Review

This is the best of the Wes Bush books. It feels conceptually complete and gets the balance between depth and breadth just right. This has become my go-to ‘Product-Led’ recommendation now.

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The Product-Led Organisation

The phrase 'product-led' has managed to become both contentious and meaningless inside organisations I've worked with. The Wes Bush books should remain the go-to books on the topic in my opinion; this one is contributing toward the muddying of the waters and the blurring of lines.

andrewclark.co.uk

Product-Led Onboarding

Product-Led Onboarding by Ramil John is a valuable and thorough guide that explores the creation of effective user onboarding experiences. John highlights the significance of comprehending user needs and guiding them through a series of "Aha" moments to encourage habitual product usage. The book offers practical strategies and frameworks to assist companies in optimising their onboarding process.

andrewclark.co.uk

Book Review and Summary: Product-Led Growth by Wes Bush

Get a comprehensive review and summary of the best-selling book "Product-Led Growth" by Wes Bush, the product management and growth expert. Learn about the key principles and practices for driving growth through a product-led approach and maximizing the value of your product to customers

andrewclark.co.uk

Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

Many software companies fail to reach their potential because they treat product-led growth (PLG) as a Product Management tactic rather than a company-wide strategy. PLG is not just about changing a pricing page or adding a free trial; it is a fundamental shift in how a company creates and captures value. The goal is to build a business where the product does the heavy lifting, resulting in effortless annual recurring revenue, lean scale with high revenue per employee, and durable growth. To achieve this, you must avoid the common pitfalls of failing to provide value before monetising and executing in the wrong order. Instead, focus on delivering a fantastic experience where the product sells itself. This requires a specific environment including clarity on your ideal user, data-driven insights into user behaviour, and a rigorous process for removing bottlenecks. The transformation involves nine specific components across three stages: building a foundation, unlocking self-serve customers, and igniting exponential expansion.

The first stage is building an unshakeable foundation, which begins with a winning strategy. You must move from being a commodity to being the obvious choice in your market. Use the Bullseye Strategy Framework to define where you will play, who you will serve, and how you will win. A crucial part of this is establishing one or more moats, a defensible advantage that makes your business hard to copy. There are fifteen primary types of moats you can build:

• Differentiation: Offer a uniquely valuable product or feature set that competitors can’t easily replicate.
• Cost Leadership: Be the lowest-cost provider while maintaining acceptable quality.
• User Experience: Deliver an exceptionally seamless, intuitive, and delightful user journey that drives loyalty.
• Network Effects: Increase product value as more users join and contribute to the ecosystem.
• Operational Efficiency: Run a highly streamlined, productive organization that delivers faster and more profitably.
• Branding & Reputation: Build a trusted, admired brand that commands loyalty and premium pricing.
• Distribution: Secure superior access to key channels, partnerships, or platforms that competitors struggle to enter.
• Speed & Innovation: Innovate faster than competitors in industries that have grown slow or stagnant.
• Pricing: Adopt a unique pricing model that aligns deeply with customer value and is hard for others to match.
• Free: Offer valuable free products that attract users and fuel demand for your core offerings.
• Switching Costs: Make your product so integrated or sticky that customers find it costly or difficult to leave.
• Proprietary Advantage: Use IP—patents, trademarks, or unique methods—to prevent copycats and protect innovation.
• Engagement: Build a vibrant community where users participate, create, and advocate for the brand.
• Expansion: Increase customer lifetime value through cross-sells, upsells, and a broadening product ecosystem.
• Founder Brand: Leverage a visible, trusted founder whose personal brand attracts customers and differentiates the company.

Once your strategy is set, you must define your ideal user. Whoever understands the customer best wins the market. Go beyond basic demographics to understand what your best users think, feel, and do. Map out the "User Endgame Roadmap" which details the steps a user must take to achieve success across five stages:

• Search (becoming aware of the problem)
• Select (deciding to sign up)
• Setup (onboarding)
• Showcase (experiencing core value)
• Scale (incorporating the product into their routine)

Identify the specific knowledge, skill, or product gaps that cause users to drop off at each stage and solve them proactively.

With the user defined, you must select an intentional model. You need to decide what to give away and what to gate behind a paywall. The goal is to verify that users can experience incredible value before they are asked to pay. Use the DEEP model to ensure your free offering is Desirable, Effective, Efficient, and Polished. You should choose the specific model that best bridges the gap between where your users are and their desired outcome. The six main models are:

• Opt-In Free Trial: Users get full access for a limited time without providing a credit card, reducing friction and maximising signups.
• Opt-Out Free Trial: Users must enter credit card details upfront, creating friction but ensuring higher-intent, committed trial users.
• Usage-Based Free Trial: Access ends when a usage limit is reached, letting users experience full value at their own pace without time pressure.
• Freemium: A permanently free tier offers limited features or capacity, attracting broad top-of-funnel usage but risking high support costs.
• New Free Product: A separate free product solves a key activation blocker and feeds demand back into the core product.
• Sandbox: A guided, interactive product simulation lets users explore capabilities when setup is too complex or time-to-value is long.

