Transcript
Gen Hanley:
It looks like we have a good amount of people, so let’s get started. Well, thank you for joining us, everyone. I’m Gen Hanley. I’m a marketing manager here at Pendo. Thank you for joining our webinar. Driving product-led transformation, a conversation about the future of product-led companies. I’m going to go over our agenda really quickly. These are the topics that our panelists are going to be covering. I’m going to start off. What does it mean to be product led, followed by how product led is for everyone. The benefits of being product led. How product led drives innovation. And then what’s next for product led. And then these are awesome panelists for the day. We have Todd Olson, CEO of Pendo, Trisha Price, our chief product officer here at Pendo and Jeff Hardison, head of product marketing at Calendly. So super excited to have them speaking today. So without further ado, I’ll hand it over to Todd so he can get us started on the first topic. So over to you Todd.
Todd Olson:
Awesome. Thanks Gen. And welcome everyone. It’s great to be here. Super excited to be joined by such amazing panelists to have an open, informal discussion around what it means to be product led. Now, just step back for a second. We want to introduce this concept of product led. And if you go to the next slide, you can get a concept of what we mean here. So when we think product led, we think about how we, as companies, put product at the center of the overall customer experience and journey. You see here, this is an example journey. Your journey may look a little different with some modifications of this one. But the idea here is not just seeing product as one step along this journey, but really core to how the customer interfaces with your business.
Todd Olson:
What’s also evident here on this chart is that being product led isn’t just a product management challenge. It’s really a company-wide opportunity. It spans sales, customer success, support. So, companies that we’re seeing be most successful with product-led techniques are ones that embrace it as a business, not simply silo it into a piece of their organization. Now I know some of you heard the term product-led growth. And when we go to the next slide, I want to contrast these terms or talk a little bit what we mean by it. But, I just introduced this concept of product led. And some of you, or many of you may have heard of the term of product-led growth or PLG as it’s often referred to.
Todd Olson:
And look, PLG is awesome. It typically refers to businesses who have a more low-touch, more viral sales, customer acquisition model. I believe Jeff here represents an amazing example of what it means to be a product-led growth PLG company. And you’ll hear from him later about things that they do. But we see product-led growth as a piece or a subset of overall areas of product led and a very important one. But there’s other aspects of product-led techniques one can leverage to drive their business forward. Let’s go to the slide please.
Todd Olson:
And, I think, the key thing is product led is for everyone. One of the biggest misconceptions I hear when I’m talking with large enterprises is, “Oh, can I do this?” Or, “Oh Jesus. I can’t do a framing model. Therefore, I can’t do PLG.” And frankly, folks, these are all myths. Each and every one of us, every business I’ve met, can leverage some aspect of what it means to be product led. If you go to the next slide. Because the reality is, everyone is either a software company or is becoming a software company. And whether you like the word digital or software, or what have you, the reality is, pretty much all of us run on software. So, all of us can take advantage of what it means to be product led. So you don’t have to be a SaaS business.
Todd Olson:
Again, nearly everyone, every company that I heard of is becoming a software company. Actually a quick aside, during new hire onboarding, I talked to this trend that we see, and one of the examples I use is, I have a toothbrush that has literally a mobile application associated with it. So, who would’ve thought 10 years ago that we needed an app, software to help was brush our teeth? But it turns out actually is pretty useful, almost addicting to watch my scores and measure it. And you can tell them slightly competitive around these things. But yes, if toothbrushes can be software, anything can be software. So with that, I want to open it up here to our amazing panelists and talk a little bit about other examples that we’re seeing of non-SaaS companies adopting product-led strategy. So Trisha, I love to hear from you on this topic.
Trisha Price:
Yeah. Being the CPO at Pendo, the benefit of seeing so many different product companies and software companies and how they’re focusing on the product-led initiative. But before I came to Pendo, I spent a lot of time in the financial services industry, which is a very highly regulated industry. And a lot of the products that I created were in very compliance, focused with a lot of change management. So an immediate reaction to your point, Todd, is like, “I can’t do product-led growth. Freeman doesn’t work for me.” But yet there are so many ways that I’ve seen this work. And some of those examples is onboarding of your new users. Helping them along that journey, putting in… Of course, there’s always a time for high touch and for your customer success teams or your training teams to come on-site or to give educational courses. But there’s also a time and a place for that to just exist right within your product.
Trisha Price:
And to be able to communicate with your users and help them through that onboarding experience, not just in a classroom or not just on a Zoom or at a point in time, but when they’re actually utilizing your product and being able to really put your product at the center of that onboarding experience is a great one. And another example of that, which is an extension of onboarding is general help, right. And help could be, “I’m stuck, help me.” Help could be, “This is a brand new feature that we’re launching and we want to help you through it and help you utilize it.” And so I think that there’s so many different ways to have a product-led mindset and product-led strategies in motion beyond just the sales process or free trials.
