2022 EDITION

The Product Manager’s Guide to

Product-Led Growth
How to build scalable onboarding
experiences that deliver first value faster
 INSIDE THIS EBOOK

Introduction | product-led growth in 2022

Defining your product-led strategy

Reviewing your current onboarding experience

Planning better onboarding: 4 worksheets

Driving results with scalable, product-led experiences

The Product Manager’s Guide to Product-Led Growth in 2022

 INTRODUCTION

The value in a product isn’t in building it but in

getting it into the hands of customers. [...] To
design something that will draw people’s
attention at the right time, in the right context.
Ming Liu
Head of Product, Lattice

Product-led growth for product managers

A product manager’s biggest asset is knowing. It’s knowing what
drives value for customers and where they get off track. The more you
know about your customers and the paths they take within your
product, the better you can plan your pipeline. So why do most
product teams map out growth inside a deck or Zoom call? The truth
is, we're often not as sophisticated when it comes to product analytics.
We're relying on customer conversations and experience. We need
tools that scale conversations into product moments.

Create what matters by turning your ideas into product-led

growth experiments. For each user interaction, every
drop-off or conversion—there’s a personalized, scalable
experience that’s missing from your user interface (UI).
Lead with your product; it starts with your in-product
onboarding experience.

The Product Manager’s Guide to Product-Led Growth in 2022

 INTRODUCTION
Product-led growth in 2022
Product-led growth (PLG) is a series
of moments that drive the user
journey—from customer acquisition
and conversion to adoption and
retention. But the journey to PLG
doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a
long time to get it right, and the
solution is never black and white.
PLG is a continuum. As you better
understand the market, you can
funnel those learnings back into the
product experience.
In 2022, users are drowning in a sea
of solutions. They’re no longer willing
to tread touch points to find value. In
the past, end-users had fewer
solutions to evaluate and could
spend more time exploring a single
product because—in some cases—it
was the only product they could
choose from.
Successful companies will focus on ...
Scalability
Refining and automating; incorporating
repeatable UX via UI components.
Personalization
Mapping experiences into delightfully relevant
customer moments.
Rapid experimentation
Adapting UI to meet customer and business needs
based on data from scalable solutions.
The Product Manager’s Guide to Product-Led Growth in 2022
Today, users may evaluate three or
more products, which leaves little
room for unlocking the time to first
value (TTFV) for each one.
Evaluation has become less about a
product’s actual value and more
about the user’s ability to discover it.
The user journey is now a race to
find benefits—and the best product
isn’t always at the finish line.
Thoughtful, in-product onboarding is
key to unlocking your growth
strategy and finding the happy path
to first value. But if it takes a human
to set up your product, how do you
transition from a human- to
product-led experience? In this
guide, you’ll learn how to transform
a high-touch, human-led experience
into a low-touch, product-led
experience that drives results.
 PLANNING YOUR GROWTH

Defining your product-led strategy

Product-led growth doesn’t require a complete UI overhaul. Start by
evaluating your current state and identifying minimum viable changes (MVC)
that will improve your first-time user experience (FTUE).

Map customer touch points.

Connect your in-product UX to your current sales
enablement and customer success content resources.

Outline quick UI/UX wins. Find your super users.

Find simple messaging Identify your most
updates to improve your Product-Led engaged users and their
current in-product Problem-Solving journey to first value.
experiences without
adding new UI elements.

Identify growth opportunities.

Explore what success looks like beyond conversion. Look
for ways to standardize everything from feature
announcements to ongoing learning.

The Product Manager’s Guide to Product-Led Growth in 2022

 FINDING YOUR HAPPY PATH

Reviewing your current onboarding experience

Moving away from a human-led onboarding experience doesn’t mean reducing
the role of customer success teams. Instead, it’s a resource shift—from reactive
customer consultations to strategic interactions that complement self-serve
experiences. Use the following questions to review your current resources and
understand how you apply them with new customers:

Why are some obstacles in your What are your key implementation
current onboarding process? milestones?

Is there a project plan with content How many users touch onboarding?
for onboarding accounts? Do activities vary?

Ideally, what content should users What UI should accounts interact with
access throughout onboarding? throughout implementation? Is the
(E.g., learning courses.) process Linear, modular, or gated?

What tools do you use to track How many users touch onboarding?
steps per implementation today? Do activities vary?

What does the simplest onboarding What UI should accounts interact with
journey look like? (I.e., smallest throughout implementation? Is the
accounts, fastest time to value.) process linear, modular, or gated?

Human-Led Product-Led

High-Touch Onboarding Experience Low-Touch Onboarding Experience

From implementation consultations to data
migration, high-touch experiences take 30+
days and countless stakeholders before
customers can find value. Teams are more
reactive and less strategic; onboarding and
other product experiences happen on shared
screens and not within the product itself.
These experiences are both scalable and
personal. Users spend more time interacting
with relevant parts of the product and less
time on scripted implementation calls.
Self-service experiences delight; the
remaining, human-led interactions are more
impactful as there’s more time for strategy.

