Common PLG failures

The most common root cause is a mismatch between the product and the chosen motion: trying to force a fully self-serve PLG play on products that truly require high-touch implementation or complex procurement.

The second is under-investing in the infrastructure PLG needs, such as instrumentation, experimentation, and self-serve onboarding, while still expecting PLG-like outcomes.

Declaring a PLG strategy without clarifying which segments or use cases it applies to leads to confusion and misaligned expectations across teams.

Running half-sales-led, half-PLG motions without clear rules of engagement for who owns which accounts, what counts as a qualified signal, and when sales should engage creates internal friction and a poor experience for customers.

Over-focusing on top-of-funnel signups at the expense of activation and retention leads to dashboards full of new accounts that never adopt the product meaningfully.

Treating onboarding or pricing changes as one-off projects instead of as experiments makes it hard to learn systematically and often results in regressions that no one notices until much later.

Overselling AI capabilities in marketing or onboarding, then delivering inconsistent or low-quality outputs, can quickly destroy user trust and generate negative word-of-mouth.

Designing flows that expect users to behave like expert prompt engineers from day one often results in early frustration and abandonment before users ever see reliable value.

Relying on vanity metrics such as total signups or page views, without connecting them to activation, retention, or revenue, makes it easy to declare success while the real motion is weak.

Ignoring cohorts, segments, and qualitative insight when reading experiments can cause teams to scale up changes that work for a narrow group while hurting the broader base.

Start by checking strategic fit: can your ideal customers reasonably self-serve the first steps, or do they actually need heavy implementation or approvals?

Then move stage by stage: is activation clearly defined and instrumented, are retention loops present and measured, and does your pricing and packaging align with how customers adopt and grow?