Todd Olson:
Yeah. Makes sense. Makes sense. Jeff, what about you?
Jeff Hardison:
Yeah, I would agree. Product-led growth companies started using automated emails at messaging and so forth because they had to. They didn’t have sales and customer success teams when they were first getting started. And so they had to lean on technology and really they truly embrace something that we all should have been doing in our products. Whether we were product led without a sales team or if we had a huge sales team. There’s no reason to just have customer success feel, be responsible for all the manual onboarding for every step of somebody joining your product. You should be able to automate some of that. And I think we’re just learning that throughout other end industry is not just the PLG industry.
Todd Olson:
Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense. Look, do any of us really want our bank just downloading random software off the internet and using it without talking to… I don’t know. Security compliance. Maybe some human just to make sure that it’s legit. No, that’s scary as help. But, doesn’t mean that our bank shouldn’t be trying to onboard us appropriately when they completely overhaul their UI. And we have no idea where to find the transfer funds capability that used to exist in our prior UI. So it highlights… It’s not a one-size-fits-all answer. It could be a variety of different techniques to improve the experience.
Trisha Price:
Yeah, Todd too I think… Thinking about the pandemic too, right, and working from home… It really shifted our mindset on this. It shifted our mindset to interact with me on my terms when I want to not on your terms. And so whether it’s banging or help, it’s like, “Be available when I want to call you. Make the interactions purposeful, but not required.”
Todd Olson:
Yeah. Yeah. Look, a lot of people say that the pandemic accelerated digital transformation, which henceforth just creates a bunch more software digital experiences, which then creates more opportunity for leveraging product-led techniques. Jeff, any thoughts too on how you may have seen some changes or even acceleration of change post-pandemic?
Jeff Hardison:
Yeah. So, I was working remote before pandemic for Envision and other companies before I joined Calendly and already a lot of companies were moving towards remote. Right? There’s all kinds of advantages. You can be able to source talent from everywhere. Let people move back home to wherever they’re from. So living in San Francisco and you started to see companies adopt things like Zoom for sales, for customer success, instead of getting on a plane and flying to see each of their customers. Which 20 years ago, that was the norm.
Jeff Hardison:
If you had to onboard a customer, you flew as a customer success person to Ohio and onboarded them. If you wanted to upsell somebody, you flew to Pennsylvania to upsell them. And with the advent of video technologies, now these customer success and sales reps have gotten really comfortable even before the pandemic, with doing a lot of their business remotely. And all the pandemic did, like you said, is accelerate what was already happening. And with the pandemic, if it starts to wane, I think that people going to want to still do a lot of this work remotely, whether they’re a customer success person, a salesperson support and so forth.
Todd Olson:
Yeah, no look, I think that makes sense. And any… This is just an open-ended question. Any obscure examples of companies leveraging product-led techniques, I think for me, one of the more extreme examples is Tesla. Not sure folks you have had that experience, but you really don’t talk to a human which is jarring at first. Because a car is not something that you’re used to not talking about a human on. They almost are product led to a fault to some degree. I was a little scary when I drove to a very sketch parking lot to pick up my brand new car. I was like, “This is got to be a problem.” Sure enough, no one robbed me. So, I guess, I walked through the car, so it’s okay. But that’s product-led on the extreme. Are there any other examples where folks have seen product led almost too extremely odd in your odd experience?
Jeff Hardison:
Yeah. Children’s toys of all things have become very product led. So whether it’s a new clock radio that the child has in their room, right. Or it’s a guitar, my toddler got a guitar that has an app, where in order to use it to tune it, all that activity is all product led within the mobile app. And you have to gamify it where you have to do certain things in order to progress. We never thought a children’s toy like that would be product led, but it’s pretty common. Another example I really love is, and I’m going to go real obscure here, the B2B trade magazine industry. Okay. So these are magazines that have been around for hundreds of years. Maybe they cover like oil and gas. They cover banking and so forth. It’s a whole industry out there and they were all paper-based for many years.
Jeff Hardison:
And then they went digital. And they had to because it was either do or die for them as it was for the media industry. They had to adapt. And for them, it was all about creating digital products. Right. And so instead of just having this magazine or maybe an online version of their publication, they had products that they were selling. Maybe it was taking the data that they were collecting from companies and packaging it up and selling that data for the oil and gas industry. They were creating digital products. They were selling these. It saved their industry and they started to adopt some of these product-led growth initiatives in order to onboard people under these products, upsell them and so forth.
Todd Olson:
Those are really good examples. I almost… I’ve got infants as well and I also have teenagers and now you got these cameras that used to get up every time you hear a sound and now we have product with parenting where I can just look out my phone and say, “That baby is turning over.” Don’t need to actually leave my couch. So it’s pretty convenient. So yeah, that’s a great example. Well, let’s shift to have a little bit talk of benefits of product led.
