Decoding Product Led Growth for Developer Relations

If you've been amazed by the growth of companies like Slack, Zoom, and Calendly, one thing that is common between all the three companies is Product Led Growth. First, let me give you a quick introduction to what Product Led Growth stands for.

Product Led Growth is a smart approach towards growing your customer base wherein a product sells itself. The term is self-explanatory enough to convey that it revolves around the growth of a company led by the product.

Do you remember going to a shopping mall where a new juice brand stall had opened up and they were calling you to come and taste their new so-called real juice flavor? Well, now do you remember buying that juice? or going ahead and buying the brand you trusted more because they had their ingredients mentioned clearly on the pack?

Self-selling products and software are the new cool. If your product can sell itself, imagine the amount of time your company can save upon giving space to more innovation and efforts. Hearing about a new software from a colleague rather than some sales agent is still the best way to gain and retain business. Well, coming back to our story you could have chosen the new brand too. Let us see how these two scenarios could have gone down.

A) You choose your trusted old brand of juice: Because you had been told years back about this brand by a trusted person, you choose to go ahead with it. Trust and past experience play a major role here. You would choose your regular brand even if the new brand was priced cheaper. Again because of trust and experience.

B) You choose to give the new brand a try: Because you are a person who is open to experimenting you go ahead and try the new brand. You like it. You buy it. Boom. You now recommend it to your friends and peers. Word of mouth plays its charm. The brand gains your trust. And Product led growth kicks in.

Let's come back to software now. The lesser a product has to be explained the easier is its adoption.

Product-led growth (PLG) is a go-to-market strategy that relies on the product itself to drive acquisition, retention, and expansion.

So what are the values that any product-led company has?

1. Smooth onboarding for users.
2. Quick 0 to 1 setup.
3. Free trial or Freemium business model.
4. Community to support.
5. Focus on solving the problem.

I hope by now you've understood what Product Led Growth is.

But how is knowing PLG helpful to someone working in DevRel?

While a Developer Advocate is someone who acts like a bridge between a Dev tool and developers helping both parties fill up the gaps in order for smoother collaboration and adoption, other roles that fall under DevRel like Developer Marketing are sometimes also fulfilled by the same individual. Developer marketing comprises tactics meant to grow awareness, adoption, and advocacy of software tools, solutions, and SaaS platforms.

In such cases, feedback received from developer communities can be used wisely towards improving the product and further polishing the product's PLG strategy.

Let us take a scenario where you get feedback from multiple developers that the feedback they had earlier given on your product's documentation hasn't been well received and they still see issues in your product's documentation. While this is a direct lapse on the side of the engineering and Devrel team, it very well could be an issue of resource scarcity for your startup.

Now if you scroll up and see that in point number 4 we have spoken about how community support is a marker of a good PLG strategy, opening up your tool's documentation to the community can help you. They can directly raise a PR on an issue they find the documentation, and all you need to do is review and merge. This way you increase collaboration, decrease effort, build trust and get your work done. Quickly!

As a DevRel if you are able to visualize this journey from feedback to growth, you are destined to deliver excellence.

I hope you found this article useful. I write about DevRel and Web3. Feel free to connect with me on Twitter and LinkedIn

Happy reading!

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