Growth is Not an Island, It’s a Hub

What Are We Doing Here?

After a long absence from social media, I have recently been reading a lot about Product-led Growth. This is something I’ve been passionate about for a long time. As a matter of fact, when my co-founder Ishai Jaffe and I started Bablic (an Unbabel Company) (which was 100% product-led, and never had any salespeople, like, ever...) back in 2014, the term PLG didn’t even exist yet and the discipline itself was still in its infancy. Fortunately, that is no longer the case, and I’m happy to see that there’s plenty of knowledge available for entrepreneurs and marketers.

Lately, I have come across some remarkable content, some of which focuses on a topic that is especially dear to me at the moment: companies transitioning from Sales-led approaches to Product-led Growth models. The reason why this topic is so important to me is because that’s exactly the kind of motion I am now leading at Unbabel .

The Hidden Side of PLG

While the content I found was a literal goldmine of information, one thing did strike me as odd. The narratives surrounding PLG initiatives focused heavily on the customer-facing aspects: user experience improvements, conversion rate optimization, communication strategies, and nurturing campaigns. Don't get me wrong—these elements are crucial. But there's an entire world behind the scenes that rarely gets the spotlight, yet is equally vital to the success of a PLG motion. Looking at UX exclusively is like seeing the tip of the iceberg, missing the massive structural changes happening beneath the surface. As growth managers, this could lead to massive overconfidence about the impact we can make to the bottom line.

PLG is a Business-Wide Evolution

It is absolutely crucial that everyone understands how Product-led Growth is not just a fancy add-on or a plug-and-play component you can seamlessly integrate into your existing business model. It's a fundamental shift that requires deep, organization-wide changes. PLG isn't just about making your product more user-friendly or automating your marketing funnel. It's about reimagining how your entire company operates, from the ground up, with the product at the center of everything.

Breaking Down Silos at Unbabel

Let’s take a look at a few examples to make things more clear, but first let me give you a little bit of context: Unbabel has achieved remarkable success within the enterprise market segment, offering one of the best combinations of quality, speed, and cost of translation, combined with elegant integrations with some of the most popular customer support platforms in the market. But, as Unbabel started acquiring competitors, the main priority became onboarding/migrating the acquired customers successfully. While the company was perfectly structured to address the needs of larger customers with sophisticated needs (i.e., the enterprise segment), it was immediately clear how that approach would not be a good fit (and definitely not cost-effective!!) when it came to smaller customers in the SMB-SME range. A more automated and scalable approach was needed in order to serve this new segment effectively, while keeping our profitability margins intact (or improving them…).

When we began building the “PLG machine” at Unbabel, it was immediately clear that it wasn’t enough to just focus on product usability or marketing automation. We had to rethink how every single function in the company interacted with growth, and fortunately we had a few great examples of companies that did that. Seeing how companies like ClickUp or Dropbox optimized and streamlined all of their Customer Success and Customer Support processes to match the scalability of their UX was definitely inspiring, but in our case, we had to go a bit deeper. It was necessary to adopt a truly holistic approach in order to scale effectively. It wasn’t just about marketing automation anymore—it was about automating and optimizing processes across the entire organization. We looked at how every department touched the customer journey and asked ourselves: “How can we scale this?”

Automating Key Aspects of the Company

When we began our transition to Product-Led Growth at Unbabel, we quickly realized that simplifying the user experience (UX) was not going to be enough on its own. True scalability required deeper automation across several critical aspects of the company. The first area we tackled was onboarding, followed by data management, billing, and engineering. Here’s how we approached each of these areas:

Onboarding: Simplifying the Offering

For many companies embracing PLG, simplifying the product’s interface or usability is often the first step. However, we found that simplifying our actual offering was equally important. While enterprise customers had complex needs that required more customization, the long-tail customers in the SMB space didn’t need all the bells and whistles. Their needs were straightforward, and by stripping away some of the more advanced features and bundling them into higher tiers, we not only made the product easier to use but also vastly improved usability for our smaller customers.

Additionally, we introduced guardrails—a set of predefined rules and limits that helped guide users through the product. Guardrails are often an overlooked solution, but they can reduce errors and improve the onboarding experience without sacrificing flexibility. This was a game changer for us.

