In this week's podcast episode, Partho Ghosh, VP of Products at Uberall, shares his transformative journey from computer science graduate to product management leader, revealing the intricacies of implementing product-led growth (PLG) strategies.
Having played a key role at Hootsuite, Partho now navigates the challenges of scaling at Uberall, bringing profound insights into how PLG drives significant company growth and development. This episode delivers a deeper understanding of the landscape of PLG, making it a must-listen for anyone interested in product management and business growth.
Featured Links: Follow Partho on LinkedIn | Uberall | 'Definition of Product-Led Growth' feature by Wes Bush
Episode transcript
Lily Smith : 0:00
Hello and welcome to the Product Experience. This week we talk to Partho Ghosh. He's the Vice President of Products at Uberall. Partho shares how he used PLG to mobilize growth in companies he's worked in. But just before that we have a very special announcement with Randy Silver and a special guest.
Randy Silver: 0:20
Hey guys, I'm here in Raleigh, north Carolina, at Pendemonium, and we ran into one of our favorite people here, mike. It's great to see you, awesome to see you too, and there was a nice announcement yesterday we get to hang out a little bit more often.
Partho Ghosh : 0:35
We'll be hanging out a lot more often, because it was announced here at Pendemonium that Pendo has acquired Product Collective.
Randy Silver: 0:42
So mind the product and Product Collective two great tastes that taste great together.
Partho Ghosh : 0:47
I love that. I love that. I think we're going to use that phrase from now on. But yeah, all working together now, which is awesome. It's something I'm really excited about. We, of course, have our conference industry, the Product Conference, there's MTP Con, pandemonium now all working together, so I'm excited about that.
Randy Silver: 1:05
So same Pendomonium now all working together. So I'm excited about that. So same thing as we have always done same mind, the product, same product, collective. But we're just bringing everything together. We're going to do more of it.
Partho Ghosh : 1:11
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the exciting things for me is the fact that, with pendo behind everything, we have more resources to be able to put on bigger events, more events. There might be a version of the future where we could get more specialized in the events. You know, there's different types of product people out there. There are different people that come to mind the product and industry. Maybe we'll be able to create more specialized events in the future too. Lots of possibilities. That's the thing I'm really excited about.
Randy Silver: 1:36
Fantastic. Well, we're really looking forward to hanging out with you more often and to doing this in person more often.
Partho Ghosh : 1:42
Yeah, that's the one thing for me. I love getting together in person with product people, sort of bringing everybody together. So I'll be able to do that a lot more. I'm just excited to be able to work with the MTP team, product collective, joining into the Pendo fold. It's going to be really cool, excellent.
Lily Smith : 2:03
The Product Experience Podcast is brought to you by Mind, the Product part of the Pendo family. Every week we talk to inspiring product people from around the globe.
Randy Silver: 2:12
Visit mindtheproductcom to catch up on past episodes and discover free resources to help you with your product practice. Learn about Mind, the Product's conferences and their great training opportunities.
Lily Smith : 2:25
Create a free account to get product inspiration delivered weekly to your inbox. Mind. The Product supports over 200 product type. Meetups from New York to Barcelona.
Randy Silver: 2:36
There's probably one near you.
Partho Ghosh : 2:48
Partho, thank you so much for joining us tonight. How are you doing? Doing well, yeah, um, nice and busy, can't complain. Uh, you know we're close to the end of q3 so it's a busy time right now, but uh, it's always, always good time well, you're returning guests, not to the podcast but to the mtp stage.
Randy Silver: 3:01
You've done that before, but for anyone who didn't manage to catch your session a couple years back, well, you've changed jobs first of all since then. But can you give us a quick intro? What are you doing these days and how did you get into the world of product anyway, oh yeah, yes, when I spoke at MTP last, I was at Hootsuite.
Partho Ghosh : 3:21
I was overseeing product and product-led growth at Hootsuite. Hootsuite is kind of the leading social media management platform. I'm now at a company called Uberall. We're also a marketing technology platform, but we're focused on kind of multi-location platforms and what we call local SEO, so really ensuring that companies' profiles and how they rank on Google Maps and Google Search kind of connect together and are managed from one place. It's been fun. My team is pretty large. We're about 20 people strong actually between product management, product design and a few other ancillary kind of roles that we have and functions. But it's definitely been a lot of fun. I'm VP of product there, so overseeing the entire product department, and pseudo, I guess, vp of product, head of product, whatever you want to call it. But it's been a real journey thus far because I'm coming into a role. They haven't really had this role in the past and they're a pretty scaled up company, about 500 people. So coming in as one of your first head first, kind of like head of product roles at that scale is different. So we're putting a lot of different processes in place that sometimes are already there when you're 500 people, which is a different challenge In terms of how I got into product I actually after I graduated from.
