As a product-led business, you have an unfair advantage over competitors as you have unlimited access to a dominant growth engine and significantly lower CACs. But, it takes an entire team to make the strategy work.
This week, we’ll go over:
Wes Bush:
The next step is really just building a product-led culture. And so I want to try and get you to think about like what does a product-led culture even feel like? And no, it's not we all bow down to the product gods at 4:00 AM each morning. No, not at all. It doesn't feel like that. But what does it feel like to be in a product-led culture? And start thinking about that. Maybe take a stab at writing down what you think that is for your business and what it could look like.
Wes Bush:
And while you're thinking of that, I want to just share what I've identified after interviewing over a hundred product-led leaders. What I'm going to share with you is two common patterns that contribute to building a product-led culture, and every successful product-led founder I've talked to really just echoes these same things. They use different words, but they're echoing the same pattern.
Wes Bush:
And so one of the first patterns that you need to evoke in your company to build this culture is developing user empathy at scale. And so Ahrefs, their marketing team is actually required to do support for one day, every single month. At RD Station, everyone is invited to sit in on user research interviews. So they have a full-time user research interviewer. And especially if executives are working on a big project or undertaking and they need more data, they're invited to go to these interviews so they can hear it from the users' words themselves. At Buffer, they really try and get key stakeholders in projects invited to join in on the research phase and really see and hear, once again, how the user wants to be treated, or how the experience is valuable for them.
Wes Bush:
And then Wistia. So what they're doing is, every Friday over lunch, they are looking at FullStory recordings and seeing how are people actually using our product. And at Appcues, they actually spent two weeks of product training for the sales team before they can even start selling because they want to make sure that their sales team understands how to actually help people in the product. Because yes, they could still get the support team to help these users out. But if it's just one person that's able to balance two of these sides, not just help people in the product but also help make the sale, they found that's extremely effective. Not just from understanding the product and developing user empathy at scale, but also in adding more value to their business.
Wes Bush:
Then the second common pattern I've found that helps you build a product-led culture is just consistently running experiments. You need to make this a consistent part of your experience. I know a lot of product-led companies, when we're looking at just the volume of experiments they're running, it is often at least double what you see in a sales-led company, because they're trying to learn more, learn faster than their competitors. And doing these experiments is one of the best things.
Wes Bush:
And I remember from Mario, he was at OutSystems and they're going through this big transition from sales-led to product-led. And one of the things that I loved that he mentioned is, that I'm just like, "Wow, like there's so many experiments you're running. There's hundreds of them right now. What happens like when you do something wrong or you break something?" And he really said it just in this way. "Like there really is no mistakes here. There's just lessons. And ideally, we can learn from these lessons whenever they pop up, because they're bound to pop up when you're running that many experiments."
Wes Bush:
And so it's something I want to leave you with. To be product-led, you really do need to take lots of swings. This isn't a one-and-done strategy. Not at all. It is an ongoing piece of your business that you always need to be iterating on. So as we wrap up here, I want to leave you with my take on how you can build a successful product-led business.