The second stage is unlocking self-serve customers. This requires crafting an irresistible offer. Within seconds of landing on your site, users judge whether you can help them. A five-star offer sits at the intersection of three pillars:

• The Result (the tangible outcome the user achieves)
• The Advantage (why your product is significantly better than the competition)
• The Assurance (removing risk via guarantees or support).

You can further improve this offer with "enhancers" like exclusivity, scarcity, or bonuses. Your landing page should clearly structure this offer by ‘heroing’ the result, agitating the pain of the status quo, explaining the solution simply, and reversing risk.

Once users sign up, you must provide frictionless onboarding. Use the Bowling Alley Framework to guide users to value and prevent them from dropping off. This involves three phases.

• Define the straight line: map the shortest path from signup to the first moment of value and remove 20-40% of non-essential steps.
• Install product bumpers: use welcome messages, progress bars, and checklists inside the application to keep users on track.
• Deploy conversational bumpers: use emails, push notifications, and support teams to bring users back if they drift away.

The ultimate goal is to maximise the number of users who reach the "First Strike”, the moment they first experience the core value of the product.

To convert these users into revenue, you need powerful pricing. Avoid common traps like hidden costs, misaligned incentives, or confusing tiers. Start by identifying a value metric…a unit that aligns with customer success (e.g., seats, usage, revenue) so that as they get more value, they pay more. Create a clear pricing matrix with simple plan names and positioning one-liners. Use the Van Westendorp model to determine the ideal price point by surveying users to find the range where the price is accepted as fair value, rather than too cheap or too expensive.

The third stage is igniting exponential expansion through data, process, and team alignment. You must replace conversation with actionable data because most users in a PLG model will never talk to you. Avoid tracking vanity metrics. Instead, focus on a North Star Metric that captures the core value your product delivers. Supplement this with Go-To-Market metrics (tracking the user journey from visitor to upgrade) and Business Health metrics (like MRR and churn). Create a weekly scorecard and assign an owner to every metric. This allows you to identify "Product Qualified Leads" (PQLs)—users who match your ideal profile and have demonstrated high engagement. PQLs convert at a much higher rate than traditional leads.

To translate this data into results, you need a rigorous growth process. Implement a rhythm of meetings that turn strategy into execution. This includes:

1. Quarterly Strategic Alignment Meetings (SAM): A full-day session to reset focus, review strategy, and set 3-5 clear targets for the quarter.
2. Monthly Focus Meetings (MFM): A half-day session to translate quarterly goals into specific monthly projects and solve major blockers.
3. Weekly Accelerator Meetings (WAM): A 90-minute tactical session to track progress on the scorecard, review to-dos, and solve immediate issues.

Finally, success relies on an elite team. Do not default to hiring new people to solve problems; look to the product first. Optimise your current team by implementing the 3T’s: Trim jobs that don’t require full expertise, Trash jobs that don’t add value, and Treasure jobs that deserve full focus. Align individual goals with the company vision and invest heavily in upskilling your employees. By shifting your focus from scaling through people to scaling through the product, you increase revenue per employee, create a more efficient organisation, and unlock durable, long-term growth.

Deep Summary

Longer form notes, typically condensed, reworded and de-duplicated.

Chapter 1: The Product-Led Playbook

• Many SaaS companies are still sales-led.
• You must have a try-before-you-buy experience - and it’s got to be great.
• Three Most Common Pitfalls:
• Approaching PLG as a ‘Product’ thing → instead of a company wide strategy. It’s about how your entire company creates and captures value. PLG is a Go-To-Market motion not a product strategy
• Not providing meaningful timely value before monetising → You need to showcase value quickly to first time users or they’ll never come back and they won’t upgrade.
• Not executing effectively → Doing things in the wrong order, focusing on the wrong things.
• Product-Led business should beat sales-led everytime. You’re focused on delivering a fantastic experience, on serving users. You have a mission, to make your product better, faster and cheaper.

The big trap to avoid:

PLG isn’t just about the easily visible surface-level product changes (the pricing model, onboarding experience). It’s not just a product thing, that’s only half the story.

PLG needs the right environment to thrive - there needs to be alignment and commitment across the company.

