Leah Tharin is a leading Product-Led Growth (PLG) advisor with years of experience in the product space. At #mtpcon London 2025, she led an actionable session on the key principles of Growth in Product and what it will look like in the future. Watch the video in full, or read on for some of her key takeaways.
The fundamentals of PLG
Leah began by breaking down what Product-Led growth is and how we can execute it:
- Build intent for time - Product, instead of sales, build conversation with customers.
- Ask your customers for something - this could be, for example, asking customers to try out a new freemium product.
- Built intent for money - after your customers have tried out a free feature, you then start asking for money.
- Ask for something again, then repeat.
Leah explains that doing this builds both customer and company value over time.
Leah stresses that PLG distribution is more likely to succeed in highly competitive (commoditised) spaces where customers have choices in how they interact with the product. Additionally, great PLG companies have growth teams that are responsible for connecting users as efficiently as possible with product value and also providing marketing and product teams with usage data, such as sign-up flows, and percentage of free users to trial users.
For example, a growth team would be responsible for a pricing plan page. They need to collaborate with Marketing, Sales, and Product to reach the best outcomes. In other words, growth teams are the owners of the first impression your product will make. She shares an infographic detailing how a common growth product team is structured.
When Sales meets Product
Leah stresses how friction arises when sales teams suggest new features and business cases that represent and satisfy only one customer. This overreliance on adding new features leads to an overfocus on acquisition methods and deteriorating product value.
AI and Product Value go hand in hand
AI allows the market to build what was not possible before and can solve existing problems with comparable quality for less money, Leah explains. AI is changing in the market, which impacts supply vs. demand.
“Less capital is necessary to build the same amount of product," she notes, meaning more competition. Companies now have to differentiate their distribution. “It’s less about the product, and more about how easy it is to try out your product” Leah says.
In the past, customers had to find a solution to afford it, but now, customers have to find the right solution for them due to the overwhelming number of options available.
Leah adds that AI is good at faking everything, making it easy to find some products and harder to find the right ones with our traditional methods.
What does the future hold?
“What we need is more specialised product managers”, Leah explains, looking into the future of product management, “Companies expect specialisation and predictability from product managers whilst also providing more support towards GTM and Sales,” she adds. For example
- Growth Product Managers
- Technical Product Managers
- Innovation Product Managers
Leah stresses how all of these specialised roles have to understand business casing from customer problems to revenue in account.
She left us with one final lesson - "Modern PLG is about putting customer success front and centre by showing value, not talking about it. For that to happen, we must understand the entire business more than ever."
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