Partho Ghosh : 4:41
So I have a comp sci degree. It was my first degree. I knew from day one I did not want to be a developer. I remember when I was like in university hitting my head against keyboard, trying to solve a problem and just not liking it and I was a developer for like two weeks and IBM here in Vancouver and, um, I made some good relationships there. I'd done a couple of co-op sessions with IBM, but I realized that I wanted to go back. So I went back and got my business degree and before I graduated I got a product type role at IBM. I was a business analyst which then turned into a product owner role, which I then coerced into a product management role, and that was 15-ish years ago.
Randy Silver: 5:27
Okay, so one of the things we wanted to talk about today was product-led growth. You've talked about the fact that this is something that you're really interested in. You've led it before and it's a topic we've covered on the podcast before, but it's been a good long while, and before we started recording tonight, lily and I were talking and we had different definitions of what we thought PLG was, and we're curious what's your definition? What is the working definition of PLG today?
Partho Ghosh : 5:53
Yeah, that's a great, great question because I think it is evolving, right. That's the first thing. As most things in product and tech do, they evolve and they scale. I think the working definition most folks mind that I believe is time for change is that product-like growth is a GTM motion that involves a form of self-serve in some functionality, right? Whether that's a trial motion or a freemium motion, something that allows a customer to activate through on their own, and whether or not you have a self-serve revenue line in your profit loss statement or not.
Partho Ghosh : 6:33
I think that's kind of PLG, but I don't know if that should be the current definition of where we are today. Right, I think PLG has been around for about what? Six, seven years now. Let's call it. I think PLG has been around for about what six, seven years now. Let's call it.
Partho Ghosh : 6:51
I think today it really is a combination, in my opinion, of how companies and products are bringing in a product-led mindset to their product. Whether you're doing a self-serve motion or if you are going through a sales-led company and sales-led motion, how is your product and its product team bringing data-informed product sales-led motion? How is your product and its product team bringing data-informed product management in the mix? How are they thinking about growth funnels? If you're a sales-led company, how are you thinking about product-qualified leads and product-led sales and acquisition funnels and demand gen and things like that? So I do think that the definition needs to evolve from where we are, because PLG is not going to. At least the original definition won't be a fit for every company, but I do think most SaaS organizations see the benefit in what PLG companies do and they're trying to bring that product-led sense into their own organization in some way into their own organization in some way.
Lily Smith : 7:43
Paddy, there was a couple of terms or a term that you used there the GTM motion, which I'm assuming you mean go-to-market motion.
Partho Ghosh : 7:57
Yes, yes, sorry, I'm trying to clarify all my acronyms. Yeah, so I think I said GTM is go-to-market motion and then I also said PLS, which is not super familiar with everybody, which is product led sales instead of just pure. I think a lot of folks see a subset of product led growth can be product led sales, but definitely not as common as, let's say, a freemium or a self-serve trial.
Lily Smith : 8:20
And so when you think of you know, one of the disagreements that Randy and I had before we started talking to you was whether product led growth meant using or leveraging your product to get more growth, so to get more sales. So self-serve is a very sort of classic Well, freemium, I guess, is a very sort of classic mechanic for that me and my guests is a very sort of classic mechanic for that, and perhaps referral in the D2C market as well could come under that banner as well. When you say product led sales as a subset of product led growth, what does that look like?
Partho Ghosh : 8:55
Yeah, I think there's a couple of different ways that I've seen this. You know from my own experiences. I think number one the most common is kind of looking at existing customers and new products or features that you build out and how you get customers to expand by themselves, right, expand by using or trialing a new set of features in the product and then eventually having sales reach out to them because you've qualified them through the product itself. And one of the big benefits I think we see with that is, instead of often, the common trend is you wait for an annual renewal to come up. You talk about trying to renew with that customer and at the same time, sell them more things and expand them. Well, what if in your product you're already testing out hey, we have this net new feature that's coming out. We're going to give you the ability to try it for 30 days on your own If you're interested. Someone from our sales team will reach out and you can buy the product and have an upsell motion from there. So I think that's the existing kind of customer use case from there. So I think that's the existing kind of customer use case.
Partho Ghosh : 10:08
Product-led sales is also used in the acquisition funnel. That maybe you don't want to have a credit card gate and a self-serve funnel where you capture a credit card. Instead, maybe you want to have a self-serve funnel that eventually sets up qualifications, hopefully using some product usage data as well as kind of ICP or ideal customer profile data, to say to sales that hey, this might be a great fit customer for us, we should talk to them and you set up those triggers for sales to kind of capture. And so I think that's bringing in part to that product-led growth motion that a lot of folks love into maybe more traditional sales-led first model.