Todd Olson:
So, there’s a ton of benefits. We’ve already started covering just some of the amazing use cases and obviously efficiency is some of it. We go to the next slide. One of the areas that we have seen a lot of success is… Yeah. Basically operation agility and efficiency. And one of the stories I love is lab core. So if you’re familiar with lab core… Many of us are familiar with lab core. Just been recent with COVID testing and things such as that. But look, they have kiosks in a lot of these offices where you schedule lab appointments, you… These are important things. This is not like “Oh, I want to get my blood drawn” kind of thing. [inaudible 00:14:05] I was about to get their blood drawn, but they were having support calls where people get stuck.
Todd Olson:
Yeah. This is a necessity that people are getting stuck in UI. And through starting to measure where in that journey people got stuck, they were able to reduce that support overhead, which of course drives efficiency. It saves money. But of course, the byproduct is also a better experience. Who the hell wants to call support when they’re trying to get their blood drawn. No one, by the way. By the way, I don’t think anyone ever wants to call support. By the way, I love our support people. They’re amazing, great humans. But really no one wants to call them. It’s a bug, not a feature. So, I think… So, yes, operational agility efficiency is a big piece, but also just… It’s not even listed here, but just a better experience. A better, happier customer. That’s a good one. So that’s one example, but that’s just one. I’d love to hear Jeff. You work with marketing teams, how do marketing teams see benefits from product-led techniques?
Jeff Hardison:
So it’s interesting. I think that a lot of marketers have had to evolve to product-led techniques and many marketers know enough to be dangerous. And I think the challenge is they tend to lean more into the beginning of the customer journey around acquisition, right. If you ask a lot of marketers, what growth marketing is, they’ll probably be like, “Well, how you get more users through flywheel and other kinds of viral techniques and… To me, that’s only one part of the journey, right? And you can use product-led growth. And I think a lot of marketers are starting to see that they can use it for acquisition, which you all called lead generation. Activation, getting somebody to use the product. Getting them to make it a habit. Getting them to then upgrade to pay credit card plan maybe. Then maybe talk to sales. Then maybe talk to customer success about renewing that whole journey as a customer. Us as marketers are trying to broaden our understanding of PLG to that entire journey. How can you use PLG techniques across that entire journey, not just one place where we’re very comfortable?
Todd Olson:
Got it. Now, look, I’ve heard these terms. MQLs, PQLs. I don’t pretend to be a marketer, but maybe I also know enough to be dangerous in certain things. So, I have to sit through marketing presentations in my job, so I hear about these terms. Are these important? Have you shifted your thinking from [inaudible 00:16:34] PQLs? Maybe you can share with the group what those terms mean, and we can break down the alphabet soup of them.
Jeff Hardison:
Yeah. And somebody will probably in the comments nitpick how I’m going to explain it. But I’m going to try my best here. So, basically, when you have somebody sign up for your product, whether they’re going to sign up for free, or they’re going to sign up to talk to sales, that can become a marketing qualified lead. Once they do certain types of activities that we consider showing intent, right? So maybe they are somebody that sign up for the product and they attended a webinar like this. Well, that might be, in some companies, a definition of MQL. And then when they become a PQL, product qualified lead, that’s when they take certain actions within the app, your product that shows intent. So it’s not just about doing marketing things like going to this webinar or clicking on email. It’s also about maybe like, “Hey, I signed up for Pendo and I created my first experiment. And then I used this certain integration which Pendo says if you use the call Pendo integration, that means you’re a great lead.” Little plug.
Jeff Hardison:
That kind of thing is… That’s a PQL, right. And so, there’s all kinds of new tools out there that are helping subordinate tools like endgame and so forth that are helping support the surfacing of these PQLs for not just marketers, but also sales people, customer success people. I’ll give you an example. If you don’t have some tool to automate that, you might go into something like motor amplitude or export a CSV and say which customers not only sign up for Kelly, but they also booked their first meeting. And they used the Salesforce integration, right? To me, that might be a very important cohort of 100 people. As a customer success person, I could call on those people and be like, “Hey, noticed that you used the Salesforce integration. Want to make sure you got value out of it. What do you think of it and so forth.” And so that kind of next level usage of product’ usage data is something that all kinds of people are using, whether they’re marketers or salesperson or customer success person.
Todd Olson:
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Trisha, what benefits are you seeing?
Trisha Price:
Look, Todd. I think, Jeff, you laid it out nicely around the whole life cycle, right? This isn’t just at the front and the middle of the process, it’s throughout the life cycle of how you’re engaging with your customers. And I think there’s benefits that for you as a company, as well as for your customers and your users, and we need to focus on both of those things, right? We talked about free concepts. Well, a free trial or a freemium version of your product. Of course, it benefits your sales team, your efficiency, you’re able to get to customers you might not be able to get to, but it also benefits your customers as well. Really being able to get your hands on a product and play with it and make sure it meets your expectations, is critically important, right?
