A Product-Led Growth Strategy is Product Management

Tiama Hanson-Drury is the chief product officer at Minna Technologies.

As the chief product officer at Minna Technologies, an embedded fintech that allows customers to manage their subscriptions without leaving their retail bank app, Tiama Hanson-Drury is passionate about many things, not the least of which is product-led growth (PLG).

“The benefit is that PLG is not a one size fits all,” Tiama says. “It works for enterprise; it works for SMB. It can work for direct-to-consumer. It can work for B2B. The great thing is it can work for a lot of people, but the truth is that you need to have the right strategy and the right investments to make it successful.”

In Tiama’s estimation, the right PLG strategy begins with deeply understanding the pain points your customer wants to solve: “Understand [the pain point] simply. If you cannot say it simply, if you cannot explain it simply, that is a sign you don’t know it well enough. You have to understand that pain point first.”

At the heart of that understanding and Tiama’s successful PLG efforts sit an investment in and a commitment to data, research, and analytics. “I’m a huge fan of research — I really like that in every product team I’ve ever worked in or product organization I’ve led, we always have product analytics,” she says. “I’m a big fan of ‘show, don’t tell.’ I don’t want to preach to somebody about why it’s important to do research. I’d much rather my team be empowered to go run some awesome research and share the outcomes in a really consumable, easy way. … If anyone thinks that PLG isn’t going to be an organic thing that you’re constantly tracking and you’re constantly fine-tuning and iterating on, you’re setting your expectations incorrectly.”

Hear more from Tiama — including a roadmap for creating a successful PLG approach, plus her take on the power of inclusivity and dimensionality — on this episode of This Is Product Management.

Download the transcript

Here are some highlights: 

• The misconceptions about PLG
• Advice for making the shift to PLG
• The benefit of inclusive design
• The importance of research and analytics
• Equity Army

Interested in another episode on product-led growth? Check out this one.