PLG needs…

• A company-level strategy in which PLG is a key part of winning in the market.
• Clarity on your ideal user
• The faintest idea of what those users are doing in your product.
• The weekly rhythms in the business to identify what's bottlenecking users.
• An effective growth process to launch regular experiments to improve your experience.
• An elite team with the right capabilities to take PLG to the next level.

PLG is everything the user interacts with on the front end, while your PLO (Product-Led organisation) ensures your company is aligned and firing on all cylinders on the back end.

To fully embrace PLG, you must transform how you sell and how you run your organisation. You need to design your organisation so that PLG can succeed.

Three outcomes to expect when you become Product-Led:

1. Effortless Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): Your product sells itself. Users can sign up, get value, and upgrade without talking to anyone.
2. Lean Scale: You generate substantial revenue with a tiny team. Your revenue per employee remains high because the product does the heavy lifting.
3. Durable Growth: You unlock more profits every year. Your lifetime customer value increases as users return to your product and use it more frequently.

The ProductLed System:

The product-led system aims to deliver on three outcomes: Effortless ARR, Lean Scale, and Durable Growth.

Mastering the 9 components will help you get there quickly and efficiently. Although, simple it’s not easy. The components are sequenced, into three distinct stages to protect a sensible order of operations. Don’t think of it as a one-and-done journey, but something that you should revisit multiple times each year.

Stage 1: Build an Unshakeable Foundation First fine-tune the fundamentals so you can withstand the strain of significant growth.

1. Craft a Winning Strategy

Get clear on what you do best and align that with market needs. Focus is key - we want to align everyone’s effort. Use the Bullseye Strategy Framework:

• Become the obvious choice in your market.
• Be clear on what your company is uniquely good at
• Define what winning looks like for your business.
• Design a business that is hard to copy

2. Define your Ideal User

You can capture market share by knowing your users better than the competition. Go beyond understanding the basic jobs-to-be-done and learn what they think, feel, and do at each stage of interacting with your product. The goals for this stage are as follows:

• Know your best users.
• Align on the endgame for your users.
• Know users' top challenges.

Once you know what your users want, you can proactively address challenges and design a product-led model that helps users accomplish something meaningful.

3. Intentional Model

Determine what you’ll give away for free and what you gate behind a paywall. You want to give users everything they need to see incredible value. The goal here is to identify the right product-led model for your ideal users, where they experience the value but also choose to upgrade. Gamify your user journey, decide what to give away for free vs. what to monetise and identify what model that’ll work best for your business (i.e. freemium, free trial, etc.).

Stage 2: Unlock Self-Serve Customers

Build a product that sells itself. Provide incredible value before monetising users and make upgrading a no-brainer. Move toward a zero-touch model.

4. Craft an Irresistible Offer

You’ll need to be clear on the following first:

• What are the results of using your product?
• Why is there less risk when using your product?
• How is your product better than the competition or alternative solutions?

The challenge is often being able to communicate it quickly and efficiently. Aim for a more compelling core offer, more ideal users signing up for your offer and a higher free-to-paid conversion rate.

5. Frictionless Onboarding

Eliminate friction to make it easy for users to sign up, get to value, and upgrade.

• Create a fast path for users to experience value.
• Add bumpers to make it effortless to get to value.
• Proactively support users when they drop off.

The goal is to increase the % of users who experience the full value of your product.

6. Powerful Pricing

You need a transparent easy to understand pricing structure to turn users into high-paying customers without talking to you. Often it’s best to implement a value ladder. Start with an accessible price entry point, but have price scale as the user derives more value from the product and you incur more cost. Goals include free-to-paid conversions, higher customer lifetime value and increase in net revenue retention (NRR)

Stage 3: Ignite Exponential Expansion

Structure your team and processes to enable exponential growth.

7. Actionable Data

Don’t track too many metrics. Keep it simple. Use the ‘True North Framework’ to identify a North Star metric worth aligning your company to, aim for a simple scorecard to break down your GTM and financial metrics. An emphasis on a single metric makes sense only if you’ve identified the bottleneck that’s deserving of your focus.

8. Growth Process

The team must translate action into results. Predictable growth is the goal. To get that we must establish a rhythm to evaluating performance and launching experiments to tackle your biggest bottleneck. One you have a growth engine working, you should accelerate execution.

9. Elite Team

Your product is the machine, not your team. Achieve lean scale with a high revenue per employee (RPE). Create a lean team, invest in upskilling everyone and aligning incentives toward the strategy.

Defining your starting point

Pin point your companies current state: so you can track the impact adopting the product-led system will have on your business.

• Effortless ARR → Track Self-Serve Revenue (SSR) both as an absolute value, and a % of sales.
• Lean Scale → Track Revenue Per Employee (RPE). Shift your focus from scaling through people to scaling through products.
• Durable Growth → Track your net profit growth rate.

