Examining Product-Led Growth
Melissa Perri welcomes Ezinne Udezue to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Ezinne is the CPO of WP Engine, a platform that provides solutions to create marketable sites and apps on WordPress, as well as the author of Product Management for Product-Led Growth, coming 2023. Melissa asks Ezinne what she thinks the key is to being a successful product leader, Ezinne shares her definition of product-led growth, and they discuss how product-led growth applies to B2B and Enterprise products, core PLG tactics, what PMs need to understand about marketing and how product collaborates with marketing and sales in a PLG company, and much more.
Show Notes
Melissa Perri welcomes Ezinne Udezue to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Ezinne is the CPO of WP Engine, a platform that provides solutions to create marketable sites and apps on WordPress, as well as the author of Product Management for Product-Led Growth, coming 2023. Melissa asks Ezinne what she thinks the key is to being a successful product leader, Ezinne shares her definition of product-led growth, and they discuss how product-led growth applies to B2B and Enterprise products, core PLG tactics, what PMs need to understand about marketing and how product collaborates with marketing and sales in a PLG company, and much more.
Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Ezinne explore:
Her journey into product leadership.
Product leaders are measured on impact, so they should be someone that people look up to. "It comes down to having a method…a way one thinks about product,"
Ezinne says. A key part of becoming a successful product manager is being able to explain your product to people in a way they can understand.
"You're combining all those signals and setting context and creating options, your ideas backlog, your product backlog, and then you're making a choice. That to me is what product strategy is," Ezinne tells Melissa.
Ezinne lists skills and attributes companies and product managers need to hone for successful product growth.
Word of mouth marketing is an important component of product-led growth. People are more likely to come to you if you offer fast and efficient solutions to their problems.
With a product-led growth strategy, sales and marketing are able to focus on upselling instead of bombarding customers. They can focus on individuals who are already interested in the product.
The first step to product-led growth is mapping out the customer journey. Identify market segments to attack and generate value. Since there are so many new companies emerging every day, acquiring a customer is difficult. Ezinne stresses being very intentional, and being creative about virality.
Resources Ezinne Udezue | LinkedIn WP Engine
Episode Transcript
Ezinne Udezue: In many organizations, marketing, go to market, sits on one side, then P&E, product and technology or product and engineering builds the product, and then another team supports the product. Product led growth is bringing all of that together in order to serve the customer in terms of delivering them value, knowing the way that they want it, and then making sure that it also serves the business. So marketing doesn't have to go acquire customers.
The product helps acquire customers. The product is the acquisition channel. Customer success doesn't have to go write these documents that live on another server out there. As a customer is going through the experience, they can see how they can be helped through the product. It's all in there. The journey of the customer is brought to life in the product.
Melissa Perri: Making great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole, the systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
Melissa Perri: Hello, and welcome to the Product Thinking Podcast. Today we have a great session for you on product leadership and product-led growth. And I'm here with Esine Udezwe, who is the CPO of WP Engine. So welcome. Thanks for being here.
Ezinne Udezue: Thanks for having me, Melissa.
Melissa Perri: It's so good to have you here. I'm so excited to talk about all these topics. You have had such an illustrious career as a product leader. You've worked at some amazing companies like Time and Procore, among many others. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into the position that you're in now and what's been your career in product so far?
Ezinne Udezue: It's been really interesting, and I've learned a lot along the way. I hate telling people how long I've been in product because it probably ages me. But I actually think I was the first product manager at T-Mobile USA in Bellevue, Washington. I think they were product specialists, etc. But somehow we negotiated a product manager title then.
And I got an opportunity to work on building some of the best experiences, Telco at that time. We had MyFaves, we built Wi-Fi products. So it was pretty early, but it was fun. And actually, that was the first time I moved into product management leadership. It was fantastic. I was there for about 10 years.