Trisha Price:
For them. And you don’t want them to sign up and churn later because they really didn’t understand the future set and what they were buying. And so that free process is certainly good for both. Same with self-guided tours or onboarding. When you think about a traditional in-person, and I’m using the in-person sort of an air quotes to be Zoom or really in-person, traditional live onboarding mechanisms. There’s a ton of value to that, but there’s also… It takes time on both people’s sides. It takes coordination. Are you available at the same time? And I’ve got to have the Headspace and I signed up for it. And then some big presentation just came on my lap or a customer issue.
Trisha Price:
And now I’ve got to reschedule, or I don’t reschedule, but I don’t have the Headspace. Being able to do product-led onboarding and self-guided tours, I can do it when I want to. I can do it today. I can do it again tomorrow. Maybe I didn’t quite get it. And I want to look at it again in the context of, “I’m right about to do that job to be done within the product.” And so, I think a lot of these benefits can be both benefits. Not just we tend to think about them for ourselves as product companies, but I think there’s just as much benefit for our customers and users.
Todd Olson:
Great. Great. And look, as you can tell folks, I’m pretty informal about a lot of these things. So there’s just a question in the Q and a box. I’m just going to throw it out there to some of the panelists and maybe take a shot out of myself and see where this goes. But the question was, what would you describe this product-led techniques? So you’ve heard some already. You’ve heard about in-product onboarding, you’ve heard about… I think Jeff just gave a masterclass in how to leverage product-led usage data to help be a proxy for intent, which can then be funneled to the sales and marketing, et cetera. Right? So, those are product-led techniques folks. So if product led techniques are all about ways we leverage the product become more effective at certain areas. So, let’s take on our screen here. We mentioned easier upsell.
Todd Olson:
So if you have current customers in your product, but you have multiple products, they’re very likely is intent data. And okay. If they use this broad set of my core product, maybe they’re good to candidates to upsell this premium feature. Folks, it’s probably your power users, maybe within product. You’re also leveraging some qualitative survey data to ask them if they’re happy, if they tell you they’re happy, they’re probably good candidates for more stuff from you. That’s another good technique. These are all product-led techniques. I think self-service in product and I am sure. I know Pendo does it. I’m sure Jeff can tell me. Self-service is a key area. I don’t know. Jeff, what do you guys do for self? You probably have to do self-service. You’re mainly a call center and taking questions that people can’t set up their calendar. You have to do something where you deflect that activity and within the product, you have to give them some level of service, correct?
Jeff Hardison:
Yes. Yeah. I would say it’s interesting. Well, there’s a lot to unpack here, but I’ll time… I’ll just back up and simplify. Product-led growth for anybody that’s going to new to it is, you’re using the product to engage, whether it’s internet messages with something like Pendo or something that you build natively to engage with a user from when they first sign up and they’re like, “What am I doing here?” To like, “Hey, maybe we need to tell them about this feature they haven’t used yet because they seem like they’re kind of getting going. To like, “Maybe we should get them to upgrade and they’re going to pay with their credit card.” To like, “Hey, are you going to renew? You signed up for something annual.” And, “Hey, do you want to talk to sales?” Right? Or, “Hey, do you have a question?”
Jeff Hardison:
And so, the product is one of the best places. It is the best place. Look at the data, company to company. When someone is in the product, you get the best engagement rates, better than email, better than anything. And so when they’re in the app, that has a great time to not just help them onboard, but also say, “Hey, you stuck? Looks like this is an area where you’ve visited here three times, which you’ve never used this particular feature, do you need help? And you can actually insert a human. Product led doesn’t mean not human involved. Right. And so, there’s this great opportunity to surface some type of experience that says, “Hey, would you like to talk to support person? Or would you like to talk to customer success?” And you know what, book time right here with them while you’re ready versus wait for them to email you three days later.
Todd Olson:
Yeah. Great examples folks. Those are great and I love that. Let’s make sure we say that again, so everyone hears it. Now product led doesn’t mean zero humans. Of course not. We’re not talking about robots taking over the world here, folks. That is not what the message of this is. But it’s using your humans in a more strategic, more thoughtful and intentional ways. That’s what we’re talking of in reserving them from areas that are of higher value. Certain aspects… Certain interactions are lower-value interactions. Let’s try to find ways to automate that.
Todd Olson:
While I’m on this whole question thing because I think it actually ties very nicely to this, and there’s a question around flywheel. We’ve been talking about customer life cycles and flywheels. The question was a similar diagram to quickly communicate the product lead life cycle. I don’t have such diagram. We certainly don’t have in the deck. I’ll open it up. I don’t know. Trisha or Jeff, do you have a comment? Is there different diagrams or is it just a product-led way to look at your existing diagram? That was my first reaction. No same diagram. It’s just different hows, same overall journey. But what do you folks think about that question?