Randy Silver: 10:50
Is this equally applicable for B2B and B2B2C as it is for B2C?
Partho Ghosh : 10:56
You know it's a great question. I mean, my focus definitely in my career has been both B2B and B2B2C and not as much B2C, has been both B2B and B2B2C and not as much B2C, although from having these types of conversations with other peers, I think that they find that a lot of their B2C organizations are already so much further with PLG that they're ahead of the game in some senses, and so I think that they're looking at a lot of the traditional models that are there and capturing and monetizing customers through typically a freemium motion and B2C, and so they obviously do have PLS in some senses, but for the most cases it's pure self-serve.
Lily Smith : 11:36
We've kind of gone like right into the detail with some of this stuff, but just kind of taking it back a little bit like what are the sort of fundamental things that you need in place as an organization to take this sort of approach with your product development?
Partho Ghosh : 11:53
Yeah, I mean, I think that is in in. You know the heart of it. The most difficult part is you could try and do all these things from a bottoms up approach of I. I'm reading all these books or articles on PLG and we should go and do it, these things, from a bottoms up approach of I. I'm reading all these books or articles on PLG and we should go and do it like people are having success with it.
Partho Ghosh : 12:11
The reality is, I think that this is something that needs to start from the top. You know and I'm hoping that that top is your CEO and kind of going down from there. You know my own experiences and being at places where you had I've overseen product growth functions where I was the head of product growth or overseeing kind of even growth. Marketing was part of that in some companies, but PLG wasn't bought in across the board from an executive point of view, and so, even though I had a pretty large team trying to go and drive like PLG in a very meaningful way with a decent amount of budget, in the end the funnel was broken in the company because that wasn't the focus through and through, and so we didn't have that buy-in from the top. There wasn't a mandate to say why we want to go down this path of PLG, whether it's better LTV to CAC ratio, so lifetime value divided by customer acquisition costs, or just customer acquisition costs in general, there's a myriad of reasons why you'd want to try out PLG, but if it wasn't bought in from the exec level down, it's going to be really hard to actually do it successfully.
Partho Ghosh : 13:23
Nbn product-led growth although product is in the title, it's not product management-led growth. It's really getting your entire company to rally around the product and using the product to drive growth, and it sounds a lot easier in practice than it actually is in theory. Now, obviously one of the biggest challenges is having a sales team and a CRO that's understanding how PLG or PLS or whatever version you want to call out, how it can help the entire company and how it can help their own teams. And really that buy-in is really critical in my opinion. I think without that buy-in you aren't going to get very far, and I've unfortunately learned that the hard way. I've spent a year and a half, two years going through one motion only to realize that I didn't have the right buy-in in the end, and that's kind of hard when you look back but yeah, that's the most important thing, I think, from the top.
Lily Smith : 14:21
And you mentioned that we see other businesses have success with this, and so the classic thing is to go well, look at what that business did. We need to emulate that, not necessarily copy it, but we need to have the same environment that allows us to experiment and innovate with the way that we're going to market in the way that that business did and come up with the way that we're going to market in the way that that business did and come up with our thing that you know really helps us grow and scale. How do you then like when you see that happening and you've got the excitement of the business and everyone's on board? But you mentioned as well, it's not like product management led growth. It also requires, I guess, mainly marketing to be on board, but potentially sales as well. How do you get everyone rallied around this as an operational mode of working?
Partho Ghosh : 15:11
Yeah, I would say that I personally think you do need more than just marketing buy-in. I think you need to have CS buy-in and account execs to buy in and your sales team and your customer success teams to really buy in as well. Obviously, operationally, you need to have your FP&A teams involved and interested. The biggest thing I'll call out is that being really honest with yourself as a product leader. If you're coming into a new organization and this is one of the focuses you want to drive or maybe you've been a product leader at a company for a while and you think PLG or some form of it could be interesting to your company, you have to be really honest with yourself and your team of where they are at in terms of a couple of things. Number one is your product ready for a self-serve motion or for more self-servability in the product? A lot of products use a lot of people to actually power what happens right, whether it's turning on feature flags, whether it's enabling parts of the product for customers to go and use. There's a lot of companies out there that still use human capital to do a lot of that work, and so really understanding how good your product is is really important. If you have sorry for the language if you have a shitty product and a lot of folks do that's about, well, it's a pretty big blocker to the product-led growth motion and that might be one of those things you realize. Ah, it's gonna pretty big blocker to the product-led growth motion and that might be one of those things you realize. Ah, it's going to take us at least a year to really drive a good product experience before we could actually go and test the self-serve thing out. And a lot of folks skip that step. They go straight to the self-serve and they do this experiment thinking it's going to be successful, and inevitably when it's a failure they go and say PLG is not right for us. It's like, well, no, you have a pretty crappy product that's not going to be able to hold on to the self-serve motion. You also might not activate customers quick enough to some form of an aha or light bulb moment to really drive that motion in a viral way.
