Why Companies Get Product-Led Growth Wrong

I’ve lost count of the number of times I have been told, “We should do/are doing PLG!” Because, somehow, that’s meant to magically fix the fact that we’re not scaling well.

Usually, what they mean is:

“Add a trial button to the site.” Or,

“Let’s rework onboarding.” Or worse,

“Our investors said another company in the portfolio is PLG and growing really, really fast. Just copy what they’re doing.”

None of those things are wrong, they’re just not the full picture. Because PLG isn’t a tactic. It’s not just a self-serve option or faster sign-up flow. It’s a shift in how your business grows, and it touches everything: product, engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and the culture that holds it all together.

In this post, I want to share what product-led growth actually means, at least from my perspective, so you can figure out whether your business is ready to move in that direction or simply reacting to pressure.

Product-Led Growth (PLG) Is a Business Strategy, Not a Feature Set

This is the starting point and the most common misconception.

Product-led growth isn’t “adding a trial” or “launching a new onboarding flow.” It’s a growth model where the product becomes the main engine of acquisition, retention, and expansion.

That means:

• Customers experience value before speaking to sales

  And yes, they will still speak to sales. Especially when you are selling more complex products, into more mature organisations with more complex system landscapes.

• Onboarding, engagement, and even retention happen through the product itself. 

  It doesn’t mean you don’t have onboarding teams, customer engagement programs or inside-sales actively working on customer expansion. But the product does some of the heavy lifting.

• Your team learns from user behaviour fast and uses that insight to drive growth.

  That means PLG isn’t something you bolt on. It’s something you design for. And it requires tight alignment across the business, or you end up with isolated efforts that never quite land.

PLG ≠ Self-Serve Signups (Though That Helps)

Self-serve can be part of PLG. But self-serve without product value is just frictionless disappointment.

PLG isn’t about making everything easier to access. It’s about delivering meaningful value early and consistently through the product.

Here’s what that actually looks like:

• A new user gets to an “aha” moment quickly (activation). It is great to have tons of sign-ups (acquisition), but if they don’t activate, i.e. actually start using the product, it doesn’t really mean much.

• They can explore real functionality before committing. Help them out with templates and demo data.

• The product itself prompts the next best action - no hand-holding is needed. Although it doesn’t remove the need for onboarding support, training and help when needed.

• Expansion happens organically as product usage increases, or as the customer’s business grows and needs more from the product.

  
  

You can have a high-touch sales motion and still be product-led.

And you can have a beautiful self-serve flow and still not be.

PLG Starts With Value, Not Virality

It’s not that teams confuse PLG with bottom-up growth loops like sharing or referrals, it’s that they focus on those first, hoping they’ll drive growth. But those loops only work once the core product value is clear, repeatable, and delivering results. Otherwise, you’re just asking people to invite others into a frustrating experience.

A few questions worth asking:

• Do your users come back (retention)?

• Do they want to invite others (referral), because the product helps them win?

• Can users explore real use cases without a long setup (onboarding)?

  
  

If the core product doesn’t land, no growth hack will save you. So before chasing growth hacks, focus on value delivery, depth of usage, and speed to value.

Why PLG Fails in Growth-Stage and Mid-Market Orgs

If you’re an early-stage startup, you can build PLG in from day one. I’ve had the pleasure and luxury of doing that myself, but the reality is most of the companies I work with are past the start-up phase when they want to pivot to PLG. They’ve scaled through sales or custom solution development. They’ve got technical debt, layered teams, and a culture that’s been built around enterprise motion.

That’s where PLG often breaks, not because it’s a bad idea, but because:

• Sales keep selling features that don’t exist and product ends up chasing deals instead of following strategy.

  There’s no shared view of what is happening in product, what’s on the roadmap, or what trade-offs are worth making. Sales push for what they need to close revenue. Product pushes back, or worse, scrambles to deliver on all the promised commitments. PLG doesn’t mean you never make commitments to close deals. But it does mean there’s a clear product strategy, and the org aligns around it, so you know when to say yes, when to say not yet, and how to make those decisions without chaos.

• Everyone tracks acquisition. No one owns activation.

  Marketing reports on MQLs and sign-ups. Product tracks features shipped. Sales focuses on closing the deal. But activation doesn’t belong clearly to anyone. And without shared accountability, it becomes a big gap and you start losing customers. 

• Onboarding is disconnected from what actually drives usage.

  New users are dumped into a generic flow that looks nice, but doesn’t reflect how real customers get value. There’s no feedback loop from behaviour to onboarding design, which means you can’t improve time-to-value or reduce drop-off.

• The business still celebrates closing deals over product adoption.

  So teams chase big contracts, not the customer's success. You might hit short-term revenue goals, but long-term usage, expansion, and retention suffer, and churn increases.

  
  

It is usually the moment when someone in the exec team announces: “We’re doing PLG now!” But no one’s aligned on what that actually means — or what it’ll take to pull it off.

What to Do Instead

If you’re not sure whether PLG is the right next step, or how far you want to go, start by asking some questions:

• Where does your product already help customers succeed on their own?

• Where are users getting stuck when activating, using, or discovering new features?

• What signals do you use to understand product impact (and who owns those insights)?

• What makes your customers leave your product?

• Are your systems (pricing, support, data, incentives) set up to support product-driven growth?

  
  

You don’t have to go “full PLG.” But you do need to know what it looks like, so you’re making intentional choices, not just reacting to pressure.

Closing

Product-led growth gets talked about like a switch you flip. And often as another buzzword without understanding its impact. It is a shift in how your company grows and that shift takes time, clarity, and structure. It takes more than a new onboarding flow or a trial button. It takes alignment across teams, incentives, systems, operations and processes, so you’re not working against each other.

Be clear about what you're optimising for and then design how you work around that.

In upcoming posts, I’ll dive deeper into some of the real-world questions teams are asking: Who actually owns PLG?

What does a PLG roadmap look like when you're not starting from scratch?

And how do you shift toward product-led without losing what’s already working in a sales-led business?

Because it’s one thing to say you want to be product-led. It’s another to design your business to support it.