Jeff Hardison:
Well, I can talk about our flywheel because it’s probably the thing that’s been written about the most about Calendly before recent things. So the flywheel for us is this. So when you create a call on the account and you share… You want to book a meeting, okay. I’m going to share up my link and I’m going to say, “Hey, feel free to share when you’re available Todd, or use my Calendly.” And when you click on that and you pick some times, an email comes to you and says, “Hey, your meeting is booked for Tuesday at two o’clock.” There is a little button in that email that says, “Hey, would you like to try Calendly Todd?” And that activity is part of our flywheel, right? And that right there drove millions of signups of users for us. We had about a three-person marketing team a year ago and we were at more than 70 million ARR annual revenue. By a large from the product itself from the flywheel and every company has its own version of that flywheel usually within PLG. What would be your example, Trisha?
Trisha Price:
Yeah, similar. It’s funny, Todd. We just hired Nicole who’s over our Pendo Growth Initiative and we actually were just looking at defining our flywheel for that initiative for Pendo. And it’s interesting as we were looking at it, it kind of starts with the whole evaluators and beginners and goes from freemium to your fully-featured trial and with a lot of focus on that users coming back week after week, day after day, depending on your product. Right. And how you think about that. And how do you go from the freemium to paying users and really thinking about that conversion, to then the adoption part of the flywheel, and how do you make sure that new user experience is an amazing experience, right?
Trisha Price:
And then you move into more of the self-serve pay. Is where we’re thinking about it as the next part of the flywheel. And then the maturity of becoming a part of your product, the way you truly do business. Then for us moving into, Todd you mentioned this one, upgrades and add-ons. And finally more getting to the virality of internal and external advocates. And that’s kind of how we’re thinking about the flywheel of growth at Pendo.
Todd Olson:
Yeah, yeah. Going back, Jeff’s question too. I think for the audience, if it’s not obvious, I count that’s one of the best flywheels that you could possibly have. And it’s not unlike other collaboration software, like Zoom where you get invited to a meeting, that’s itself is the advertisement for signing up for Zoom. In Pendo, it’s sharing charts and graphs, it’s understanding where the data is coming from. It’s seeing in-app messages. Now we have been a little more careful, when you’re using someone else’s product and you’re seeing a message, we can’t be an advertisement for Pendo. Our customers wouldn’t allow us to do so. So, I think for us, it’s really about democratizing data and sharing data and leveraging that as part of the way we drive some of that flywheel and virality.
Todd Olson:
So. Awesome. Awesome, great discussion. I’m trying to get loads of questions. Given that I wasn’t sure I was even going to take questions now, things… Yeah, love it. But let’s keep moving forward and I’ll try to weave in some of these questions if I feel it’s appropriate. Keep throwing them in the Q and A, if we don’t get to them in this webinar, we’ll follow up offline in written form. But I want to talk a little bit about how product led drives innovation. And we’ve seen a lot of examples here at Pendo, but the interesting ones is, as I said earlier, COVID accelerated digital transformation and accelerated for many businesses that had nothing. And one of the customers we work with, a company called Mindbody, you may be familiar with Mindbody. They power a lot of the yoga studios, little fitness studios. And folks there were period of time where no one was going to a yoga studio nor a fitness studio.
Todd Olson:
So Mindbody had to reinvent itself, not only for themselves, but also for their customers. And in doing so, came out with a Mindbody on-Demand, which was a virtual wellness platform that they could offer to their customers to offer to their end customers, which could continue creating some customer stickiness and loyalty when there wasn’t that face to face interaction or in-person. A similar example that I like is Bright Horizons. Folks, we’ve already talked about kids a few times. Bright Horizons is a drop-off daycare area, but no one was dropping off their kids to daycare. So, they had to figure out a way to help parents. Because trust me folks, staying at home with kids is… That is not working from home. That is parenting full time. So said for someone that has some experience in this matter.
Todd Olson:
So, people needed in-home care. They didn’t need to drop off because no one was dropping off their kids. So Bright Horizons innovated a great product led basically at-home care service that you could match up and find someone to come to your home and satisfy that challenge to make sure folks could get back to work. So, those are just some examples. Jeff, what’s your take? Any insights around innovation that you started driving the product? New areas of opportunity that started to uncover, I’m curious.
Jeff Hardison:
In terms of new product-led initiatives?
Todd Olson:
Yeah. Exactly.
Jeff Hardison:
I would get back to the one we were talking about earlier and it’s that again, product led doesn’t mean no human. Right. And I do see more and more companies trying to experiment with how they’re going to surface an opportunity for someone in the product to talk to human. Right. And so there’s testing going around like, “Does it make sense for it to be just customer success that engages with somebody? Does it make sense also to allow sales to come in?” And then that might feel a bit more intrusive to some companies. Right. So I think there’s testing going on around that. And how do you do it? Do you allow somebody to talk immediately to them via video chat? There’s many different companies out there that allow you to embed video chat, like a Zoom kind of thing experience within the app where you can talk directly to a representative. A lot of consumer companies do that versus B2B. Or should it be more like you are engaging in written chat with them, is it that you book a meeting and so on, so forth.