Partho Ghosh : 17:18
The last thing I'll kind of call out here as well is vice versa If you have a crappy product and you're doing really well, it might be because you have a kick-ass sales team, right? We know a lot of companies where a lot of bad products get sold and do better than some of the companies that have a really great product right, because their sales can sell, and that's a good thing. In a lot of cases, that's like kudos to those sales teams, but that might be the superpower of that company and so trying to bring in this PLG motion might go against the complete grain of that company and what's made them successful. So I really think it's about being honest with yourself as a product leader when you or you're asked to bring in this kind of thinking or emotion of whether or not it's right for the business, instead of just saying, look at all these amazing SaaS businesses, I want to be like them, let's go and do it right. So that would be my thought process on it.
Lily Smith : 18:17
And I guess, based on that, sometimes I do think sometimes we hear about these terms and these approaches to things and we're like we're not doing it right. Unless we're doing product like growth or you know whatever, it is continuous discovery like we can beat ourselves up about. You know, not doing these things, but from what you're saying, actually there's a time and a place for this approach and so you don't want to do it when you're not ready.
Partho Ghosh : 18:43
Yeah, that's a good point.
Partho Ghosh : 18:45
I mean, I think you brought up a really great example right Continuous discovery or being even just data informed in your product discovery.
Partho Ghosh : 18:54
I am of the belief that really good product management principles need to be there and, no matter what company you are, PLG or not, having great product management principles and a foundation is going to make your product experience and your product better.
Partho Ghosh : 19:10
And so, in terms of whether that was the right time or place, my argument is there's always a good time and place and that was yesterday for that kind of set of thinking and good product management skills. But I think the time and place question of, like, understanding what your company is really good at, it's unique differentiators and if some of them are its people or some of the differentiators are its sales team, being able to outsell you know other sales teams and really be able to pitch in a different way that might be something you think about from a time and place point of view of like. Okay, maybe it's not the right time right now. I know a lot of companies where their people and how amazing their customer success teams are is a huge part of the value prop, which is great, but is that the best competitive differentiator for a PLG company? Maybe, maybe not.
Lily Smith : 20:06
And do you think that people hear product like growth and they assume that it means the sales team are all losing their jobs and that, you know, all the customers are just going to be magically found through specific features and flows and things like that?
Partho Ghosh : 20:23
Well, I hope not, but I mean I've definitely been there where that's been the case and a lot of the pitch.
Partho Ghosh : 20:30
I'm proud of the fact that my current company at Uber, that hasn't been the case, because we've really been very clear on our message that you know what we're trying to do, at least from a product strategy.
Partho Ghosh : 20:43
I think they only see the benefits from a sales perspective, but that's also me going through a lot of learnings and refinement of how to bring PLG into motion at companies. I've done it wrong in the past where you basically did have this wall and barrier of like sales versus product and that was not a lot of fun. But I would think that in this new world, especially when you look at some of the new GTM tools that are out there things like clay and a lot of the data tools that sales teams are using these days lines really well with some of this PLG motion and thinking, and so I think that giving more product usage data to qualify prospects, leading with the product first, instead of custom tailored demos, I would hope that if the products are good and the experience is good, that sales are doing way better because of it and I think that really great sales teams see that and they know that. Okay, this is going to make our lives better and we get to focus on bigger and better things because of it.
Randy Silver: 21:54
Yeah, this episode is brought to you by Pendo, the only all-in-one product experience platform.
Lily Smith : 22:00
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Randy Silver: 23:02
We're in more today at pendoio slash podcast, rich Mironov has this great line about when he goes into companies and if the sales is selling the wrong thing, if they keep coming back requesting features that don't exist or aren't aligned with the strategy, he rewrites sales incentives to make sure that everything that they only get rewarded for things that fit the ideal customer profile. It sounds like what you're saying is in a company that is practicing PLG properly, sales is getting qualified leads. They're happier from that perspective and it doesn't mean they're not going to come back to product and say, hey, we are hearing this, we need this. But it's a very different type of relationship. It's not a combative. Do this to make the one sale. It's help us with our conversion percentage. We're hearing this consistently. It's almost product qualified feedback.
Partho Ghosh : 24:02
Yeah, I think it's a really great point that Rich brings, and I've seen that myself.
Partho Ghosh : 24:06
I really believe, especially when you talk about product led sales, that I myself have worked with CROs and FP&A to build out SPFs to test product market fit and really get sales.
