Which strategy drives growth?
How to align teams for Product-Led success
The day has finally arrived. Imagine that tomorrow you’re launching that product you designed, hoping it will “sell itself.” You have a freemium plan, an attractive onboarding flow, and you’re confident users will start coming… but nothing happens. This is the reality many startups face when trying to implement a Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategy.
In recent years, PLG has become a mantra in the startup world: letting the product itself drive acquisition and monetization. Sounds great, right? However, most companies make the same mistake: they confuse having a freemium model and a slick onboarding experience with being truly product-led.
So, can your product sell itself, or do you need a sales team to generate opportunities? The answer to this question is one of the most critical decisions for growth: choosing the wrong approach between a Product-Led (PLG), Sales-Led, or hybrid strategy can slow your company’s scalability for years. Let’s explore the Product-Led path.
What Product-Led Growth is (and isn’t)
If you offer a free trial or a freemium plan but users never reach the “aha moment,” you’re not doing PLG.
If you see PLG only as a commercial model and not as a customer experience transformation, you don’t understand PLG.
If marketing, sales, support, and product are not fully aligned toward a single goal, it’s not Product-Led Growth.
How a Product-Led Strategy Works
For the PLG model to succeed, you need to build what Wes Bush calls a product-led organization, based on the following:
Start with strategy, not tactics: Focus on a single niche until you dominate it. Define the market you want to win and why your product is 10x better than the competition.
Simplify the product: PLG works best with intuitive, fast-adopting products. The easier it is to try and see value, the more organic your growth will be.
Define the “aha moment”: Users should experience tangible value in minutes, not days. Identify the action that triggers their first real transformation.
Focus your KPIs on PLG: Track activation, retention, and conversion to paid. If the product creates value on its own, growth will be organic and scalable.
Align the whole team: Marketing, sales, and product should operate under the same indicators and vision, ensuring the user gets value before any sales pitch.
In short, adopting a Product-Led Growth strategy is not about launching a free plan and waiting for users to show up. It’s about designing your entire organization so the product delivers value before any sales conversation.
That’s what truly creates an organic, efficient, and hard-to-replicate growth engine, where every satisfied user becomes your best acquisition channel.