Stage 1 Build an Unshakable Foundation

1: Strategy

How clearly are you the obvious choice for customers in your market?

Strategy isn’t a plan - it’s a theory as to how you’ll win.

It’s a choice to do some things and not others. It makes it easier to say no to initiatives and projects that won’t help us win.

A great strategy unites your team - in pursuit of making massive progress in one direction.

Focus done well can: speed up internal decision making, help clarify your offer for customers and create a business that’s hard to copy.

The Bullseye Strategy Framework

1. Which market can you dominate as the obvious choice? You need to move from being a commodity (fierce competition and slim margins) to being ‘chosen’. Specify who you’re targeting → and your unique value. Think big.
2. Where will you play? Who’s your ideal customer? What problem do you want to solve? What’s your core product? What are your primary marketing channels? What geography do you target?
3. How will you win? What’ll be your moat(s)? What makes your business defensible and hard to copy?
‣
15 Types of Moat
‣
4 Common Ways to build a moat
4. What’s your winning picture? You need an endgame. What are you trying to achieve each year, each quarter and each month? What are the outcomes you’re aiming for, and what goals get your there. If successful, what’s the reward?
5. What Strategic Choices Must You Make? Strategic choices are often sacrifices. You must decide What are your core values? What are the core capabilities your business needs? Strategic choices are all about what you’re saying no to. What strategic choices must you make based on your where-to-play, how to win and 1 year picture strategies.

2: Ideal User

Whoever knows the customer best wins the market. Get laser focused on who you’re serving. Building for everyone is building for nobody. Don’t try to be everything to everyone.

If you don’t hone in on a single type of user then it’s hard to understand how to serve them better, hard to decide what to give away for free, hard not to weaken the appeal of your messaging, hard to slim down onboarding and you’ll have high churn.

Buyers and users sometimes aren’t the same. You need to cater to both for long term success.

Find your ideal users → they love your product, use it regularly, share it with others, upgrade without hesitation and give you valuable feedback. They’re easy to serve and become your biggest advocates.

• Who uses your product the most?
• Who upgrades the quickest?
• Who leaves the best testimonials?

The User Endgame Roadmap Model

Phase 1: Identify your Ideal User

1. Write down as many ideal users as you can
2. Asses each users likelihood of success (Use the Fogg Model: Motivation, Ability, Prompts)
3. Identify one ideal user: Who do you think, feel and have the courage to say is your ideal user?

Your ideal user will evolve as you scale your business - you may exhaust each segment and have to widen your net or move onto the next.

Phase 2: Clarify the Endgame

What is a user capable of once they experience the value of your product?

1. List all core outcomes: What will users see, feel, hear when successful?
2. Select the top 3 outcomes: You might fix a pain, prevent harm or improve over the longterm.
3. Define your User EndGame Statement. E.g. Canva: Design anything and publish anywhere.
• It should be inspirational, clear about what it isn’t, simple, achievable and your product should be able to deliver on the promise.

Phase 3: Craft a User Roadmap

Detail the steps a user must take to get value from your product. Do so across the 5 stages: Search, Select, Setup, Showcase, Scale.

• Search: Two key stages: They become aware of the problem. They’re actively doing research on how to solve the problem. Common challenges are information overload, feat of change and lack of knowledge about how to solve the problem.
• Select: Users learn about your solution and decide whether to signup. Two key milestones: If they visit your website. If they sign up to use your free product. Screen recording tools can help you spot challenges.
• Challenges When visiting: Website navigation issues, too many calls-to-action, overwhelming amount of information, slow loading speeds, unresponsive design, unclear value proposition, lack of trust indicators.
• Challenges When signing up: Unclear benefits of signing up, too many form fields, technical issues, mandatory credit card signup, concerns about privacy and security, uncertainty about free trial or freemium limitations, confusing pricing.
• Setup: Don’t stand in the way of value. Quickly setup their profile (to understand their goals) and onboard them to value.
• Challenges during profile setup: survey fatigue, unclear purpose, privacy concerns, language and accessibility issues, lack of immediate benefit, and technical issues.
• Challenges during onboarding: , users often face complex installation processes, unclear instructions or guidance, overwhelming amounts of features, lack of customisation, time-consuming processes, and insufficient support and resources (e.g., knowledge base, live chat).
• Showcase: Two key milestones: The first strike - users experience the core value of the product for the first time. The Key Usage Indicator: some threshold after which they’ve experienced the core value a number of times and are far more likely to develop a habit.
• Common challenges at this stage fall into 3 camps
• Product Gap: users don’t know how to use the product
• Knowledge Gap: users don’t have the necessary knowledge to use the product
• Skill Gap: Skill to use the product
• Challenges during the First Strike: users being unable to find what they're looking for, distractions, product bugs, and lack of personalisation.
• Challenges at the KUI stage: users often experience external trigger fatigue from emails, SMS texts, and notifications, feel overwhelmed with new information, have trust issues, and may not receive quick rewards (e.g., results take 15 minutes).
• Scale: Are people upgrading? Two key milestones. Upgrade: when users enter a paid plan. Advance: When users grow out of their existing plan or use solution more.
• What needs to be true, for it to be a no-brainer for your users to upgrade?
• Once users upgrade, you need to keep delivering value.
• Upgrade challenges: confusing pricing, bad free experience, payment issues, unclear cancellation policy, limited payment options, migration concerns, support concerns.
• Advance challenges: steep learning curve, prohibitive pricing, integration challenges, not enough customisation, performance issues, lack of advanced tutorials, team adoption.