I feel lucky because I don't know how, but somehow I understood that being able to balance business results and customer value was what would move me off the chain. Just somehow it was, yes, you can listen to the customers discover, but you have to balance that with the impact it's going to have on the business. So that was a very important aspect of my growth there.
And then I raised my hand quite a bit. T-Mobile had one of its biggest launches, which was MyFaves. And it ran into an issue and I raised my hand. So when I think about keys to success, I think that impact focus, that understanding of customer focus, raising your hand and trying your best to be a good person.
That often is what I think leads one to an interesting career or a successful career. From T-Mobile, I moved on to Discovery Media and built some really interesting applications and ran their platform team. And then Time, Inc. I ran innovation for them. That was fun. Eventually moved into e-commerce at Bizarre Voice and built some new products for them and then construction platform at Procore.
And now I'm at WP Engine. So lots of battle scars, lots of learning, many industries to have tried and failed and tried and had successes at. So that's my story.
Melissa Perri: That's great. So many amazing companies on there too. So when you're going back and looking at your journey in product so far, what do you believe were the keys to success, to succeeding as a product leader, to making that transition into a product leader? What do you go back on and highlight when you think about your career?
Ezinne Udezue: Let me start with more recent stuff. As a product leader, I think you're measured on impact and your ability to mobilize the team towards that business impact. That's generally the measure of success. In that transition from an individual contributor to a leader, though, it can be tricky. But I will share my point of view.
When I look at the competencies that I've built out, because we do these leveling guides, et cetera, I've done it at least six times now. When I step back and look across the dimensions of the competencies and I ask, how does one move up? How does one switch from this ladder to the other? One thing that is consistent is this idea of being exemplar, being the person that people look to.
So in the world of product management, as one wants to move up the ranks or one wants to switch into leadership, of course, there has to be business reason for that switch. There has to be a scope available and you have to have the competence. But at the heart of it, I think being a reference is a core part of that.
When I think about what it looks like to be a reference, I think it comes down to having a method, at least having a way one thinks about doing product. I often call that a product system. Can you articulate to someone who is coming to understand what product is, what your steps are, why they are in this order, why you think about things in this way?
I think that's critical. And once you're able to begin to establish that, you can then coach others or mentor others. And that, in my opinion, is how you move up the ranks, how you grow, and oftentimes how you get tapped to lead in product management. So when you're thinking about your system for product management, what does that include?
What's the components of it or the pieces of it? I'm going to start with what, at least when I started in product management, how I thought about it then. I thought about it, and I'm going to use some words that may not be common, but I thought about it first as product strategy. And for me, strategy is really about choice.
And then I thought about product development. You actually would hear those type of words. Somebody was a product strategist, somebody was a product development manager. And then the last part, which I referred to earlier, was the impact piece, was product impact and results, that business side of things.
And I thought of my job through those three lenses. And from the very beginning, even as an individual contributor, when I think about product strategy, I think about it as ultimately you're trying to make a choice and you're getting signals from the product result part of product management, which is you've launched it, you're getting new results. Is it working?
Is it not working? You're editing. You may be getting signals also from your leadership team on a pivot in terms of strategy, and you're combining all those signals and setting context and creating options. Your ideas backlog, your product backlog, and then you're making a choice. So that, to me, is what product strategy is.
If you move and elevate it up to the very top, it's the same thing. You're taking market context. You're taking business context. Those are your signals. You're laying it out with your peers, whether it's the COO, CTO. And you're asking yourself, with this context, what are my options? How do I want to win?
And you're then making a choice. That, to me, is what product strategy really is. Then, after you've made your choice, you go into the product development phase, which is now articulating that, bringing others along and allowing them to help you build. And oftentimes you'll hear the build, measure, learn.
Now you know what you're building. You have the strategy, the choice, the reason why you're doing it. And then you can honestly go through the development part of product management and then check on your results and then edit, move, learn, rinse, and repeat. So that was how I thought about my work.