Jeff Hardison:
So I think there’s a lot of experimentation going on with, how do you engage with the humans that work for that product-led growth company?
Todd Olson:
That’s great. Trisha.
Trisha Price:
Yeah. I think I love that example of driving innovation through product led and thinking about not just how to buy your product or how to train on your product or how to communicate within your product, but actually having people engage with your product outside of the realm you typically think. Like I go to a product and I log in or use it and with your calendar and your Zoom examples, Jeff, those are really, really great examples. And I think for all of us, as we think about innovation and Todd, you mentioned this when you talked about this whole work-from-home and COVID. I think there’s so many places where product-led interactions have become more and more, right. You just even think about when you get an Uber and you message them, right.
Trisha Price:
To talk to them, right. Again, they put their product at the center of it, right. You don’t have to go out and find the person’s number and fill in the helpline and call them. Right there. Are you there? Are you waiting for me? Same thing when I get my Whole Foods order or my Instacart order. Right. And they can’t quite find the product and I’m doing a substitution change. There are so many examples like that, I think, where so many companies are driving new innovation and putting their product at the center of things. Not just when I’m ordering my Uber or ordering my Instacart order, but throughout that process. And so I think that’s really great to see.
Todd Olson:
Awesome. Awesome. Look, I’m going to take a question from the audience here. Can I weave one in… I like this one though. Is it possible to apply product-led growth in public government companies where growth is measured in, for example, the adoption of a service in our reduction costs? Folks, I’ll give you an example. I was stressed in the pandemic when people couldn’t sign up for vaccine appointments for some period of time. I had members of my family reach out and ask, “What can we do?” Right. And that’s a great example where that’s not about driving revenue or driving growth. It’s just making sure that I don’t have to get on the phone with like CVS or Walgreens and try to figure out how to do this.
Todd Olson:
Because that just was not scalable at that time. And you have millions of people trying to do so all at the same time. And it was very, very challenging to do that. You need a different way to have self service and support. So, that is absolutely a great example. I think for focus, it’s going to date me a little bit, but if you remember back when the healthcare system got reimagined, what was called Obamacare, there’s a lot of conversation, the press around the user experience and how to do it. And that’s another great example. That would be a great example of a product-led healthcare. Right. But, those are just some examples I have for my past, or even a more recent one. I don’t know if Jeff or Trisha if you have any examples as well?
Jeff Hardison:
There are hospitals. Hospitals have all kinds of government regulations applied to them for wayfinding. They’re measured by the government on how well they can help people find their way around a hospital. And so a lot of the hospitals have tried to adopt mobile apps that they then promote to their visitors on helping them find their way around. And those mobile apps not only tell you where you’re standing and what’s near you and how to get there and so forth, but they also have product-led experiences within them. Because you might have somebody that’s stressed out as a parent and they’re at a children’s hospital with their child who’s just broken their arm, and they don’t have time to try to onboard onto a new app. And so, these hospitals have thought a lot through how do we make it really easy once someone downloads this app to get going and they use various product-led techniques to do that.
Todd Olson:
That’s awesome. That’s awesome. I’m taking another question since it’s directed towards me and why not? So, “Since Todd made a comment, well, folks are great. No customer wants to call support. Fair comment and also mentioned that product led doesn’t mean no human interaction.” By the way, I agree with that. “Then please explain or share details how a company could transform traditional SaaS-based customer support. The one that could better serve customers based on product-led support best practices.” And really, to me, how to blend by two comments is, because I agree with Jeff, by the way, product led does not mean no humans or no human interaction. I think what we’re trying to do is… And this is my opinion. I’ll get Jeff’s opinion after this. Is, when folks are reaching out support, it’s really helping people solve problems and better drive business outcomes.
Todd Olson:
And just telling someone what this number is or what this report does or how to click this button, how to use this feature. So I think what we’re trying to do is evolve from just resolving bugs or issues or things that are like smaller, more tactical things to how do we help connect strategically with the customer? Okay. How do we learn more about their business and connect our product to theirs? So it’s about having a more thoughtful conversation. Just answer my question around this smaller thing. So I think the evolution here is helping partner more closely with customers to drive more meaningful outcomes. Not that there isn’t any human interaction at all, it’s just that we should be having different levels of conversation. So, that’s what I knew about. Jeff, what do you think about it? So how do you blend this human-led and product-led? Any thoughts there?
Jeff Hardison:
Yeah. So one way we think about [inaudible 00:38:12] is this. One of the things I’ve noticed at other SaaS software companies is that a lot of times they optimize their onboarding for early- adopter personality types. People that like their DIY that like to get in there and think and read the documentation and try a feature. And they might not even read the documentation or watch a help video. And a lot of software companies really try to… They prefer those kind of users. Don’t we all? Right? Because they don’t ask a whole lot of questions and get stuck. But, we have 10 million users and there’s all kinds of learning types out there. There’s the early adopter type.