Partho Ghosh : 24:20
Sorry, spf I actually don't know what SPF stands for, but it's basically sales incentives, like sales programs where you get bonus on the leaderboard per se or reaching a certain threshold with a certain product and so getting sales to test something new or try a new product out, or trying to get them to adopt something that's not there today, it's not the easiest thing, right?
Partho Ghosh : 24:44
So putting the SPF in place to incentivize them to try and do so, alongside putting in kind of that product usage data as part of that it's been a success recipe for me for sure, and I think that that's a good point that Rich has brought up that you almost do have to kind of rewrite some of that to really drive the behavior in the right direction. I also think that's important from just a general experimentation and product-led kind of thinking at sales-led companies, that product managers need to ask for those kinds of things to see if their products actually get adoption and a product market fit, because sales can be so used to just selling what's there, and they make good money just selling what's there. Doing anything that new can be disruptive, doesn't? It's the wrong thing, and so how do you persuade them to sell a different thing or a different way? That's definitely one big way of doing that.
Lily Smith : 25:46
Pato, can you talk us through some of your sort of direct experience with developing product led growth, sort of tactics or I don't know what you would call them Sometimes they're features, tactics, flows, whatever it is, and kind of how that came about and, yeah, whether it was successful?
Partho Ghosh : 26:07
Sure, yeah, I mean, I think you know, anytime you think about PLG and product-led growth, you Google it online. I think the first thing that's going to come up probably for you is onboarding, or activation. That's typically where the quote, unquote books start, and for good reason, I think. That getting you know the time and time again you see, especially in B2B SaaS, you see that early activation equals long-term retention, right, and the faster that a customer is activated, the faster they start seeing value in your product, the stickier that customer becomes, and so, with that being the baseline kind of theory, looking at activation and onboarding is often the first step in all of that. And so, and I believe that activation starts on your website, it doesn't start in after you've signed up to the platform. It's always, you know, the first touch point for the customer with your product experience, and I think that is the website often. And so you know I'll give some experiences from Hootsuite Some of the things that we had learned was just how fast we had to activate customers when we were at Hootsuite Setup moment, for Hootsuite was setting up a certain number of social networks that you need to connect, because the value prop of Hootsuite was really scheduling posts ahead of time and sending it out to multiple networks really quickly.
Partho Ghosh : 27:35
But if you don't connect those integrations quick enough to see that value thereafter, you're kind of hooped. And so we did a myriad of different tests to try and figure that out from different homepages, many of which were kind of a waste of time because they didn't really improve things. We found that an actual homepage itself was quite critical. The Hootsuite originally, before I joined them, didn't have a homepage. So creating a kind of a launchpad for customers to come in and learn what they should do and what they could be doing better was really important. We tried activating and making some of the hard things easier by just being more playful. We actually brought in the brand's mascot, which is named Owly, as kind of a I hate saying it out loud, but kind of like a Clippy, if you remember from Microsoft Word and Clippy it was there to kind of help guide you and it was there to answer. Obviously it turned into kind of an AI chatbot of sorts, but it got a lot of usage because customers loved that owl and its brand and so that helped drive trial the paid conversion rate quite a bit. And talking about the website and activation.
Partho Ghosh : 28:45
One of the things that we had seen from a data point of view that a lot of other SaaS businesses might disagree with, was we actually put a credit card gate in front of the product, and that was because we found that, with the number of trials that we had at that company, we needed to figure out quality of trials and signups much faster than we were.
Partho Ghosh : 29:11
And having a credit card gate was a really solid way without hurting trial number of trials too much a really solid way of getting just better quality and our trial to paid ratio you know that conversion rate when went up quite a bit without the number of trials going down that it was a net benefit for sure for the company. And so I say that story only because, from a product point of view and for anyone that's listening, you're often told not to do these kinds of things. Right, when you read books and you read articles, people will say never put a credit card gate up front, never block things. But you have to test things for yourself and your own company, and I was very bullish on the fact that that would not work. But the team went and tested it. I said, yeah, absolutely, we should be testing everything, and that came out as a really huge winner for us.
Randy Silver: 30:03
So yeah, I'm curious. Admitting you were wrong about something and you were director of growth there, you must have talked about this strategy with people. How did that happen? How did you deal with it with the other executives? How did you sell it afterwards? Was it just we've run a bunch of tests, we have evidence, or how did you feel?
Partho Ghosh : 30:23
Yeah, I mean it's a great question. There's a lot of you know and Hootsuite wasn't a small company, it was about 1, 1500 people at the time when I was there A lot of opinions, right politically would come in, and even my own opinion, obviously, on this topic of, like you know, I've done product growth before and I've been in a product for X, y and Z years. You know, is this really a good idea? Should we go and do this? But you know the team feeling pretty bullish on the idea that we should at least test it and go through that and I said, yeah, absolutely, the numbers will tell us in the end what's right, what's wrong.