And I think that that helped. I could articulate it. I could speak about it. I could talk about what I was learning in each part of the job. Transparently, that's kind of an old model, in my opinion, in this new product-led growth. I think it's a little more expansive than those three things. And before, you would get a signal from marketing.
But now, that marketing signal may be in the product.
Melissa Perri: Yes, definitely. And you just mentioned product-led growth. You're writing a book on this. Product-led growth is one of those buzzwords that float around out there. I think a lot of people don't exactly know what that means. What does that mean to you?
Ezinne Udezue: That's actually a tough one. Only because it means so many things to many people, I'm always cautious about trying to define it. But at the heart of it, it is made up of many tactics. And most people think about product-led growth as virality. But when I really back up, and as Aji and I, Aji is my husband, he's the co-author of the book, when we step back, we really say, finding growth through the product. You just basically said it's not just about virality.
Melissa Perri: It's about finding growth through the product. And I think that was awesome, because not a lot of people describe it that way. Do you want to expand on that?
Ezinne Udezue: Yes. So when I think about product-led growth, I'm often concerned about defining it, because it means so many things, and different people are religious about it. But when Aji and I think about it, it ultimately comes down to finding growth through the product. Growth of the company, growth of the business, and uncovering value, holistic value through the product.
In many organizations, marketing, go-to-market sits on one side, then P&E, product and technology, or product and engineering, builds the product, and then another team supports the product. Product-led growth is bringing all of that together in order to serve the customer, in terms of delivering them value, knowing the way that they want it, and then making sure that it also serves the business. So marketing doesn't have to go acquire customers.
The product helps acquire customers. The product is the acquisition channel. Customer success doesn't have to go write these documents that live on another server out there. As a customer is going through the experience, they can see how they can be helped through the product. It's all in there. The journey of the customer is brought to life in the product.
Melissa Perri: I love that. And I haven't heard anybody really describe product-led growth like that before, but I think that's so important. And you're right. So many people just think about it as virality, or it means growth hacking, and I see people try to hire VPs of growth hacking instead of product. But the most successful companies I've seen actually do product-led growth.
It is exactly how you describe it. It's growing through the product. So when you are thinking about reorienting a company towards product-led growth, you did mention a couple of things that marketing comes from the product and customer success is not over here just documenting everything, or we're walking through the product, we're learning about the product as we go.
What other types of things have to change in the company or in the way that you're thinking about bringing that product to market compared to what we used to do before product-led growth? It's a very subtle thing,
Ezinne Udezue: But oftentimes we'll have ideas of what the product should be. And the idea is to stuff that product and modify the customer to use the product in a very specific way. I think the core thing, at least with the product team, that I really try to harp on or work with engineers is doing true customer discovery, really understanding what the issue is, what workflows and what their pain is, so that you can then orient the product to fit into a mold that helps them solve it, make it intuitive, not get the customer to learn how, particularly for the sharp problems.
Which are basically pain points in our target customer's workflow that just eats at them, that steals their time, their energy, their focus. Once they experience the right solution, they just can't live without it. So if you study your customers well and really do discovery, you can watch where that pain is or where that sharp problem is, and then ease it, make it disappear.
And that is when things begin to fly within the product. People get to the activation point or the aha moment sooner because you've taken away that core friction or you've shown that you understand their true intent for the product. So I hope that makes sense in some way.
Melissa Perri: Yeah. So it sounds like if you're gonna be a good product manager for a company that wants to do PLG, product-led growth, discovery is a core component of it. Being really good at discovery, really getting into those sharp problems. What other attributes or skills do you think they need to hone or have differently than a traditional background, or do you think they need to learn about product management to really succeed here?
Ezinne Udezue: I think they need to figure out what they mean when they're building their feedback loop. And again, like I said, good product managers have frameworks and systems, et cetera, right? But when you do launch, how are you learning whether it's working or not? You actually have to actively take ownership of that.
