The State of Product-Led Experience: Opening Thoughts

This article is a short abstract of covers opening thoughts & scope of “ The State of Product-Led Experience” - The most comprehensive research on Product-Led Growth to date. In addition, a reinstated definition of User Onboarding via the lens of Product-Led practices is analyzed. Authored by: Despina Exadaktylou, founder ReinventGrowth- the Product Experience Agency. 

The Product-Led Challenge

Developing a product is hard. Delivering it efficiently to multiple customer segments is an ongoing challenge. It is one thing trying to increase a customer base and another retaining it for the long run. Finding the optimal point that will make customers keep coming back for more, especially when we refer to B2B solutions applying to a range of personas and industries, is a rather complicated task.

For a while now, the emerging Product-Led GTM practices, having as panacea products' superpowers raise the one million dollars question: What defines customer experience? While optimized product delivery comes first into mind, the challenges following Product-Led transformation are far greater.

Before we get there it would be wise to mention what a Product Led GTM strategy entail: A Product-Led GTM strategy is an approach to running a business that puts the product at the center of the organization. Those organizations deliver a product that anticipates and answers customers evolving needs by delivering stellar, customer-centric product experiences. In this instance, the product is not just a part of the customer experience. In a Product-Led GTM strategy the product is the experience. An experience so strong and optimized that converts accounts, in a matter of minutes, and is delivered on a consistent cadence in order to retain and expand them.

Product-Led organizations have their departments consider the product as the main growth lever, while they reorganize the GTM practices around its mission and vision and improve collaboration across the board.

So, which are the challenges SaaS businesses need to overcome when making the transition?

Challenge 1: The dominance of IT consumerization

The surge to deliver flawless product experiences in B2B is rising from the major challenge IT consumerization brings on the table. The frictionless, seamless experience B2C solutions provide is now expected in B2B too. This shift in the customer acquisition process elevates the product as the primary growth driver and disrupts the ever-changing SaaS landscape again.

Is not enough anymore for a product to deliver. Product features, should onboard users seamlessly and sustain engagement levels. Even beyond that first experience, product Led organizations retain and expand their clientele, based on products’ features and by keeping retention and support costs low.

On the other side of the spectrum, inconsistencies in GTM practices, limited experimentation, and infinite handholding still have their fair share across the SaaS industry. The more organizations deny to optimize product experience, the harder it will become for them to drive accounts towards retention and expansion.

Challenge 2: The rise of the customer

The abandonment of long term contracts has liberated customers. The subscription economy enables them to make up to twelve buying decisions within a year. If we add on that, the reduced switching costs, the surge of competition and the strength of customers’ voice on social mediums we have the rise of an era where a sole user can hold all the cards under his sleeve.

This shift has raised customer expectations from having a solution that can barely meet their needs to one that will allow them to grow while offering a stellar experience at the same time. An experience so strong and optimized that will make a prospect convert to paid in a matter of minutes and will be delivered on a consistent cadence to retain and expand him.

Digital products’ complexity and their delivery across an array of devices are only making things worse. Context, of usage, is no longer optional. On the contrary, it is the one ingredient that should follow product experience. Its absence can be detrimental to any SaaS offering. An effect that becomes stronger in case a systemic process delivering personalized and tailored experiences is not in place.

Challenge 3: The abandonment of silos

Getting rid of silos’ domination is the first step forward an organization should take when providing an exceptional customer experience. Sales and Customer Success, the direct or indirect surrogates of customer onboarding so far, along with Product Management need to establish a standard set of metrics when evaluating product experience.

Only the employment of a unified agenda and alignment across and within departments will bring clarity and optimize product delivery across the board. In the opposite scenario, confusion, misalignment, and decreased ROI will prevail.

Challenge 4: The emerging role of product management

Product Management is also changing face. Gut feelings are not supposed to lead any more product management decisions. Product leaders, have to evolve into data-driven experimenters relying on qualitative and quantitative results.

This mindset shift will enable them to get easier the internal buy-in from internal stakeholders and come closer to customers’ needs. The continuous monitoring of passive feedback, the ongoing conduction of user research, followed by investment in data help product leaders get a better understanding of the context behind day-to-day usage.

Continuous Investment in a customer-centric approach will enable product leaders to deliver optimized experiences and build features compatible with products’ vision and customers’ evolving needs.

