This article comes from Partho Ghosh’s insightful talk, ‘Using PLG to stop killing your product vision’, at our 2023 SaaS Metrics Summit, check out his full presentation here.
Imagine this - you quit your job and pour your heart and soul into building an amazing software product.
You toil endlessly, burning the midnight oil, working around your kids in a post-pandemic world and then … finally, you get that critical traction and product-market fit!
As customers start rolling in, you need to scale up with salespeople, developers, designers. You raise your first round of funding to hire more people. You even hire a superhero product manager to solve customer problems.
Then one day, a huge brand knocks on your door. They love your product but need some enterprise features. If you build what they want, it could completely change your trajectory! But...you realize that doing so might mean compromising your original vision.
If this scenario sounds familiar, you've likely felt the tension between staying true to your product vision and rapidly growing revenue.
I've been there myself, and I know how easy it is to gradually lose sight of your initial mission as customer demands pile up. But there is a way to have it all - maintaining your product vision while still satisfying customer needs.
The answer? Adopting a product-led growth (PLG) strategy.
Inmy previous roles as VP of Product Growth at companies like Hootsuite and currently as VP/GM of Product-Led Growth at SecurityScorecard, I've seen firsthand how PLG can realign teams around a unified vision.
So let me share the five key ways to use PLG to protect your product vision…
1. Understand your product vision
This one sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how many companies and product teams can't succinctly articulate their product vision. Without a clear guiding light, it's easy for your roadmap to get derailed by the squeaky wheel of customer requests.
When I was at the B2B SaaS company Bananatag, it took 4-6 months of deep work to distill our vision into just seven words:
"Become the one-stop shop for all internal communication."
Simple, but it meant every decision we made laddered up to that north star.
We communicated it incessantly until people thought we were overdoing it. We baked it into our investor pitches, product presentations, and roadmap discussions. Having such a crystallized vision helped us stay focused as the company scaled rapidly.
Don't have a vision statement yet? Make it a priority to work with your founders, executives, and key stakeholders to craft one.
Trust me, it’ll be one of the most valuable exercises you do as your SaaS product grows.