There are some organizations I may step into, I consult through product mind sometimes. They were like, oh yeah, the UX research team is gonna find that out, they're gonna find that issue, but a good PM has to build what we call a customer listening machine. Really knowing how to first ask the first layer question, get that down based on that learning, sharpen the question even more, now get another cohort of people, then ask a lower level question, then even watch them.
So just having a methodology around how they think about learning and getting feedback from the customer. The second part is really taking this idea of mapping out the journey of your customer. Every organization I'm in currently at WP Engine, we're really laying out what the customer journey looks like.
How do they learn about us? How do they sign up? How do they onboard? How do they become familiar with the product? And looking at every single permutation and trying to figure out where the friction is. So laying it out visually often, like we're in rooms or we're on Figma, just laying it out, trying to understand and color coding the friction points and beginning to reduce every single one.
And oftentimes we may introduce new ones. So going back and revising. This idea of understanding your customer lifecycle, their customer journey, and then laying it out. When I think about some product led growth tactics, morality comes to mind, premium comes to mind, self-service comes to mind, these are just many aspects of what you need to look at if you truly want to grow through the product.
So on the pricing side, asking yourself what aspect of your product can actually allow a customer to fully understand what it is you plan to deliver to them and then they can choose you because that ultimately is what you want. So making sure that your product managers understand what the core minimum value is and can talk about that and how they're incrementally adding over time. I always go this layer cake thing, like what is the basic thing?
And then what will most people want? And beyond that, what will most other people want? If you can articulate this layer cake of value to understand your business, that's another thing I look for in product managers or at least hope to teach them as I enter new industries or enter into a company.
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Melissa Perri: So a couple of things that kind of stood out to me when you were talking about that, it sounds like user experience is wildly important when it comes to product-led growth. You're talking about reducing the friction and really a lot of the user journey mapping, all those things. And I think some people are gonna hear about, I could totally anticipate this just by the questions that get written into the podcast all the time, but some people are gonna listen to this and be like, well, maybe that only works for consumer products. How do you think about product-led growth when it comes to enterprise products or B2B type products too?
Ezinne Udezue: I always start off with what is generally true, what's a general trend. There is a move towards what we would say the consumerization of B2B. Even the buyer is a cut consumer in some way and they have expectations of how they buy. So it's not a UX thing. It really is psychological. It's time. It's about time being wasted.
It's about just work, darn it, right? So because of the leaps and bounds we've made in consumer products, there now is an expectation of simplicity and intuitiveness in B2B products. There's still a tension on who's the buyer of the product, but you'd be surprised how much users are beginning to have an influence.
It really isn't a UX thing. It is this idea that you just make it work. People have learned that things can be simpler, they can be more intuitive with consumer products, so with B2B they just have to work. Another thing that one has to pay attention to in the B2B space actually is also the influence that users have is greater now.
Before you used to have a procurement team and they sat and only discussed with the leadership team, but now most leaders will ask their team and really try to make sure that the tools that are being selected work for them. And people speak, people talk to each other. They learn what works and what doesn't.
Actually, this is actually a good segue into a core aspect of product-led growth. I just said people speak. So it's that word of mouth and the ability for you to build in this idea that you solve problems so elegantly that folks want to share. That is ultimately what virality at the core is. You can also engineer it, quite frankly, by creating shareable moments or collaborative aspects of your product.
There are some that make sense to add collaboration to and others that do not. And then when it does not, how do you create these shareable moments that bring people into or introduce them to your product? That's another core tactic in product-led growth. If you look at it, it really is marketing. You're taking marketing, which tries to get paid media, earned media, all of that, and you are putting in the product.
So again, at the heart of it, when you really step back and look at what product-led growth is, is taking these components of what makes a product successful and weaving it right into the product. So again, self-service becomes a core part of it or automation becomes a core part of it because you want to give the customer the ability to become aware of the product, activate on the product, engage on the product, monetize, upgrade, downgrade, whatever it is they want to. If they're stuck, self-serve, help with the product, and then share their wonder through the product, either through invitations or creating these moments where they're just so proud to talk about how this thing just worked for them.
