PLG isn't the same as sales, marketing and product alignment

Product-led growth is absolutely the right paradigm to think about growth for open source projects, and often the right paradigm to think about commercial offerings based on open source projects. But product-led growth by itself is not a synonym for sales, marketing and product alignment — and that alignment it was you need to really accelerate growth.

First of all, there’s the rhetoric around PLG. It goes like this: “sales people suck and we’re going to make them all redundant, anyway our product sells itself.” Given that in reality, if you sell to big companies you are going to need salespeople, you don’t want to lean too hard on this rhetoric. You want to make sure sales feels like, and actually is, an equal partner in the sales-product-marketing trio.

Second, the name ‘product-led growth’ can make people assume that in a PLG motion, it’s the product team that’s all-important. Yes, your product and what it does is super important, but so is integrating it really tightly with marketing. If we’re talking about self-service (ie, your community edition, and possibly more) you won’t have a sales interaction, but you will need tight coordination between marketing and product. And by coordination, I don’t mean product leads; I mean product and marketing leaders work together to optimize alignment in the message that’s going out there and the product experience.

By the way, this is both even harder and even more important for open source startups than for straight SaaS or otherwise closed-source software. Because your growth strategy is so much more complicated and every one of your teams is at constant risk of being spread to thin — because they have to build, market and, to a certain extent, sell a free open source project plus at least one commercial offering, all while also telling a cohesive story about what your company stands for. You have different ICPs, different differentiated values, different use cases for open source project and commercial project. Maximum alignment is critical.

True alignment between product, sales and marketing starts with positioning your project, commercial project and company intentionally, either with outside help with someone like me or by doing some critical thinking with your co-founders and leadership team and using a positioning canvas as a template. But you also need to make sure they stay in alignment, are part of the same feedback loop, share information and iterate together, so that they stay in alignment.

That’s what will lead to success in growing your community, growing your customer base and increasing revenue. It will also make the company more fun to run, and more fun to work for.