Beyond the product offering, we introduced a comprehensive knowledge base so customers could find answers to their questions independently. But it didn’t stop there. We leveraged behavior-triggered in-app messages to guide users in real-time, linking directly to specific knowledge base articles based on the actions they were taking within the product. This combination of self-service resources and timely, contextual guidance allowed customers to figure things out on their own without the need for hands-on support.

Data Management: Standardizing Across Systems

One of the most foundational pieces of a scalable PLG strategy is data. At Unbabel, we had a lot of data flowing through various systems, but not all of it was standardized, and that made automation difficult.

I pushed for stricter standardization in how data was formatted and managed across all systems and databases. Whether it was customer usage data, billing information, or performance metrics, everything had to follow a consistent structure. We made sure that every component holding data was equipped with an API endpoint, allowing us to automate the reading and writing of data seamlessly. This level of standardization meant that we could automate processes at scale, and data could flow freely between departments without manual intervention.

Automating Billing and Invoices

Billing was another area where automation was sorely needed. Although we already had metering in place to track customer usage, we improved the capability to generate quotes before customers submitted translation projects. This gave them more transparency and control over their spending.

We also overhauled the invoices to make them more clear and detailed, providing customers with all the relevant information they needed. On top of that, we built out new billing screens where customers could dig deeper into their billing history, project costs, and even download specific reports. By providing this level of transparency and autonomy, we not only streamlined the billing process but also enhanced the customer experience.

Engineering: Aligning for Scalability

Finally, we turned our focus to engineering. For PLG to work at scale, the product itself must be designed with scalability in mind from the start. This meant opening new channels of communication with the engineering team to ensure that growth objectives were aligned with their development roadmap.

One of the critical changes we made was to establish a clear process for collaboration between the growth and engineering teams. This alignment allowed us to leverage each other’s work—whether it was about automating backend processes or integrating new features, every new component had to be built with flexibility and scalability in mind. This collaboration ensured that we could continuously iterate on the product without creating technical debt that would slow us down in the long run.

Shifting Mindsets: Growth is Everyone’s Job

In case I didn’t make it clear enough so far, one of the most important, yet often overlooked, roles of a growth manager is to be a champion for scalability across the entire organization. One of the first things, and probably the most important, I did was establish efficient and effective communication channels between Growth and the other teams. This is not a dry exercise from a business school course, it’s about the people. Collaborating closely with engineering, finance, operations, and others meant starting conversations, building personal relationships, understanding how others work and think. It’s important to know what success is to them, what are their constraints and what they are worried about. But most importantly, we need to keep in mind how the interaction between Growth and other functions impacts the customers’ experience. NEVER forget the POV of the customer.

This allowed us to quickly identify bottlenecks and figure out where we could automate processes, but even more importantly, it helped build a culture of experimentation, where every team felt empowered to test new ideas and find ways to improve scalability. It wasn’t just about the growth team running experiments anymore; we wanted the entire company to think like growth hackers.

Scaling for Long-Term Success

Within a short time, it became clear that the real goal was not short-term wins but long-term scalability. Every change we made came after a simple question: “Does this remove the bottleneck just this one time, or will it eliminate it forever?” Every new process and workflow we designed had to pass the scalability test: “If we double our user base tomorrow, can we handle the load? And if we grow 10X?” If the answer was no, the job was not done.

Final Thoughts: Growth is a Company-Wide Endeavor

If there’s one key takeaway from my journey implementing PLG at Unbabel, it’s this: Growth is not the responsibility of one team—it’s everyone’s job. It’s about instilling a culture where every department thinks about how they can contribute to scalable, repeatable, and automated growth.

Whether you’re in marketing, customer success, or product development, you need to be aligned with the broader growth strategy. Growth managers are in a unique position to influence how the entire company thinks about scalability. By fostering a culture of process optimization and automation, we can ensure that our efforts lead to long-term, sustainable growth.

So, if you’re ready to scale, I encourage you to start today. Begin by collaborating with teams outside of your usual scope and evaluate how scalable their workflows are. What’s one thing you can automate or optimize to ensure that your growth efforts will scale tomorrow?

Let’s go! ??