Product-led growth (PLG) is a growth model where product usage drives customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.
Companies with a product-led growth strategy—think Slack, Calendly, and Datadog—are able to grow faster and more efficiently by leveraging their products to create a pipeline of active users who are then converted into paying customers.
Although it’s rightfully associated with viral, freemium, bottom-up distribution, product-led growth is more than a simple go-to-market formula. Any company—even those selling to large enterprises or operating in niche vertical markets—can adopt PLG principles to improve user experiences and increase go-to-market efficiency.
And they should: Product-led growth isn’t going away any time soon.
The center of power has shifted from the buyer to the end user. And the consumerization of software means that end users now demand better experiences from the tools they use.
In order to succeed in the current Age of Connected Work (more on that below), software companies must rise to meet the demands of the market—and that means building a product for end users and then distributing that product directly to those same end users.
It’s hard to fathom now, but there was a time when adopting new software could take months, quarters, or even years.
Now software shows up at work all on its own, introduced by individuals who champion its wider use. People are finding, downloading, and adopting products without any directive from their bosses. In fact, end users are the ones telling their bosses which software to buy.
As the software market continually evolves, we’ve witnessed the rise of the end user, and we’ve reached another inflection point—we’ve entered the Age of Connected Work.
In this new era, software is more than a tool. It’s become a fundamental utility powering our working lives. In the past, we would “own” or “rent” software, but today we simply use it.
This market shift may feel huge—and it certainly has huge implications for the way companies do business—but it’s not exactly revolutionary. The software industry has been moving toward the Age of Connected Work for some time, and smart companies are already adapting to keep up.
So, how did we get here?
Back in the 80s and 90s, software was something you installed from an actual, physical box. Massive, monolithic on-premise software programs were expensive to build and buy—think 6- to 7-figure CAPEX purchases.