3: Intentional Model

How intentional is your free model? You should decide what to give away for free and what to charge for. The best models give users everything they need to succeed at each stage of the journey. The tension is often between not providing enough to entice users, and providing too much so there’s no incentive to upgrade.

What’s the goal of the free model? It should be about levelling up your users. You should be aiming to build trust, and show you can deliver on a promise.

The DEEP Model

1. Desirable - Gamify your model by breaking it down into three levels based on your users endgame: Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. The beginner level should solve a problem everyone has, the intermediate level should solve a problem most people have and the advanced should solve a problem only a minority of people have. Once users have been successful at an early level, they’re more likely to graduate to the next.
• Your beginner outcome should be unique (to your product), desirable and effective.
2. Effective - unpack the biggest challenges at each level (product, knowledge or skill). Prioritise them and tackle the most important
3. Efficient - Decide what to give away for free and what to gate. Make each level easy to achieve.
1. For each challenge, identify Product, Content or Resource solutions that can help your users overcome the challenges.
2. Prioritise the solutions based on cost / impact.
3. Shortlist solutions in an outcome based roadmap to create clarity for your team, that one for each stages. E.g. Beginner: Outcome X, Challenges A, B, C, Solutions X, Y, Z
4. Polish: Identify what free model works best.
• The Six Main Models:
1. Opt-In Free Trial: Users get full access for a limited time without providing a credit card, reducing friction and maximizing signups.
2. Opt-Out Free Trial: Users must enter credit card details upfront, creating friction but ensuring higher-intent, committed trial users.
3. Usage-Based Free Trial: Access ends when a usage limit is reached, letting users experience full value at their own pace without time pressure.
4. Freemium: A permanently free tier offers limited features or capacity, attracting broad top-of-funnel usage but risking high support costs.
5. New Free Product: A separate free product solves a key activation blocker and feeds demand back into the core product.
6. Sandbox: A guided, interactive product simulation lets users explore capabilities when setup is too complex or time-to-value is long.
• Choose the model that best allows your users to experience the value. Help bridge the gap between where they are and their desired outcome.
• Package it up as a one pager that outlines what you’re promising ideal users in your free plan. Boil down what you’re giving away for free into 3-5 bullet points:
• Desired User Outcome.
• Top Challenges (your ideal user will encounter)
• Top Solutions (you’re giving away)
• Model
• Call-to-Action
• Future Versions

Stage 2: Unlock Self-Service Customers

Go from high-touch to zero-touch customers.

Irresistible Offer

How irresistible is your offer?

Make your free offer enticing to get as many people as possible to try it. Within seconds of landing on your homepage, users evaluate your business and your offer. They determine if you can help them, might be able to help them or you absolutely help them and you’re the best solution. To get into the last bucket your offer has to stand out. It pays to have a clear strategy and differentiators.

Common Mistakes:

• Being cute → you must explain what your product does
• No enhancers → what’s the magic sprinkle that makes your offer irresistible?
• Lack of structure → your offer page should flor like a story