So looking at the humanness as well and really hacking that into the product. That's kind of how I look at it.
Melissa Perri: Cool. So when you're talking a lot about baking marketing into the product, does that change how you look at the requirements for a product leader who's doing a PLG product, or if you want to be a CPO of a company that's doing product-led growth or you want to be a product leader, what might you have to hone in your own skillset in order to do this well?
Ezinne Udezue: I'm not looking for marketers, to be honest. I'm looking for people who know how to drive results first. That's it. We haven't spoken about data, but in order to ensure that you're, number one, working on the right thing and that it's working, you have to look at how the data is coming out of it all and making adjustments along the way.
The reason I bring up marketing is that growth, the business growth, is often tied to sales and marketing, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a part that we, as product folks, don't often spend time on, but good PMs, they don't have to have been marketers, but they need to understand what are the metrics that allow for the conversion that drives sales. That's it.
So if you understand what a funnel is, understand how to generate leads, and basically take those leads, qualify them, and then understand that the next thing you need to do is try and convert them, that's the core of it. It's math. And most PMs are pretty good at math, but if you can articulate to a good product person what the math looks like, and they can look at the data on the other side and they know how to build, measure, and learn, and then go back and make the choices, create a strategy around what they need to do next, that's all I need.
You have a lot of marketing people who can help support. Is it a benefit to understand marketing? Absolutely, it is. But I don't think it's rocket science. At least it's not yet. I haven't been part of a rocket company yet, so I don't think that's it yet. Maybe one day, and then he can tell us.
Melissa Perri: Yeah. Okay, so it's not about being an amazing marketer as a product manager, but it is about driving results and understanding some basic marketing concepts. Putting leads out there, conversion funnels, all that wonderful stuff. How then does product work with marketing and sales in a product-led growth company? What changes about that?
Ezinne Udezue: Honestly, whenever I join a company and we say, okay, we're gonna go down this path, the big thing people always, oh my goodness, you can't fail sales, oh, they're gonna freak out, et cetera, right? So it's a wonderful conversation to have. It really is this idea. With working with sales, it's preying them up to do strategic sales instead.
Taking some lead, whatever your lead source is, and getting more qualified, product-qualified leads, as an example, right? People who may have tried your free, freeing your inversion and now have been informed within the product of how to upgrade into something that is paid for, or they can see that value. So by the time they're getting to that point, just depending on what your product is, a salesperson can approach them and then have a strategic conversation.
Just the other day, we have a self-serve channel and I kind of look at who comes in and buys our free product, our low-end product. And I remember looking and I saw, wow, we just got a huge customer, a very, very large customer, but they bought our smallest plan. They're gonna try it. They're gonna kick the tires.
They're gonna see if it works for them. And my hope is that we have enough value that they won't want the tiny fund. They'll upgrade to the next one and upgrade. That particular customer, I suspect that they will be one of our bigger clients because they've proven it out. They've tested it. It worked elegantly on their behalf.
And then when it's the right moment, they can either reach out to us or we reach out to them and just say, hey, how is it going? And we move from what was probably a hundred dollar sale price that they chose. They drove their experience through and now sales can have a much larger discussion about getting our product to the rest of the entire business.
But marketing is very similar. Marketing is a little unique. I think it's actually, we do well with data-driven marketers on the product side because the thing we're doing now with product-led growth products or PMs, they're focusing on exposing signals within the product that necessitate an outreach or some marketing trigger.
In the past, you would try to cohort and marketing would try to guess who to say what to. But now within the product and with good instrumentation, there's no guessing. You know who came in May. You know who has actually gone through the full engagement or activation path. You know who stopped midway.