Partho Ghosh : 30:58
And this is also a challenge that a lot of companies for example my current company we couldn't do that as easily because we just don't have the traffic numbers that a company like Hootsuite had. Even my previous experiences before that I've been at companies that had lots of traffic you could do those kinds of experiments. So you have to be a little bit cognizant of that. But to answer your question, I think I'm one of those guys who really preaches strong opinions very loosely held, and I may have not been that way early in my career, but you definitely get humbled on this job and so I think over time you just kind of realize that it's probably best for me to have loose opinions, just so I don't have egg on my face anymore. But yeah, and so I'm all about. If the team wants to come back and be more data driven, I'm all for it.
Lily Smith : 32:08
I think that's so true. All of the sort of like slightly more mature product.
Partho Ghosh : 32:10
People that I know, and myself included, are definitely more of the. I don't know if it's going to work who knows Like I can guess, but I'll probably be wrong Whereas younger folk tend to be a lot more like this is definitely going to work or definitely not going to work. I saw some memes on that on LinkedIn of like, great like your feelings and sentiment in a meme form of like over your career and your trends. It was basically your 20s, 30s and 40s, but it was, yeah, very, very true.
Lily Smith : 32:25
One of the other things I'm curious to know on the credit card trial, the gated trial that you did, did you model what you would need to happen before you did the experiment? So you would know like we need to get X amount of credit cards input in order for us to make up, like what the difference would be?
Partho Ghosh : 32:48
Yeah, 100%, and that company especially, were quite a bit more mature as an organization and definitely at more scale. A couple of things that we knew A, we knew our trial to pay ratios really well. We knew what each percentage lift to trial to pay would mean on the bottom line of our P&L or our profit loss statement and we knew the number that we had to hit for it to be a successful experiment. And we knew the numbers. You know in the end were revenue numbers and conversion numbers and so we understood we also put a premium on annual versus monthly and we put a premium on, obviously stickiness and kind of churn. But, all things being equal, we absolutely knew what the number was and it met it. And then some, you know there was such a clear winner in the end.
Partho Ghosh : 33:39
If I remember correctly, because it's going back a couple of years, you know we dropped in trials by about 15, 16% if I can remember correctly.
Partho Ghosh : 33:47
But our conversion rate for trial of paid reissue went from like let's call it the 5% ish to 15 to 20 or 20 ish plus percent, so dramatically different, and I think that tapered off over time but it never really went kind of below that 15 to 20% mark.
Partho Ghosh : 34:05
So in the end it was a clear winner and it got us thinking about a lot of other things that we were doing, the most controversial being that at the time we tested then our freemium motion to see the value of our free product and see what that was bringing, and we decided to turn off our free product actually and open up an easier way to our self-serve, up an easier way to our self-serve. And so we kind of had to play that battle of, as we were looking at our free product, how we'd bring them into trials and what was the right fit, knowing that we may have to build a new free product at some point. It was never a we're going to kill free forever. It was never that idea. It was like what would the right product be for free users? And that question came up just because of that win we had on the credit card game.
Lily Smith : 34:53
Nice. So you talked earlier about how product-led growth doesn't mean product management led growth, and one of the things I tend to hear or see is that product managers don't necessarily do that modeling side of things with experimentation. So when you're looking at things like this in you know that organization, but also in overall as well, like what does the team around you look like? Who's involved, um, and how do you structure yourself and in that sort of I guess, cross functional, it would be a cross-functional team but like is that? Like everyone across the organization, and who's, who's leading the charge? Is it still product leading or is it a different part of the organization?
Partho Ghosh : 35:38
It's a good question. I've seen it in a couple of different ways. I can explain it from what we're trying to do, at least at Uberall, but my answer would be that, absolutely. I would say that when I've joined product organizations, one of the things that I often try and bring in is a lot more commercial thinking and just monetization thinking, even for you know, product managers that may never have like touched that part of like let's call it growth kind of your CFO department more getting more reporting and analysis available from a product revenue by product area or feature area. Sometimes setting these kind of things up for your product managers can be really meaningful. The other thing I often try to bring in is a North Star metric framework, which is always great to do but it's hard to follow up on. You kind of have to kick off, I think, the new year we're doing this for 2025. We look at our North Star metric that we're trying to hit, how it is associated to revenue Hopefully your North Star metric is not revenue, it shouldn't be and then understanding how a product area that a product manager oversees, how does it perform against the North Star metric, how does that product area improve the North Star metric and we make those connections so that the product manager understands that if I improve these product usage KPIs, I inherently am improving the North Star metric and thus improving revenue in some sense. So I think there are structures that you can bring to your product team to help them get more closer to this modeling. Now I do have product managers that are a lot more data driven and that will model themselves or they understand statistics in a different manner for split testing and things like that, so they can set up these types of tests. But they're a different breed, right. That's a bit of a specialty, I would say, for some of those PMs.