The Five Star Offer Generator

1. Define the Core Offer: A great offer sits at the intersection of three pillars. You must dig deep into the customer's psyche to define these clearly.
1. The Result (The "What"): This is the tangible, measurable outcome the user achieves. Avoid vague promises like "grow your business." Focus on specific endgames (e.g., "save 10 hours a week" or "increase self-serve revenue"). Types of Results: Tangible (revenue), Intangible (peace of mind), or Improvement (efficiency).
2. The Advantage (The "Why You"): Explain why your product is significantly (10x) better than the competition. If you cannot articulate this, the customer won't switch. Link this to your competitive moats (e.g., lower fees, faster setup, unique pricing). Ask "So what?" If the advantage doesn't directly solve a pain point, it’s weak.
3. The Assurance (The "Safety Net"): Even with a great result and advantage, risk prevents action. You must address fears (ROI, setup difficulty, security) head-on. Techniques: Money-back guarantees, price matching, free trials, dedicated support, and social proof (awards/logos).
2. Add Enhancers: Enhancers take an offer from a 7/10 to a 10/10, potentially increasing conversions by ~15%
1. Exclusivity (Scarcity & Urgency): Give the user a reason to act now rather than later. Examples: Limited-time offers, beta caps, or "exploding" bonuses that disappear after a set time
2. Bonuses: Offer high-value add-ons that resolve specific friction points for the user. Crucial Rule: Do not offer random gifts (e.g., a toaster). Offer relevant value like free audits, onboarding courses, or 1:1 expert consultations.
3. Assemble the Offer: Once the offer is defined, structure your landing page into five specific sections to maximise conversion.
• Hero Section: Grab attention immediately. Components: A tagline (Result), Sub-copy (Reinforcement), CTA (First step), Visual (Product in action), and Social Proof (Logos/trust).
• Problem Section: Agitate the pain of the status quo. Use a "spiky point of view." Highlight why current non-SaaS solutions or competitors are broken (e.g., "excessive fees").
• Solution Section: Answer "How does it work?" Keep it simple (max 5 steps). Show how the user gets from their problem to the result (e.g., "Sign up -> Publish -> Profit").
• Risk Reversal: Crush the remaining objections. List the top 3 reasons people don't buy (e.g., setup time, ROI) and counter them with specific data, testimonials, or guarantees.
• Call-to-Action (CTA): The final push. Reiterate the main value, the lack of risk (e.g., "No credit card required"), and the immediate benefit of starting now.

Frictionless Onboarding

How easy is it to sign up and get to the value of your product?

The Bowling Alley Framework helps you create an effortless onboarding experience by guiding users directly to the core value of your product and preventing them from “falling into the gutters” (dropping off). It centers on three ideas:

1. make the path to value extremely short,
2. remove all unnecessary steps,
3. add strategic bumpers to keep users moving forward.

The Three Phases of the Framework

Phase 1: Define the straight line → remove friction → shorten path to value.

Design the shortest, cleanest path from signup to the user’s first moment of value.

1. Map the Fast Path: Document every step from homepage → signup → first value moment, then eliminate anything not essential.
2. Add Profiling Questions: Ask only 1–2 targeted questions that allow you to personalise the user’s journey and accelerate them to value.
3. Label Steps (Green / Yellow / Red): Required now / Important later / Remove.
4. Define the Straight Line: Keep only the green steps and ensure they flow with zero friction (“all green lights”).

The goal: a path that is 2–3× easier than before, removing 20–40% of steps.

Phase 2: Install product bumpers → guide users toward the straight line inside the product.

Product bumpers guide users inside the application so they don’t get stuck or lost.

• Welcome Messages – orient users and restate the value promise.
• Product Tours – quickly direct users to the areas that matter most.
• Progress Bars – set expectations for how close users are to completion.
• Checklists – break setup into small, motivating tasks.
• Onboarding Tooltips – teach essential interactions without overwhelming users.
• Empty States – turn blank screens into clear next-step prompts.

Use only the bumpers needed to keep users on the straight line; don’t overload them.

Phase 3: Deploy conversational bumpers → bring users back when they drift and support them through any remaining obstacles. Conversational bumpers reach users outside the application to pull them back in, educate, and support them.

Conversational bumpers range from hands-off to hands-on:

• External Messaging (emails, push, SMS, reminders)
• Knowledge Base (self-serve answers)
• In-app Messaging (real-time help from your team)
• Community Forums (peer support and shared solutions)
• Training (courses, coaching, or guided walkthroughs)
• Specialists (high-touch help from onboarding or success staff)

Start with a “VIP, unscalable” approach for early learnings, then automate and scale what works.

Powerful Pricing

How well do you turn free users into high-paying customers?

Phase 1: Identifying Value Metrics: A value metric is how you measure value and charge for it (e.g. contacts, seats, usage, revenue). Good value metrics are: Simple (customers instantly understand what they’re paying for), Aligned (to the core outcome your product delivers) and scalable (as customers get more value and use more, they pay more).

To find yours generate hypotheses, scan how your market charges, and run each candidate through a “simple / aligned / scalable” check. Limit yourself to one or two value metrics.

Phase 2: Build Your Pricing Matrix (4 Steps)

The pricing matrix is what goes on your public pricing page so users can quickly choose a plan.

