The Product-led Organization digital workshop
Product-led organizations make their products the vehicle for acquiring and retaining customers, driving growth, and influencing organizational priorities. They represent the future of business in a digital-first world.
What makes an organization product led?
In his book “The Product-led Organization,” Pendo co-founder and CEO Todd Olson walks you through the core concepts for becoming product led. Watch the video below for inspiration, then play it for your team to kick off your workshop.
Your path to product-led growth
The Product-led Organization workshop series is designed to help you put the concepts from Todd’s book into practice and turn your product into a growth engine. Explore the modules and exercises below.
Identify your jobs-to-be-done
Deliver based on customer needs
Setting SMART goals
Create a path to your desired outcomes
Define your data stack
Inform your decision-making
Design a product-led experiment
Turn data into insights
Building blocks of onboarding
Ensure a human-led experience
Make support self-service
Empower your customer with on-demand education and training
Create a customer health scoring model
Predict success and struggles
Design a launch plan
Ensure successful launch every time
Create a Product Feedback Policy
Understand the voice of the customer
Roadmap your way to success
Communicate the purpose of your product
Get the full digital workshop
Identify your jobs-to-be-done
Product-led organizations have a clear understanding of why people “hire” their product and they design the experience to help users get those core “jobs” done. Use this exercise to identify the Jobs to Be Done of your product, so you can create an experience that best delivers on those customer needs.
As facilitator, you might use this exercise as a jumping off point for product roadmap planning, or to begin a discussion of what product-led activities might help your customers do their “jobs” more effectively and efficiently. Kick this session off by setting the stage for what you hope to accomplish through the exercise.
Setting SMART goals
The product manager’s job is to connect the why with the work. This exercise will help team members set clear strategic goals for what they hope to accomplish as they start or progress on a product-led journey. They’ll also begin to think through a path to those outcomes.
You may want participants to set goals that tie to a broader company initiative for the quarter or year, or to a specific product launch activity. Kick things off by stating your intention for the exercise.
Define your data stack
Product-led organizations are data-driven organizations. Data offers a common language for measuring progress toward the goals you set for your product. It also helps you know when to pivot. This exercise will help you identify available data sources, then narrow in on the most relevant business, operational, and qualitative metrics to enable your team to make decisions.
This exercise works best when you start with a specific goal, like improve user retention or reduce support tickets, or a specific JTBD. The team can then narrow in on the data sources and metrics that will help inform the decision-making required to achieve that goal or meet the customer need.
Design a product-led experiment
One of the most effective ways of turning data into insights that can improve the customer experience is through experimentation. An Experiment Canvas offers a disciplined approach, forcing you to clarify your hypothesis, determine the risks associated, and set up a test that can validate your hypothesis within parameters like a time frame or with a segment of customers. It also provides a template for capturing results and next steps. And it’s easily shareable with others on the team.
Building blocks of onboarding
In this exercise, you’ll brainstorm with your team what aspects of your human-led onboarding experience could or should be automated in-app. You’ll also walk away with an action plan to ensure users get to a quick “Aha! moment” during new user onboarding.
Make support self-service
Empowering your customers with on-demand education and training in your application allows them to find the information they need, at any time, without creating a ticket. In this exercise, you’ll analyze your product’s support ticket trends, identify existing resources that might help address those issues, and design in-app messages you can automate inside your product to guide users to help prior to calling support.
Create a customer health scoring model
This exercise is inspired by the team at Rapid7, who discovered as they added hundreds and then thousands of customers that it was increasingly difficult to identify the most successful users, as well as those who are struggling. By assigning customers a score based on product usage and a myriad of other indicators, they could begin to predict success and struggles, and intervene more quickly. A key point from their case study in the The Product-Led Organization is that your customer health scoring model will evolve over time as you observe customer outcomes. This exercise will get you thinking about the components of your health score and the action plans you’ll put in place to retain unhealthy customers and leverage healthy ones.
Design a launch plan
In a perfect world, every feature is immediately and enthusiastically adopted by every customer. In reality, that’s rarely the case. As we add users and personas and our products become more feature rich, launch communication has to evolve. That means rethinking the way we educate and enable users. In this exercise, your team will design a process to ensure a successful feature launch every time. Your team will come away with a tactical plan that covers how they will: communicate feature launches and product updates, measure success using product analytics and sentiment, and capture and incorporate customer feedback.
Create a Product Feedback Policy
Customer feedback is vital to any successful software product—product teams should always strive to understand and incorporate the voice of the customer in everything they build. But this is especially important for product-led organizations, where everything the company does revolves around the customer. By creating a product feedback policy, your team will have a standard process to follow to gather and manage feedback from customers, ensuring customers have a voice as you evolve your product. In this exercise, you’ll determine how you’ll manage and weigh customer feedback; and create a document you can share internally and/or externally to explain the process you’ll follow.
Roadmap your way to success
Product-led organizations recognize their roadmap isn’t just a document; it’s a powerful planning, communication, and organizational alignment tool. Roadmaps are the most effective way to communicate with internal and external stakeholders the purpose of your product, and to solicit their feedback. They give everyone a chance to buy into your vision. Your team will come away from this exercise with a tactical plan for mapping roadmap decisions to the goals of the organization, factoring how they’ll use data to inform those decisions and how they will communicate the roadmap to stakeholders.
You have two options for this exercise. Participants can complete and discuss the worksheet during the session, or they can complete the worksheet in advance and use the shorter time frame for alignment and discussion around what roadmapping improvements could be made.