You have a sense. And it's now enabling your marketing team, if they're separate from you, to actually get the right message to the right people. So that's the beauty of it. It's not this other world thing sitting on the other side, trying to guess who to talk to and how to talk to them. You now have cohorting through the product because you have a free trial or a free tier and can see who is interested in kicking tires and then you can market to them.
Melissa Perri: So it sounds like with a product-led growth approach, it actually helps sales and marketing tremendously because it gives them more opportunity to focus on not just shoving a product down somebody's throat who doesn't want it, but upselling them and getting people who are already interested and just getting more out of them and expanding rather than starting from a cold collar or a cold place.
Ezinne Udezue: Absolutely, absolutely.
Melissa Perri: With this too, it kind of sounds like to me that product-led growth companies, if you've got somebody in there trying it, they know they like it, they're gonna convert. Sounds like they're actually on their way to better retention as well compared to other ones. Is that like a big piece of this too?
Ezinne Udezue: It really is. I'm simplifying it because there are products that can be viral, there are products that can't, right? So that's why I always say people get so stuck on virality as the way. That is what I call an accelerant. So think about virality as an accelerant. But ultimately, when you give the customer value and you give them power, which is ultimately one of the things you're doing because you're talking to them in the way that makes sense to them.
You're giving them value. They can control their journey. I think you end up with a happier customer. They can downgrade, upgrade as they choose. They battle-tested the product to see if it gives you value because you offered something either as a freemium or as a free trial. So they chose you. In choosing you, they now are seeing value at the right time if you have the self-serve aspect of customer support in the product.
You're helping them find success upon success upon success. If you are able to add these shareable moments, right? They're supported by their community in terms of their choice in this particular product. Or if it's a B2B product, they're collaborating with others and it's increasing value on their behalf.
All of these are things that lead up to being content as a customer. When I think about the book and what we talk about for reducing churn and making sure PLG works for them, we talk about making sure you are able to engage the customer, answer their objections, help them through hard times in real time, give them an opportunity to also pause and leave if it's not working for them. This is not a force you into a one-year contract and make you stay.
And I say this because I actually was part of T-Mobile when we decided, we went through this process and decided we're gonna be the challenger and challenge AT&T and all the other folks. And we called it brand storming then. And when our new CEO came in, we called it challenger. But the idea was, what is it that others do that we need to rethink?
And this contract thing was the big deal. So taking it off and saying, you know what? If you're gonna choose us, we're gonna earn that choice every month if we have to. Not saying annual contracts are bad, but don't make it hard for them to leave. Give them a chance to pause if they have to or for a discount if you need to.
So those are some of the things, but ultimately if you make your customer happy and you give them value, they'll stay.
Melissa Perri: I love that. It's a very counterintuitive approach, I think to a lot of people out there who are trying to lock in their year contracts, their long-term things. I've experienced this personally too. If it's easier for me to leave a company, it's easier for me to come back too. I'm not gonna be so upset at them that I had to jump through hoops because it wasn't the right time for me.
And when I'm ready to come back for it, you want to. I really like that perspective on it. When you're thinking about companies starting off with PLG, so say they're looking at their product and they're going, can I do product-led growth or is this right for me? Maybe even some B2B companies who have been traditionally super sales-heavy, super marketing, all those things.
Where do you think they should start in evaluating that?
Ezinne Udezue: I just met with a company recently. We talked through this and I often say, the first thing is map out the journey for your customer. Where is it? How are they experiencing you from the very beginning? Many times, and this isn't just a journey decision, it actually often is a cost of acquisition decision with the prevalence of new companies out there.
There's just a lot of options. So the cost to acquire a customer is getting more expensive. So I find that many people start at what you'd call general self-serve, look through and see what is it that you have humans doing that isn't necessary? Can customers come in? Can you create a marketing campaign?
And then can they go through and activate themselves without much touch? So oftentimes, self-serve is the first entry into product-led growth. Then you start layering other aspects. From the product side, I think that any company that is focused on value is doing its part on the product side because ultimately that's what the ask.