1. Name Your Plans: Use clear, familiar names (e.g., Free / Starter / Pro / Enterprise) and keep it simple.
2. Write a Positioning One-Liner for Each Plan: One sentence that says: who this plan is for, and what outcome it enables.
3. Define What’s Included: Decide how much of the value metric each plan includes (e.g., volume limits). Choose 3–5 key features per plan that map to the outcomes users care about most.
4. Add Clear Calls-to-Action (CTAs): Use obvious, consistent CTAs (e.g. “Get Started Free,” “Start Free Trial”). Make the primary plan’s CTA stand out visually.

Phase 3: Determining the Ideal Price (4 Steps)

Use a simplified Van Westendorp (Van West) model to find a price range customers see as fair, not cheap or outrageous.

1. Choose a Plan to Price: Start with the intermediate / core paid plan that most people will buy.
2. Prep Your Pricing Survey Ask users “What would be an acceptable monthly price (good value for money)?” and “At what price would this feel expensive (you’d think twice)?”
3. Decide Who (and How) to Ask: Survey the right segment (e.g., ideal free users for mid-tier, existing mid-tier for advanced).Drive responses via in-app prompts, email, or “waitlist” framing for a new / revamped plan.
4. Decide on Your Price from the Data: Plot responses to find the optimal price point where “acceptable” and “too expensive” curves intersect. Use this as the anchor for that plan and scale other plan prices accordingly (don’t price below this point).

Stage 3: Ignite exponential Expansion

From linear to leveraged growth

Actionable Data

How often are you aware of your most important business bottleneck?

Product-led companies succeed only when they can clearly identify their biggest bottleneck at any moment. Because most users never talk to you, data must replace conversations as the main way you understand whether users reach value, or where they get stuck.

Four common data traps:

1. Tracking Everything: doing so dilutes focus and makes progress impossible. Instead track only what matters.
2. No Accountability: When no one owns a metric, it won’t improve. Give metrics owners.
3. Not Measuring What Matters: Vanity metrics (likes, impressions) distract from real business drivers; stick to metrics tied to value and revenue.
4. Not Segmenting Users: Aggregated numbers hide insights; separating ideal vs. non-ideal users reveals real bottlenecks.

Phase 1: Identify the Core Metrics to Track

There are three categories of core metrics:

1. North Star Metric (NSMs): captures the core value your product delivers and aligns customer success with company success. It should be: easy to measure, tightly aligned with customer outcomes, a behaviour your best-retained and highest-LTV users do frequently, aligned with your strategy and often the same as your value metric. It typically includes: Frequency (how often value is delivered). Quality (how meaningful the value is).
2. GTM Metrics (GTMs): Track the 6 key steps of the user journey. Website visitors, Signups, Users who complete setup, Users who hit First Strike, Users who hit the Key Usage Indicator (KUI), Users who upgrade. Together, these reveal instant bottlenecks: for example, low setup completion = onboarding issue; low signups = marketing/positioning issue.
3. Business Health Metrics (BHMs): Track the essentials that indicate financial stability: Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Total Revenue Churn, Cash Balance (tracked weekly). Optional secondaries (use sparingly): Net Revenue Retention, Expansion MRR, ARPC, CAC

Phase 2: Build Your Weekly ProductLed Scorecard

Create one simple spreadsheet containing your NSM, GTMs, and BHMs.

Assign an owner to every metric using the “Ownership Test”:

• Can they influence it meaningfully?
• Do they want to own it?
• Do they have the capacity?

Each owner backfills a month of historical data to establish a baseline.

The team updates the scorecard manually every week, which forces deeper thinking and reinforces accountability.

When a metric is off-track, the owner becomes the “CEO of the week,” and the whole team supports fixing that bottleneck. Over time, this drives a culture of clarity, ownership, and cross-functional alignment.

Phase 3: Install Product Qualified Leads (PQLs)

Once you’ve used the scorecard for a month, layer in Product Qualified Leads, a powerful upgrade predictor.

A PQL = Matches your ideal customer profile (via profiling questions) + Completes setup + Hits First Strike (experiences core value once) + Hits the Key Indicator (demonstrates repeat value).

PQLs convert 30–50% of the time. Align teams to help ideal users reach value quickly.

Change your GTM metrics to highlight where ideal users get stuck:

1. Unique visits to your website
2. Ideal Signups
3. Users who complete the setup
4. Users who complete the first strike
5. PQLs
6. Ideal users who upgrade

The True North Framework (NSM + GTM + BHM + Scorecard + PQLs) gives you:

• constant visibility into what’s holding the company back
• weekly accountability
• a simple, evolving dashboard for running the business
• a data foundation for predictable growth

With actionable data, you always know your bottleneck and can aim your full team directly at it.

Growth Process

How well does your company translate action into results.