Partho Ghosh : 37:34
One thing that I've always done in the past three or four companies I've been at is create a product analyst kind of sub-department. So today we have one product analyst, which is not enough. We're actually small plug. We're hiring for another product analyst. If you're interested, go to the Uber All Careers website. But yeah, we are looking. We are effectively doubling our department.
Partho Ghosh : 37:59
But I think it's really important for product managers, product designers and product marketers to be able to talk to someone on the data side that's dedicated to product usage and product in general. And so I definitely was spoiled at Hootsuite. Hootsuite was like the largest. We had six or seven product analysts under one senior manager who was amazing and, I think, trying to get closer to those ratios that we had at Ho. It would be the dream at my current company and maybe in the future. That's definitely where I've seen it done the best. But I've also seen a smaller scale. I was at a company called Unbounce almost a decade ago. Unbounce is a conversion rate optimization platform, and so split testing and experimentation was in our DNA, like our product did that, and so a lot of our product managers need to understand how that all kind of worked, and so they would do their own modeling and I thought that was really unique. So maybe there's some learnings there for someone in terms of building a culture without having to hire a bunch of analysts.
Randy Silver: 39:06
When you're adopting this, this approach, nupartha? How long does it take to really see results? How do you know that you're going in the right direction with it?
Partho Ghosh : 39:15
That's a great question. That's a hard hitting question in some senses because it does take some time. I think that you can see improvements in how your product managers are perceiving the changes and improving their day to day kind of job the way that they talk, the way that they showcase and discuss results, way that they talk, the way that they showcase and discuss results. I'll just give my examples. At Uber, I'll be really proud of the team and the changes they've made. I am always very transparent in terms of talking to the entire product department of where I see us in terms of product management maturity, and I told them I think we're a three or four out of 10 right now and we need to be at an eight or nine out of 10 a year from now, and so we made a plan of action to how we're going to get there. And you know, even with some of the changes in terms of how we show prototypes, how we talk about new ideas when we do our one pagers, we're very much starting with success metrics first, starting with outcomes. You know, starting with the data, we are very much focusing on outcomes and not outputs. That was a big, big change. I think a lot of orgs need to look into is a lot of product can still be very output focused and not outcomes focused, and so within three or four months, I've heard from a lot of other stakeholders, a lot of execs, that, wow, they've seen a shift in just how products are talking and thinking, and so you can kind of see successes through and through.
Partho Ghosh : 40:46
But, to answer your question, I do think it takes a solid year before you really start to see the real improvements.
Partho Ghosh : 40:54
A, because if you're in this journey, you're going to have a lot of baggage, and so there's probably six months of development baggage that you have to this journey.
Partho Ghosh : 40:59
You're going to have a lot of baggage, and so there's probably six months of development baggage that you have to get through before you really get to put your own stuff in place, and then you get to start executing on your own strategy, and so after that you hope that you can showcase some forward movement six months thereafter, which is now a year in total. So I do think it takes a solid year before you really start seeing some of the real impact. But I said it was a hard-hitting question because I know for myself and a lot of peers I've seen a lot of peers. I think there's a lot of change that occurs from a product leadership point of view within. You know a lot of people moving jobs 18 months to three years, and I think sometimes it's it's tough to put a strategy in place and execute on it if that's the time you get, so to speak you mentioned um at the top of the call, that you are the sort of first or the head of product vp product at uberall.
Lily Smith : 41:59
So what does the structure look like there in terms of um? Are you reporting then into a cto or is? Is there a cpo and how is that like working, because you said you need that sort of executive buy-in to to this approach. So were they all very au fait with product-led growth or have they just entrusted all of this to you?
Partho Ghosh : 42:26
Definitely PLG was a and just product-led thinking was a big topic when I was joining the organization of. They were looking for someone with that expertise and experience, so it was definitely something they had started with, I would say, which obviously got me interested. I think we're a bit of a unique case where it's actually been a couple of years where I have reported to a CTO, but I do report to our CTO and she's quite product minded. Now we're both on the West Coast and that's another reason for that. We're on the West Coast and we get to work really closely with each other in terms of just time zones. We're a global company, so I'm up usually at 5 or 6 am Pacific Standard Time working with our EMEA counterparts. So and our CEO and a lot of execs are on the EMEA side, so that's quite nice. But I will say that we had a new CEO join the organization right before I joined and I meet with them every other week and quite close to discussing these things with them in that cadence.
