Team Buyers Not IT Decision-Makers

The real buyer in product led software is the team that feels the pain, not the central tech function. In practice, a design lead, product lead, or marketing lead owns the budget because they know exactly what breaks in their workflow, while IT steps in later to check security, overlap, and vendor sprawl. That is why products like Figma win by creating strong internal champions before procurement starts.

• Figma spread by solving a day to day problem for designers first, then becoming the place where PMs, engineers, and marketers review files, comment, and sometimes edit directly. That cross functional usage makes it harder for IT to argue the tool is just a niche point solution.
  1 sacra 2 sacra
• The blocker role of IT gets stronger when a company is trying to cut overlapping SaaS spend. The internal champion still matters most, because the approval fight becomes a concrete argument over why this tool does something the already approved stack cannot do well enough.
  1 sacra
• Airtable shows the same pattern in a different product shape. It often lands with marketing or operations teams, then sales and success use product usage data and cross team sharing to turn that local adoption into a larger enterprise contract.
  1 sacra 3 sacra

Going forward, the winners in PLG will be the tools that turn one team's must have workflow into an organization wide habit before IT consolidation starts. Once multiple functions rely on the product, central IT still reviews the purchase, but the political cost of ripping it out becomes too high.