So like I started off and said, product-led growth is about kind of folding your departments into the product and product engineering job is making sure that their intention, what they wanted to do with the product can be done in the product. So that's just generating value. So as long as you keep generating value, removing the friction to that value, you often are in good place.
Being creative about virality is also just a win, like shareable moments and nudging folks through. That's another thing with AI, we now can do a lot of nudges in the product. But now looking at other aspects, other departments, other places that have often been considered, go to market or support, that's where I think there's definitely an opportunity.
How do you begin to fold them into the product? That's usually the first place to start.
Melissa Perri: And when you're thinking about that too, I can hear people already being like, oh my God, so support now reports in the product or does marketing report into product? What does that mean, fold it into the product?
Ezinne Udezue: It's not, it's just they work through the product. So support still does its thing. They have a responsibility, but now as they're writing their articles and putting it out there, they're making it available in the product and breaking it into snackable bites that can be exposed in the right context.
They're looking at figuring out how to have their support staff respond via chat. They're asking, what are the most important reasons? What are the most frequent reasons people call us? Okay, let's push that into the product and try and reduce those call volumes. So it's not a matter of people reporting into product, but using the product as a means to carry out your work and think about it more strategically.
Melissa Perri: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So do you have an example or as many as you want of a company that does product-led growth well that you admire and kind of reference?
Ezinne Udezue: It's a cheat, only because Audrey worked there, but I looked at what they did with Calendly because they did it, they did it all. They not only worked on the pain, even trying to get our books, ourselves scheduled, that's a thing, that's a challenge. You get a LinkedIn request and somebody wants to meet.
I mean, trying to get somebody to pick up some free thing in my garage and we can't seem to get our schedules to work. So that's a pain and they found a pain and really tried to work on really reducing that sharp pain. Then they looked at being completely and utterly efficient, doing their marketing and sales and everything through the product.
Then they layered in, actually they're pretty lucky in this piece of virality because the idea of a meeting is viral no matter what. It's not one person. It's between two, three, four, five. But what they did well though is they chose what industries to go attack first and from sales teams trying to schedule meetings, all of a sudden it's not a small node of people meeting with each other.
It's now this very distributed thing. So if you go after sales team, you have one company reaching out to many customers and now they're receiving this invite to Calendly. Now all those folks get exposed to it and then begin to reach out and use it in whatever way it makes sense for them. So they did a good job in also picking what segments and these segments were what I call multiplicative.
They were really thoughtful about that. So again, self-serve in terms of just really giving the customer ownership of their experience, they focus on a really sharp problem. Then they layered on this idea of sharing and network effects by really multiplying knowledge of the value that they were creating.
Melissa Perri: That's a really good example. And I love that you broke down all those different pieces of a PLG for it too. So for our listeners out there who wanna learn more about you and also get your book when it comes out in 2023, where can they go?
Ezinne Udezue: So we don't know the name yet. So that's one thing I get often. However, if you wanna learn more, you can go to howtoplg.com to sign up for the free PLG worksheet. A lot of what I said is there and so much more. You can use it to assess where you wanna start, what part you wanna work on because you can't do it all in one day, right?
And we'll keep you posted as we come up with more artifacts and assets as we build out the book, we'll share as much as we can. The idea is we have a lot of these conversations with our friends and acquaintances we've built as we've grown up in product. And we just said, you know what? Let's just put it on paper.
Let's just write it out. That's the spirit behind howtoplg.com.
Melissa Perri: Awesome. And I'm glad you guys are doing that too because it's all very, very needed to be written down on paper so people can understand that. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure having you on the podcast. And for those of you listening, please go to howtoplg.com so that you can get a hold of their book and learn more about product-led growth. And if you like this podcast, please subscribe to the product thinking podcast so that you never miss another one. We'll be back next Wednesday with another Dear Melissa. So make sure you write in your questions and we'll see you next time.