The Product Manager’s Guide to Product-Led Growth in 2022

 WORKSHEETS

Planning better onboarding

The following worksheets are designed to help you plan your
in-product onboarding strategy. From gathering project resources to
journey mapping, these exercises will help you and your team define
your customer’s happy path.

The Product Manager’s Guide to Product-Led Growth in 2022

 PROJECT INVENTORY WORKSHEET

Write a list of customer onboarding resources in the CONTENT TYPE column (e.g.,
intro deck). List the what, who, when, and how of the distribution process in the
DESCRIPTION column (e.g., Google slides sent via email by CS).

CONTENT TYPE DESCRIPTION

The Product Manager’s Guide to Product-Led Growth in 2022

 TTFV WORKSHEET

What is your shortest path to finding first value?

In the numbered spaces below, write the action or requirement necessary
for your customer to move forward in their onboarding journey.

OUR FIRST VALUE IS

1 2

4
3

x
X marks the spot.
5
6

If your path ends here,

it’s likely a happy one.

8
9
7

Customer overboard!
Six or more steps increase
the likelihood of drop-off.

12

10 11

The Product Manager’s Guide to Product-Led Growth in 2022

 JOURNEY PLANNING WORKSHEET

List tasks within your CURRENT customer onboarding journey; identify FUTURE opportunities to transform tasks into
product-led experiences. “Kickoff” is an example of a stage; a “CS-led kickoff call” is a step.

STAGE
CURRENT FUTURE CURRENT FUTURE CURRENT FUTURE CURRENT FUTURE

TASK
View, save, or print this worksheet in landscape orientation.

The Product Manager’s Guide to Product-Led Growth in 2022

 BUILD YOUR DREAM DASHBOARD WORKSHEET

Plan your product-led content. Think about your ideal customer onboarding experience:
What’s the UI of your dream dashboard? Cut out the following components and arrange
them on a separate piece of paper. Outline copy, images, or videos for each component.

Arts and crafts not your thing? Experiment with

different UI components and layouts for free.
Sign up for a Candu Personal Plan now.

The Product Manager’s Guide to Product-Led Growth in 2022

 BEYOND ONBOARDING

Driving results with scalable,

product-led experiences
Onboarding isn’t the only key to product-led success. A complete strategy
incorporates experiences that impact engagement across the board.

While it’s possible to move toward a product-led growth strategy by

incorporating UI updates into each sprint cycle, it’s not a sustainable
approach—especially for SaaS startups.

The data gathered from in-product onboarding will inform every aspect of
each personalized user journey; your team’s ability to deliver thoughtful
future experiences will impact adoption and retention—and, ultimately, the
success of your company. This is why every SaaS product manager should
care about product-led growth.

The complete product-led user journey

Feature Adoption
Announce new features inside your product with UI
elements like announcement bars.

Ongoing Learning
Bring learning materials inside your product with
curated dashboards.

Self-Serve Support
Add right-rail support components that update
based on segments and user flows.

The Product Manager’s Guide to Product-Led Growth in 2022

BEYOND ONBOARDING
Grow without code
A truly scalable, personalized
product-led journey requires rapid
iteration. Non-technical teams
need the freedom to adapt and
implement experiences based on
customer learnings. No-code UI
components take ideas out of
decks and directly into the product.
Everyone from founders to product
marketers and customer success
teams can build product-led
experiences one embed at a
time—without impacting
engineering road maps. Rapid
prototyping means real-time wins
for under-resourced teams. Every
product manager wishes they had
a window into their product. That
window is a no-code UI
component.
The Product Manager’s Guide to Product-Led Growth in 2022
Why “no code” is product-led growth:
Trial experiences transform your product
Non-technical teams can easily add
components at drop-off points to help get
users back on track. Your product
becomes a personalized asset for each
user. When personalized journeys trend,
you’ll discover new routes for your road
map.
Communities interact inside your product
No-code community dashboards allow
your champions to surface features and
share their experiences alongside new
users. Non-technical teams can update
components to include timely news based
on trending topics.
Content becomes a “content experience”
Customer success, sales, and marketing
teams are empowered to translate
everything from learning content to
awareness messaging into UI components
that nurture the user journey directly
inside the product. Users are served the
right content at the right time—right where
NOW YOU CAN

Accelerate your product-led

growth curve with Candu.
Empower everyone to create
beautiful, no-code UI components
that can be embedded into your
product, seamlessly. It’s all about
enhancing the products you already
have—but doing it yourself.

Explore the benefits of Candu for

product-led growth:

• Rapid experimentation
• Delightful personalization
• Scalable automation

Discover Better Onboarding

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