What is product-led growth?

Product-led growth (PLG) is a strategy where the primary way customers discover, evaluate, and expand their use of a product is through the product itself. Users can sign up, reach value, and grow usage with minimal friction and without needing a long human-driven sales process.

In a mature PLG motion, product usage is both the main engine of growth and the main source of truth. Activation, retention, and expansion are modeled as measurable behaviors, and teams iterate on those behaviors through product changes and experiments.

In sales-led models, humans do most of the work before users touch the product: discovery calls, demos, proof-of-concept projects, and negotiation. Marketing-led models rely heavily on content and campaigns to create demand and qualify leads before a product experience is involved.

In PLG, users experience value early and often. They self-educate inside the product, qualify themselves through usage, and often bring the product into their team before a salesperson ever joins the conversation. Sales and marketing still matter, but they build on top of strong product usage instead of compensating for a weak product experience.

A useful way to think about PLG is as a value chain: acquisition → onboarding → activation → retention → expansion. Each stage has its own question: who is arriving, how quickly do they reach value, how often do they return, and how does usage grow into revenue?

Strong PLG motions treat each stage as an area of continuous design and experimentation. Rather than treating onboarding, retention, and pricing as one-off projects, teams revisit each link in the chain regularly using shared metrics and qualitative feedback.

PLG is more than a set of tactics like adding a free trial or in-product checklist. It is a system where product, data, and go-to-market are tightly coupled. Product changes affect activation and retention; those in turn drive which accounts become qualified for sales outreach or expansion offers.

Operating that system well requires reliable instrumentation, a culture of experiment design and review, and shared ownership across product, growth, marketing, and sales. Decisions are grounded in behavioral data, not only in intuition or anecdote.

For founders and leadership, PLG usually means investing earlier in product, data, and self-serve infrastructure rather than primarily in headcount for outbound or field sales.

For PMs and growth leads, PLG expands the scope of ownership upstream and downstream: signup flows, onboarding journeys, activation definitions, and sometimes the handoff to sales and customer success.

“PLG means no sales team” is inaccurate. In practice, many successful PLG companies run a hybrid motion where product usage creates high-intent leads and sales focuses on expansion and complex deals.

“PLG is just a free trial or freemium plan” is also wrong. Free trials and freemium plans are distribution choices. Without a clear activation definition, strong onboarding, and a retention model, they rarely produce durable growth by themselves.