To uncover more of those challenges and competing strengths Product-Led organizations employ, we embarked on a mission to define product experience in the SaaS landscape. To achieve this, we surveyed 40 SaaS organizations and interviewed 50 executives who own or lead Product Management, Customer Success, Marketing and Sales activations. 

The goal of our effort is to map, through real-world examples, Product-Led techniques used and estimate how they affect critical aspects of the customer journey. We believe that our massive data sample and thorough analysis will enable SaaS organizations to align their internal teams and optimize product delivery. Our commitment is to help reshape the SaaS growth mindset via the lens of Product Led practices. The survey’s results directly guide those efforts, and this extensive report will highly reflect on them.

Key Points of Analysis

1. Introduction of a remodeled onboarding definition — direct outcome of Product Led practices
2. Introduction of product metrics, SaaS organizations can consider when assessing onboarding effectiveness.
3. Extensive analysis of onboarding key performance indicators & data

Exemplary Participants

Product-Led Onboarding (PLO)

As a business function, the magnitude onboarding has for SaaS organizations renders it more critical by the day. Especially now that customer experience needs to be stellar and user satisfaction established in the early stages of the customer lifecycle. When effective, user onboarding helps new users become proficient, and customers grow within a service. A poor onboarding experience, on the other hand, disappoints buyers, infuriates users, and eventually leads to churn.

Being subject to the GTM practices at play, onboarding changes attributes with the ease a chameleon adapts to a new environment. 

Through a Self Serve onboarding strategy, it is fast and to the point, camouflaged behind scalable practices. On a Human-Assisted strategy, it becomes a thorough systemic process embraced by the handholding Customer Success provides.

Depending on its design, onboarding includes basic setup help, training, and leads to experiences that create proficient and habitual users. When executed correctly, it becomes a scalable and tailored educational framework, enabling accounts to grow by moving them down the customer lifecycle. When executed wrong, it delivers out of context messages, creates friction, and encourages drop-offs.

The multivariate nature onboarding has enables it to replicate Sales practices. The ongoing feature releases discourage the iconic sales funnel taxonomy. Every time a new release is launched, the onboarding process is reactivated to deliver initial value, lead to upgrades, and further account expansion. This process abandons the traditional sales model archetype, ending onboarding prevalence during activation.

Being a continuous process, onboarding needs to be evaluated at every stage of the customer lifecycle. The sales funnel has evolved into a circle where onboarding stands in its epicenter waiting for the next feature release to be triggered again.

The industry’s transition to Product Led practices, also plays its part in this evolution. As a process, onboarding no longer includes invasive, out of context in-app interactions presented at large in front of users.

Product data exploitation overrules the assumption implying product engagement activations cannot supplement the systemic process humans deliver. On the contrary, onboarding becomes the connective tissue between the two.

Product Led onboarding (PLO), a term coined by ReinventGrowth , is a set of data-driven product engagement practices, that consider behavioral notions and users’ proficiency.

Strategically, it avoids random feature introduction to users. Instead, it exploits historic data and considers a prospect’s proficiency level when exploring a product for the first time.

Contextual guidance constitutes its main pillar and enables product experience to double down on users’ workflow early on by following their progressive route to excellence.

Previously, even when a tailored experience was provided, the work was not done. A viable monitoring process following users’ progression effectively could not be established. Marketing Led practices may have introduced the use of analytics to monitor prospects’ online behavior but failed to provide organizations with an extensive analysis of in-product behavior.

Product Led organizations already capitalize on PLO practices and combine insights from prospects’ online presence with those derived from the product itself. Product managers are at the forefront, able to pinpoint which features are sticky and where drop-offs occur.

Onboarding is finally able to be measured end-to-end and pinpoint where growth lies or churn lurks.

In a SaaS world, where stellar customer experience is now synonymous to optimized product delivery, user onboarding acts as the Jack of all trades.

It takes users by the hand, helping them accomplish what needs to get done. Product Led practices transform onboarding in a data-driven force that fills in the gaps humans are unable to, by eliminating confusion and sustaining engagement.

Eventually, it all comes down to what game is at play. The one ruled by humans, or the one led by machines.

Next Chapter: Evaluating Product Experience

Originally published at ReinventGrowth's site on May 16th, 2019. Claim a free copy of the extensive report here

At ReinventGrowth we are convinced that Product-Led practices is the future of SaaS. Keen on making the transition to a Product-Led GTM model? Contact us today and let us know how we can help your organization get there.