The Growth Process is a set of rituals that help turn strategy into results. It’s all about installing a predictable cadence:

• Quarterly: Step back and align (strategy + focus).
• Monthly: Translate strategy into projects.
• Weekly: Drive execution and remove blockers.

Each ritual is structured, repetitive, and designed to keep everyone: looking at the same numbers, obsessing over the biggest bottleneck, committing to clear priorities and be held to account by peers, not just a boss.

1. Strategic Alignment Meetings (SAM) – Quarterly ritual of reset and focus

• A quarterly full-day session with leadership and department heads.
• The vibe is slow, reflective, strategic and zoomed-out.
• The aim is to re-align the company on “what game we’re playing” and “what matters this quarter.” It creates shared context, a habit of revisiting strategy and a quarterly “reset” of priorities so the company doesn’t drift.
• Core elements:
• Check-in & Retro: What went well / didn’t / what to do differently; creates honesty and learning, not blame.
• Strategy & Accountability Review: Review the strategy, roles, and scorecard; ask “Is this still the right path?”
• Targets & Top Goals: Set a small number of clear, measurable quarterly targets (3–5 max).
• Issues Deep Dive: Long, focused block where the team tackles the biggest strategic problems together.
• Component Deep Dive: Each quarter, “water” one part of the ProductLed System (e.g. strategy, offer, user).
• Top Focus & Top Projects: Choose one top focus for the month ahead and a short list of key projects.
• Cascading Messages & Rating: Decide how to share the outcome with the company and always end by rating the meeting and giving feedback.

2. Monthly Focus Meetings (MFM) – Monthly ritual of sharpening and refocusing

• A monthly half-day session with leadership.
• The vibe is mid-altitude, bridging strategy and execution.
• The aim is to convert the quarterly direction into this month's concrete focus and projects.
• Core elements:
• Monthly Retro: Same three questions (what went well / didn't / what to do differently); builds a muscle of learning every month.
• Top Focus & Project Review: Check if last month's top projects really got done and if they actually moved the needle.
• Scorecard & Targets: Review key metrics, mark them on/off track, and set new monthly targets to make the quarter inevitable.
• Issues: Discuss and solve the biggest blockers to hitting this month's and quarter's goals.
• New Top Focus & Top Projects: Choose one top focus for the coming month and priority projects that directly support it.
• Cascading Messages & Rating: Communicate the focus + projects to the rest of the company and rate the meeting.

3. Weekly Accelerator Meetings (WAM) – Weekly ritual of execution and accountability

• A weekly 90-minute session with leadership (sometimes extended leaders).
• The vibe is fast, tactical, and action-driven.
• The aim is to keep everyone moving, clear blockers, and make weekly progress on the monthly focus.
• Core elements:
• Wins: Start with quick personal and professional wins to set a positive tone.
• Monthly Picture & Scorecard Review: Briefly re-anchor on the monthly goal, then a rapid "on-track/off-track" check on metrics.
• Project & To-Do Review: Quick status on projects and last week's to-dos; anything off-track becomes an issue.
• Issues (most of the meeting): Deep discussion to uncover root causes and decide concrete actions, not just talk.
• Top 3 Priorities & New To-Dos: Each person leaves with their top three priorities and specific actions for the week.
• Rating & Feedback: End by rating the meeting and giving one improvement suggestion.

Taken together, these rituals create: A drumbeat: quarterly (SAM) → monthly (MFM) → weekly (WAM). A culture where: strategy is revisited regularly, priorities are explicit, progress and problems are visible, meetings themselves are continuously improved .

The meetings help keep everyone aligned on the same North Star, force the team to confront bottlenecks and ensure the most important work actually gets done.

It’s a ritualised operating rhythm that turns strategy into speed and consistent execution.

Elite Team

Does your team have what it takes to become the obvious choice in your market?

Your product should solve most of your problems when you’re a product-led business, hire as a last resort.

Investing in your current team can give you big and quick returns. The investment you put into each colleague helps influence how much their value appreciates over time. If you invest more, you will get better returns.

Free up time first by implement the 3T’s:

• Trimming jobs that don’t require your full expertise
• Trashing jobs that don’t contribute value;
• Treasuring jobs that deserve your full time and focus.

Regularly audit your team to see who embodies the core values of your business. Analyse each job based on Motivation, Skill, Results, and Capacity.

To incentivise your team, understand each direct report’s big vision for their life and help them get closer to that vision each day. Trim or remove jobs from their plate that don’t align with their vision. Help them double down and build more skills around the jobs that align with their vision.

Make sure there’s something meaningful at stake for your team to achieve the endgame. You should feel crushed if you don’t complete the endgame.

Coach each direct report so they’re developing one skill each month. Coach them on how to improve in one area.