Chris Miller

A lot of product management is also managing personalities and figuring out how people want to work with you and figuring out how you work for them.

Oftentimes when you're making decisions that could be described as hostile towards your customers, but a net positive for the business, you're probably not thinking long-term enough, right? Because there's no possible way, unless you have completely cornered a market and there is no competition whatsoever, that you could continually be hostile towards your customers and grow.

That attitude of saying that every problem is our problem and radical accountability and ownership mentality helped us find opportunities that maybe the business wasn't explicitly asking us to solve, but we were able to triangulate why it might be important for the business for us to solve it.

We really had an aggressive mentality, an aggressive approach, and what that looked like was at the time, a very small percentage of, I think HubSpot's subscription revenue would be described as self-service, so we approached the team who owned it and we were like, 'Are you all working on this?' They were like, 'Nah, we're working on a bunch of other stuff.' We were like, 'Can we take this?' They were like, 'Sure, if you want it.' And so, we took it and immediately blew it up.

First I would ask, why do you want to be product led? What assumptions are you making in terms of why being product led are going to be net positive for the business or for your customers? And I might even ask them to define what product-led means to them that we can get on the same page of what we're even talking about.

The number one mistake is hiring a head of growth, giving them no resources and expecting them to pull rabbit out of their hat.

At the highest level, it's like taking a go-to-market approach where your product job is to grow revenue and you use humans as a backstop and not the other way around.

PLG at its core is just having your product sell the value prop of what your business does, and you can still deliver on that without being able to stand up a very robust and sophisticated experimentation practice.

We also learned a lot from talking to people who we wanted to be customers but were not, right? And people who had either broken up with our product or evaluated it and never fell in love with it in the first place.

One of the traits that I look for in PMs that I hire onto my teams, and also when I think back to the people that I've learned a lot from working with over the years, one of the common behaviors or traits is relentless curiosity, this insatiable desire to understand things and a lack of fear in admitting when they don't understand things and being uncompromising and getting the answers so that they do understand.

Go reach out to a PM and ask how you can make their day easier. Figure out what you can do in your spare time that they can offload to you and do a little bit of volunteer labor, even if that's just shadowing because I think just getting that context and understanding the sort of rhythm of how a team ideates and defines problems and prioritizes and ship software is the experience that's going to be the most important.

People lie on surveys all the time for a variety of different reasons, but no one lies to Google because it's transactional. If I lie to Google, I'm not going to get what I want.

If you're doing growth, right, if you're doing product-led growth the right way, then you're trying to balance the science and sort of taking a somewhat hygienic approach to validating assumptions and hypotheses with being really ambitious and really pushing for the things that are going to have massive impact for your customers at the end of the day. And when you're doing that, you're going to fail more than you're going to be successful along the way.

If your sort of primary modality of product-led growth work is experiment-driven product development and you're hitting more than like 30, 40% of the time, you're thinking too small.

If you're not resilient, what I've seen happen is you end up sort of grasping for a win, which can sometimes look like making bets that are too small and too insignificant to matter.

The best growth product leaders and growth minds that I've worked with over the years or have had the privilege of learning from over the years, I think the thing that I noticed about them is they're almost ambivalent to the solution and certainly ambivalent to how complex a solution may or may not be. And taking little to no pleasure or pride in the complexity of a solution so long that it delivers the outcome that the business and your customers need.

I think if building the next super sophisticated widget is the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning, growth might not be for you, I think the best growth product leaders and growth minds that I've worked with over the years or have had the privilege of learning from over the years, I think the thing that I noticed about them is they're almost ambivalent to the solution and certainly ambivalent to how complex a solution may or may not be.

We don't even talk about problems without a qualifier. Are we talking about a business problem? Are we talking about a customer problem? Are we talking about an efficiency problem? Describe the nature of the problem and parse it out.