AMA: Retool Head of Product Marketing, Kevin Garcia on PLG Product Marketing

At Retool, we've evolved our structure around the product-led and sales-led sides of our business. About half of our team is focused on sales-led growth, partnering closely with demand generation and GTM teams on everything from integrated campaigns, analyst relations, enablement, and more. The other half is focused on our product-led growth. Retool sells to developers, so at our company that means partnering closely with growth and content marketing, as well as product, on everything from SEO t ...Read More

When I think about improving onboarding, I think about the initial motivations and expectations users are bringing to my product and the specific pain points during onboarding. Here are questions you can ask: Initial motivations and expectations What initially motivated you to sign up for our product? What problem were you trying to solve/what were you trying to do? How much time did you dedicate to solving this problem with our product? What expectations did you have before using our product? W ...Read More

I think PMM at Slack could help with land and expand in quite a few ways: Help understand the first user and their use case Help understand the first buyer and their use case Help understand the customer journey within your most successful accounts Develop a point of view on which personas and use cases are the most critical during lands and which ones are most critical during expansion—and start building what's needed to win them Slack can be used for many purposes—planning a major launch, team ...Read More

Every successful SaaS company needs to find, activate, retain, and monetize users. Product-led growth (PLG) is a strategy that aims to make the product—as opposed to sales or marketing teams—the primary (or only) way that users hit these milestones. Just like being a PMM at a sales-led company, you need to: Define your user Define your buyer Understand the urgent problems they want to solve Understand the habits you want them to keep/break Understand the value they get from your product (and the ...Read More

For any PMM role, I tend to evaluate the PMM on research mindset, storytelling, and ability to execute. Here's how I'd focus my search (and what I'd ask) for PLG PMMs: Research mindset What I'm looking for: PLG tends to be very focused on scaled channels (e.g. SEO/SEM, social) and product usage. As a result, much of the research these PMMs will do is scaled—running large-scale surveys, digging into product usage reports, etc. I'm looking for individuals with who can be self-sufficient in followi ...Read More

I recommend you: Learn how to get your own insights Learn what's worked for others Develop your own taste You'll notice most of these lean toward taking action versus "required reading." That's on purpose. The best way to learn PLG is by doing it. Learn how to get your own insights Build up your skills in collecting and synthesizing data Book a 1-hr lunch with someone on your data or product team to walk you through how they measure product usage today. Read 10-50 customer support tickets and de ...Read More