Who owns Product Adoption in Product-Led Growth orgs?
Isn’t adoption a function of growth? Yes, it is. But who really owns adoption in product-led teams?
Product❓
Growth team❓
Product Marketing❓
Lack of this clarity leads to inaction and confusion as to who owns what, ultimately leading to under-achieved goals and customers lost.
While every team has a different approach based on the resources and stage of growth they are, here's what has become clear to me:
📝 First up, what is product adoption?
Product adoption occurs when a user begins to use your product as intended and understands its value to build a habit around it. It goes further than just acquisition to encompass activated and retained users.
Product adoption metrics try to optimize for the depth of product usage per customer.
So what role does each function play in driving product adoption?
🧠 Product:
• Builds new features that solve end-user problems and optimize product-market fit.
• Cares about delivering value quickly as soon as the user discovers the new feature
• Measures active usage as % of total customers
🗣Product Marketing:
• Creates the product positioning, launch, and messaging to engage the target audience
• Ensures sales and success teams understand what the product does.
• Measures campaign success / Demos booked / Sales and CSM leads created.
🚀 Growth Team:
• Drives discovery of the new feature in-app
• Cares about the end-to-end customer journey to fit the new feature into a customer's everyday workflow
• Measures product tours completed / trials started / paywall hits
While there are some boundaries when it comes to product adoption, there are some areas that all three functions share ownership of:
💰 Annual Recurring Revenue:
Contributing to top-line growth is part of each team's OKRs
🎯 Awareness:
Increasing product awareness and targeting the right customer segment, either through in-app or email campaigns is also a shared responsibility
💲Monetization:
These three functions work very closely when pricing and monetizing a new feature.