As a SaaS leader, you’re facing a constant balancing act.
You need technology to empower your team, but you don’t want a bloated tech stack clogging productivity.
Product leaders and managers, in particular, need lean, efficient tech stacks to operate effectively, especially when it comes to product-led growth. The right combination of technology is the key to Product teams, Customer Success teams, and entire organizations unlocking product-led growth without wasting time and resources to manage convoluted, disconnected, and repetitive technologies.
How do product-led growth tech stacks work?
Product-led growth (PLG) tech stacks aren’t like other technology groupings. PLG tech stacks are designed to fuel a complete product-led growth strategy. They’re meant to be hyper-focused and purpose-built for one goal: using technology to improve your product and drive growth.
The technology of a PLG tech stack must include the capability to gather product analytics data to identify user behaviors and what they need to be a success with your product. At the same time, your tech stack should also encompass in-product engagements to increase adoption, improve onboarding, create retention, empower Customer Success teams, and enhance your product.
Your PLG tech stack should be used to inform, create, and measure in-product engagements. Ultimately, you want your customer to have a faster time-to-value (TTV). However, you must first find a single software platform that offers combined integration capabilities to save time and significant resources needed to integrate separate tools.
Do you need a product-led tech stack?
There was a time when SaaS companies could get by without having a product-led growth strategy and corresponding tech stack in place. However, as traditional sales models give way to more user-focused, recurring revenue models, using the product as a growth driver is increasingly necessary. To effectively leverage the product to implement PLG, the right technology stack is critical.
What are the essential product-led growth tools for your tech stack?
As you’re building out your product-led growth tech stack, it’s essential to keep two broad goals in mind:
- Your product-led growth tools should be interconnected, ideally run through a single platform. This technology will make it easy for your teams to work together, share data, and stay productive while giving them an edge in efficiency.
- Make sure to integrate beyond just your Product teams with technology that is easily leveraged to inform holistic customer efforts. By using a tech stack that easily integrates across departments, you’ll be able to deploy PLG strategies organization-wide and approach cross-functional efforts, such as retention, as a larger team.
With those essentials in mind, here are a few tools to add to your product-led growth tech stack:
- Product Analytics–Product-led growth is all about improving user experiences, and product analytics will reveal user needs. For instance, path and funnel analysis tools show you exactly what steps users are taking as they move through your product. Feature adoption reports can showcase what product features are or aren’t getting used. And tools such as retention analysis can help determine which types of users or features influence retention most.
When these product analyses are combined, they help spot sticky features, determine product-market fit, and measure how well your PLG strategies are paying off. By watching your users’ behaviors, it’s easy to spot friction points and eliminate the obstacles standing in the way of users’ objectives.
- Closed-Loop Feedback–Another critical piece of the product-led growth puzzle is customer feedback. And if you want to be successful, it’s vital to adopt tools that close the loop by taking action on user feedback. Closing the loop is a process where feedback is gathered through surveys or analytics and used to make decisions. Then more feedback is aggregated to see how those decisions affected your users, and the product is refined even more. Adding customer feedback tools to your tech stack allows you to assess user sentiment and build product features they love.
- In-App Engagements-Another important tool in your product-led growth tech stack is in-app engagements. These adoption boosters let you interact with users in the product to drive behaviors and promote feature usage. For instance, imagine you observe that a group of users isn’t adopting a new feature as quickly as you would like. In-app engagements can prompt users by highlighting that desired feature in context or guide them strategically past a friction point to adoption.
Whether you drop in a guide, have a pop-up dialogue box, direct them to a linked help article, or other helpful in-product interactions, you have the power to lead your user in the right direction. Ultimately, that makes it easier for your user to enjoy your product and discover value—and your product will grow in the process.
Start building your ultimate product-led growth tech stack.
An efficient product-led growth tech stack will maximize your resources and push growth to a whole new level. Are you looking for more secrets to building your ideal tech stack? Learn more by reading “Mastering Product Led Growth.”