Jeff Hardison:
There’s the person who wants to read documentation. There’s the other person that wants to watch a video series. And then there’s a person that just wants to have somebody hold their hand, right? And so they want to talk to a human and you really need to think about all the different types of learning types within your customer base and ask yourself, in your product that experiments, are you meeting all of those people where they are? Whether that’s servicing documentation in product, whether that’s showing some type of little video or that’s giving them an opportunity to talk to human.
Todd Olson:
That’s awesome. So we talked about innovation and I want shift focus a little bit of insights and Trisha, we got a slide teed up for you. So here next we advance one. And I want to hear how you see this breadth of product getting help, drive more innovation particularly with product-led businesses.
Trisha Price:
Yeah. Look. This slide reads very left to right as if it’s linear. But in fact, I think it’s kind of its own kind of flywheel, which is that looking at qualitative and quantitative data to both launch and continue to perfect and iterate on your product, is a very iterative process. And you do need qualitative and quantitative data and launching new products, launching new features and getting it right is hard. Right? Very few of us, no matter how much research we do, no matter how many design partners we gather, launch something and get it perfect on day one. It requires iteration. And so, I think, being able to have this whole process of being able to collect qualitative and quantitative data, really understand it and make sense on it, no matter who you are, whether you’re the chief product officer, whether you’re in marketing, whether you are in customer support, but be able to really understand how people are using this feature or your product, and then act on it, right.
Trisha Price:
And act on it could be multiple things. Here it says no code or code. Well, most of us in the long run when we take action, want to continue to make that experience more natural and more perfect based on our user’s behavior. But sometimes that takes time to get it right. And so being able to immediately act with in-app communication is a great way to bridge that gap while you’re working through a code or a more long-term solution. But there’s also understanding different segments of your population and being able to really personalize those experience as you look at the data.
Trisha Price:
And so I think the interesting thing about this is mixing both those kinds of information, quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative being, “Where are people clicking? How are they using your product?” The qualitative being, surveys, polls requests, enhancement requests, and being able to look and then creating this roadmap or this full picture of what to do about it. And I think that’s just the important thing is as product people and being product-led organizations, really thinking about this as that flywheel circular process, not a one time launch and forget it.
Todd Olson:
Got it. So you’re talking about great examples here and there’s this whole in you, right? It’s not linear, but it’s on the right side of my slide here, which is talking about action and communicating users’ app. There’s a couple of questions in the Q and A around, when does in-product notifications become too much? Feels that after a while customers just click it away and not pay much attention. There’s another one around implementing notifications, describes nightmare. How many to send, what to send, when to use any tips, notifications, any tips and best practices. I’ll start off and then open it up. First off, measure, measure, measure, measure is the first thing if you’re measuring it and people are just clicking it away and not paying attention. Well, guess what? You probably have too much. That’s an easy measure right there.
Todd Olson:
I think generally speaking, when you’re adding anything to your user experience, you have to be thoughtful. Is this just adding to the experience or taking away from experience? And if it was taking away to the experience, then you obviously shouldn’t do it. I think one of the keys that I’ve seen as the best practice is this concept of personalization. You Jeff, even talked about an example early in the webinar. If I’m reaching out to a customer and say, “Hey, we noticed you have done this or have now have not done this.” And then follow up with some call to action right there. You’re connecting with that user because it’s clear that you know what they’ve done and not done. That’s personalization folks. We like personalization. And we like it when something feels like it’s meant for us. So if you have a generic, “Hey, welcome. What do you want to do?”
Todd Olson:
That is not personalized. That’s generic. So I think our recommendations is, measure often. I think in-product notifications are more like a scalpel, not like a sledgehammer. Folks understand that metaphor. So be thoughtful, be strategic. And if it’s not working kill it or adjust it or run experiments around it. And the other thing is you can run an experiment against a cohort and if it’s working, you can double down on it and if it’s not working, you can remove it. Right. So, we big, big, big believers in running experiments throughout your products and then personalize. I think those are to me, the best practices and… So, Trisha, Jeff, any other comments around that?
Jeff Hardison:
One of the central tenets in the world of digital products is that, you are not necessarily your customer base, right? You might have created this product for yourself as a startup founder, but that doesn’t mean that your next 10,000 customers are going to be just like you. And so, a lot of times when companies are trying to think like, “Should we…” And they’re [inaudible 00:44:49] their hands like, “Should we do in product messaging or not?” There’s always somebody on the team that says, “I hate those things. And I would hate to see some mole pop up to give me a helpful video.” Again, you not your customer. It’s surprising how much our customers who are different than us that have different preferences, really do like those experiences. And to Todd’s point, if you’re still on the fence about it, do a test. Take your control where you don’t show the message and compare it to 20% of your customer base that gets that mole in the video and look downstream at the data and say, “Did these people activate better?” Or “Did they upgrade better when they saw the experience versus when they didn’t.”