Partho Ghosh : 43:26
I think I'll just bring this up because founder mode has been a topic of sorts as of late and one of the things I think founder mode tries to talk about are these like skip level ideas, right, and the idea around skip level meetings. You know I have them with our CEO all the time and I don't think I'd be able to be successful in my job without that. So before this, yeah, I was either reporting directly to CPL or to CEO. There was quite a few years where I was reporting directly to CEO and I think these things change at scale, right. Who you report to at 100 to 200 people is very different of 500 to 1,500 people, and they all have their uniqueness. I would say All of them have pros and cons in every sense of the word.
Lily Smith : 44:13
I'm hearing a lot that there's a real trend towards either having a CTO or a CPO and you know that basically being a CPTO job and so having a very product minded CTO or a very kind of technically minded chief product officer.
Partho Ghosh : 44:30
I have a controversial topic on that, which is my take is I think some of that's because after 2022, we went through a lot of change in terms of just a lot of layoffs that occurred and a lot of focus on margins, and so I understand that I do think we'll see a world where that splits up again. I think, if you're a SaaS organization, your product strategy, your company strategy, is probably all around your product and technology. I do think that you need to have kind of those two things you know things be looked at at least at scale. So I'd be surprised I have seen it at a thousand plus people, companies and I'm always kind of shocked by it of you know that I think that would be a scale where you'd have both a CPO and a CTO. But you are seeing, you're correct, you're seeing a lot more of that.
Lily Smith : 45:24
And it's an interesting trend, for sure.
Partho Ghosh : 45:25
Yeah, one to keep our eyes on. We'll have to come back in a couple of years and see if your prediction was correct.
Lily Smith : 45:28
Yeah, I think some of these things are cyclical at times. You've kind of mentioned a couple of times I think you mentioned a tool called Clay and you mentioned some other tooling Like what does like the best sort of tooling setup or what kind of the fundamental tools that you need for like a product, like growth approach.
Partho Ghosh : 45:44
Oh boy, that's a good question. I mean, I think from the start, you know, from a product management point of view, when I look at a product tech stack, I put a lot of emphasis on to product analytics and kind of digital adoption platforms. You know we're at Uber, we use Pendo. I've been a Pendo fan for a long time and use Pendo for a while. I know there's a lot of other tools that are similar but yeah, just having that own one where we kind of look at analytics and segments, that's a really important part is customer segmentation and then tying kind of your digital adoption platform or your guides to that. We use the digital adoption platform part not just from an onboarding adoption point of view but more so on the monetization side, which I feel is sometimes a better use case for it of like really getting customers to upsell or try new feature areas out through that platform. So I really think for a product standpoint of view, that's really important. I would say an experimentation platform depending on your traffic numbers, if you have the traffic to be able to really stand up, split testing in a meaningful way, I think that's a no brainer. Those are products like Optimizely and a few others come to mind. And yeah, I mean outside of that.
Partho Ghosh : 47:02
There are things that product starts to get into, depending on how mature your organization is from a PLG point of view, you might think about product-led sales platforms or GTM platforms that combine product usage data alongside other kind of GTM tools, whether it's things like Clearbit and Sixth Sense and things like that. So you're starting to see like products like Pocus, for example, kind of combine the two of those things. I think Clay does that as well. I'm not as familiar with what's best in class in that area, but I definitely know that product gets a lot more involved, which is cool.
Partho Ghosh : 47:38
I will say that one thing I've kind of soured on as much as my early career is this might be a controversial take I find roadmap tools a little overrated. I find that most of my companies and organizations I've been at over the last five plus years every scaled company that I've seen just ends up using slides and sheets in some way to get that job done. Even if they have a tool in the background, they still end up using slides to make it beautiful and to communicate it. And so we do use a roadmap tool, but I question the advocacy of a product roadmap tool. I'll leave it there.
Lily Smith : 48:23
I love it. We've had two controversial takes in one episode. That's great.
Randy Silver: 48:29
Awesome, Partho. Thank you so much. This has been fantastic.
Partho Ghosh : 48:33
Yeah, no worries. Yeah, I appreciate you guys having me on and anything I can do to help out let me know. But yeah, it was a fun chat thank you so much, pat.
Lily Smith : 48:40
Though the product experience hosts are me lily smith, host by night and chief product officer by day, and me randy silver also host by night and I spend officer by day and me.
Randy Silver: 48:59
Randy Silver also host by night, and I spend my days working with product and leadership teams, helping their teams to do amazing work.
Lily Smith : 49:07
Louron Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor, and our theme music is from product community legend Arnie Kittler's band Pow.
Randy Silver: 49:17
Thanks to them for letting us use their track.
