The audience for this document is three-fold.
1. My team, to help reinforce all of this for them.
2. EPD (Engineering/Product/Design) leads. We all present to each other and make sure we're aware of conflicts and dependencies. It's also a great way to increase understanding of our work.
3. New colleagues. When someone is new and they don't know anything about my team, I can just direct them to this document.

Sometimes, it can be hard to get internal alignment on a document like this. I had faced a lot of internal dissent with the 2021 version of this charter, which shaped how I got alignment for 2022. I essentially wrote a short 2-page document with the high level direction, plus what we wanted to do and why. I sent that to a couple of senior leaders and got their sign off on it -- including visible evidence (like having them comment directly in the doc). And with their feedback and alignment, the planning cycle was so much easier. It was much easier to get other stakeholders on board once they saw that the senior leaders had already signed off on it. It kept us from running in circles.

I was hired into Productboard to build a growth team from scratch, define what is product-led growth for the company/product, and to take care of the self-serve experience.

During my interview process, I talked with a lot of people who knew about product-led growth but the fact of the matter was that the vast majority of Productboarders didn't understand it. And, some stakeholders, like Sales, might feel threatened by it.

In addition, some of the people I work with hadn't done growth before or had different definitions of what it meant.

So, a lot of my time is spent educating people. I often put up the same definition of product-led growth to try and reinforce it -- whether it's part of planning, presentations to senior leadership, EPD all hands.

Hear Japna talk about the challenges of educating (and often re-educating) stakeholders about PLG and the role of experimentation.

In this section, we talk about needing to focus on one of the three PLG methodologies listed above, because of constrained resourcing on the team. Additionally, we propose which one is best given the company and market context.

I end up writing this document on an annual basis and then refreshing it every 6 months, often because:
1) there's a new company priority that requires us to move in a different direction (meaning the strategy might change)
2) the strategy stays the same but I want to provide a progress report on how we're doing

We have a great partnership with our Commercial Sales team. They actively worked with us to productize their onboarding/coaching. We've been able to work with them to figure out when it makes sense to spend sales calories on ACVs and when it doesn't. For example, we experiment to see if we can still convert people despite a lower touch from Sales or even without Sales having to talk to them at all. They've been able to "up" their threshold after which they would schedule a call.

A complex product like Productboard will have multiple activation metrics. You can define them by identifying each high level use case your product solves for. Each of these will have a set up moment, an aha moment, and a habit moment. We did this exercise cross-organizationally to ensure we got a holistic representation of our customers, and then used the input to translate these activation moments into actual metrics that we could track.

In here, you can see our Key Results are based on driving improvement in two of our activation metrics.

In this section (redacted here), I outlined the big investments we were going to make in the coming months. For each investment, I would outline:
- A problem statement (plus links / summaries of any data we had about the problem)
- Solution detail (as much as we knew about it, or at least open questions)
- Timelines and milestones (complete with links)
- Risks and mitigation
- Any other relevant links

Japna Sethi

At Productboard, I wrote this team charter to reinforce the connection between the team vision and near-term initiatives, as well as to increase understanding of the team's work among stakeholders. 

Product-led growth (PLG) is a type of go-to-market distribution motion where the product is the first part of a prospect’s evaluation and sales experience. It puts the product at the forefront of the buying experience and relies on the fact that you can experience a (part of) the product to realize its value before you commit to purchasing.

How PLG is manifested, practically speaking, looks different depending on the type of company or product.

= a free product experience with full feature functionality but with a limited timeframe for product usage

= a free product experience with limited feature functionality but with an unlimited timeframe for product usage

= a way for a product’s existing user base to bring someone outside the direct ecosystem of the product to receive or experience limited product value for free

We can look more deeply at the market for more insight, and see that among the top touted PLG companies, the Free Trial method is the most popular. A company might employ one or more of these manifestations at any given time, but it is not necessary to employ all 3.

Top PLG Companies (as defined by OpenView Partners)

Productboard is a purpose-built tool specifically for product development teams and the personas within them, most especially product managers.

method, where the product is the first touchpoint in a prospect’s evaluation experience, but we have a lot of work to do to improve this experience.

, we might consider approaches such as [redacted].

, we might consider focusing on building key growth loops in [redacted] or [redacted].

To ensure our solutions intuitively communicate Productboard’s value at each step of the customer journey, ensuring prospects and customers can easily get up and running once they start using Productboard.

What is the Growth tribe responsible for?

1. We will deliver a superior trial experience for 

whether the trial plan is Essentials, Pro, or Scale

2. We will deliver a great onboarding experience for any new user (e.g. new maker, contributor, etc) that signs up and joins an existing account such that they can get to value quickly.

3. We will drive in-product customer expansion motions in concert with other GTM teams to help existing customers receive even more value.

That's an exciting and ambitious vision! But where should the Growth team focus this year, specifically?

We will continue to lay the foundations for the current buyers' journeys by focusing [redacted]. More deeply, we will continue to laser-focus on the two fundamental product values found not only in our basic starter plan but across all plans - [redacted] and [redacted] - to ensure anyone and everyone can get started using our product regardless of their use case or eventual plan choice.

a prospect on web should be able to clearly understand what Productboard offers and be compelled to sign up for a trial

our pre-trial acquisition experience should manage a prospect's expectations of what they will experience in trial

a new user should be able to get their existing data into Productboard easily

a new user should be able to understand our hierarchy and manage their backlog

a new user should be able to create and share a roadmap with their own data.

We have identified a few working principles we want to adopt moving forward to help us make decisions and execute faster:

Our Sales and Customer Success teams are doing a lot of things right.

 We should leverage our internal strengths by partnering closely with them and productizing what they do well.

Following suit with the above, we should be opinionated about how a prospect 

onboarded onto Productboard to be successful in the product, regardless of what use case they came for or what plan they're initially interested in.

Stop "experimenting with" or trying to "prove out" distributing our lowest tier plan. Let's go ahead and make changes we need to distribute our product and be successful in concert with our Sales and Marketing teams.

Growth team charter at Productboard

Growth Team Charter

Setting the Context

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