Todd Olson:
Great. Great, great, great. Trisha, anything or Jeff will do the next slide.
Trisha Price:
I love what Jeff just said. And maybe even one step further when he talked about picking 20% of your customer base and doing an experiment, target specific characteristics of your customer base. Because, guides aren’t just for everybody. Todd, you talked about those personalized experience, but which types of users, which user behaviors want different kinds of guides, amounts of guides can vary. So Jeff, you brought this up well. Don’t base it based on what you like, base at what your customers and your users like, and even within your users really understand that segmentation between them and what frequency and types of in-app communications works within certain segments.
Todd Olson:
Awesome. Awesome. Okay. So, the next section that will be our final section is, what’s next. What’s next for product led? I’d love to just look a little bit out in the future, prognosticate just a tech add for what folks think is coming down. So, Trisha, any thoughts to stir?
Trisha Price:
Yeah, I think Todd, just to carry on from what you said before, which is measure, measure, measure, and collect the data, what’s next for product led none of us are going to know. But I know if we have the mindset and the data of which to act on, we’re going to be in a better position for continuing to shift customer expectations and continued movement towards digital. And so I think that’s a key part. Is having those measurements in place and having both the quantitative and qualitative data for you to act on. And then creating that data-driven culture, right. As leaders, we have to make sure we’re asking our teams the questions when they bring something to us and say, “This is the future I’m focused on.” Or, “This is the new market or new product I want to launch.” Asking the data behind that.
Todd Olson:
Awesome, awesome. Jeff.
Jeff Hardison:
So, I think it’s already happening, but it will only continue. And that is, you have these product-led companies where maybe they didn’t have many salespeople or customer success people. And it was mostly product managers and engineers and designers and they’re buildings product that automates how you onboard people and how you get them to convert and so on and so forth. And what’s happening is, a lot of these PLG companies, they’re hitting a ceiling in terms of how much market they can go after just by going after people that are going through those experiences. And they want to go upmarket to maybe, like a fortune 100 company where they talk to customer success people, they have legal needs and all kinds of paperwork that they need somebody to help them through. And so these PLG companies, adding sales teams and customer success teams is this new thing that PLG is wrestling with.
Jeff Hardison:
How do you get the people’ people and sales and customer success to get along with the more data-driven, maybe design-driven people over on the product side. And so this whole effort to figure out how to get these two to play nicely together, and how this impacts in-app experiences is, now you have customer success people weighing in on the in-app experiences. You’ve got the salespeople weighing in like, “Hey, I want to run this experiment to upgrade somebody.” Or, “I want to run this experiment to see who’s stuck and that might be coming from CS.” And so the product team now has to hear from all these different voices in their company, because they have new stakeholders and that’s something we’re all going to have to adjust to.
Todd Olson:
Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah. Because I think there’s this blending that needs to occur between these different modes, because the reality is you get to a certain size and scale, you [inaudible 00:49:06] both. Right. And trying to figure out what you do, product led versus human led. That’s really, really wise. I was talking with another CEO who was talking about sales teams. Need to rethink the way they sell. She was almost calling it sales in a product-led world. There’s a lot of innovation left to rest over there. So look, that’s awesome.
Todd Olson:
Thanks everyone. Go to the next slide here. I think we’ll… Please connect with us. So, I think these icons are meant to connote this is their LinkedIn profile. So just first [inaudible 00:49:48] someone on LinkedIn and hit connect and we’d love to continue the dialogue and the conversation on what it means to be product led. If we didn’t get to your question in this webinar, I do apologize. We’ll follow up in a written form and I’m really confident there’s going to be a recording. Maybe Gen’s going to come on and tell us if there’s going to be a recording, but I’m pretty sure there’s going to be a recording. So, with that, thank you all for being here. It was a really, really pleasant conversation. Thanks Trisha. Thanks Jeff. So appreciate it.
Trisha Price:
Thank you Jeff and Todd.
Gen Hanley:
Well thank you everyone for joining. That was awesome. I’m still stuck on the toy example. Oh my God. We’re getting everybody started with product led really early nowadays. But just a few final notes for everyone. Thank you for attending. We will be sending out the recording in the next couple of days. So keep an eye out for that email. If you want more product-led resources, we do have a product-led hub on our site. So feel free to check that out. Like Todd said, feel free to connect with Pendo, Calendly, Todd, Trisha, Jeff, everybody on LinkedIn. This is the first webinar and our product-led series. Our next one’s going to be more focused on customer success team. So, make sure to keep an eye out for that invite and that webinar is going to be on April 7th. But thank you so much for joining. Thanks Todd. Thanks Trisha. Thanks Jeff. And hopefully, if we get to, our audience can join us for our next webinar too. Thanks all. Have a great day.
Jeff Hardison:
Have a great day. Cheers.
Todd Olson:
Thanks everybody.