How does Product-Led Growth (PLG) as a motion act as a tailwind for Arrows?

We think of PLG as one ingredient in the mix. No company is purely a PLG process. All the classic example companies that people think of—Twilio, Figma, Asana, Zapier—have sales and sales-assist functions, account management, and customer success.

PLG is a trend of sorts, but the lessons in it are here to stay. The strategy aligns with how many customers actually would prefer to buy. Understanding and supporting that route is likely to be beneficial for most companies. However, it does not give you permission to abdicate the role of actually helping customers figure out what they need to do, inside and outside of your product, to get to their desired outcome.

If you think about any complex goal you have, for example, “we want to increase X“, a lot of the work actually happens in the decision-making process of, “What is X? Is X a reasonable goal and how will we get there?” 

You’d need to know which teams have to be involved, the decisions you need to make along the way, how you need to roll it out and communicate it. Only so much of that process can be done within the walls of any product you’re using to achieve those goals. So, product-led growth is great in allowing customers and users to enable and discover how they might serve themselves, but rarely does it stop there. Every customer is different, and has unique problems, so they often need guidance as well.

That's why you hear Twilio, Zapier, Asana, and all these companies that are focused on self-serve and product-led playbooks actually work directly with their biggest and best customers. They have a human in the loop to help strategize and consult with the customer how to get from point A to point B.