ProductLed Podcast

Mona Akmal is the CEO of Falkon AI. She is a product and engineering hotshot whose passion is building solutions to technically challenging problems. She’s in the show today to share data-driven methods such as identifying your product-qualified leads and figuring out what the value of your product is to your end users by using the concept of value metrics. Not sure what your value metrics are? Don’t worry because Mona has got you covered.  So product-led folks, be sure to turn your volumes up because this will be a fun episode! Show Notes [1:08] The concept of value metrics which is generally not well understood  [3:11] Three most common mistakes that she sees in value metric [6:12] A lot of times, value metrics are used to identify atypical behavior of a certain customer population  [8:18] Define value metrics before you even start your user research so that you know which ones are you going to look put for [8:37] Three key parts of figuring out what the value of your product is to your end-users [10:43] What are the correct value metrics for a particular business?  [17:55] When it comes to product-led growth for the growth part, how can you make money out of it? [21:29] Usage-based pricing goes hand in hand with a product-led growth [23:06] Accuracy and rigor in defining value metrics are key to all aspects of the business  [23:32] Your intuition plus data analysis plus unbiased user research all of them have to play together in harmony to understand your value metrics  [23:46] Coming up with value metrics and throwing them in a lockbox does not result in product-led growth. You have to operationalize these value metrics to see the benefits  About Mona Akmal In her twenties, Mona decided to migrate to the United States with a degree in Computer Software. She also had her first job in one of the world’s famous software companies, Microsoft. Two decades later, she’s now spearheading Falkon AI with her undeniable wits and talent. Mona is, without a doubt, one of the best Product and Engineering people out there. Link Falkon AI Profile Mona’s LinkedIn Mona’s Email Address: mona@falkon.ai

Dan Balcauski, our pricing master, is here to help us understand the value of pricing and compete in the market while generating over-the-top revenues. He delves into the ins and outs of how effective it is to maximize your price to have long-term profitability and move your business forward. So let’s hop on in, explore the depths of pricing models and learn a thing or two from this savvy expert.  Show Notes [0:58] How to be competitive while still generating revenues? [2:57] On understanding customer value, psychology and finance aspects  [3:13] What do people typically get wrong about pricing, especially in 2022? [4:17] How does he define an effective price? [5:48] How does the entire pricing process work? [8:49] Using the “jobs to be done” framework to understand customer value [12:01] What exactly is packaging from a perspective of a software product? [14:29] Make sure that your offering is clear and the customers understand what might be the best for them [17:00] Have a pricing committee and internal systems for your product  [18:21] How often should companies change their pricing? About Dan Balcauski As the B2B SaaS Pricing continues to evolve, so does Dan. Dan is always passionate about helping businesses optimize their pricing models. He’s always a one-call away when you need help in your pricing endeavors. Link: Product Tranquility  Profile: Dan’s LinkedIn

Mariam Hakobyan is the Co-Founder and CEO at Softr. She’s an engineer turned entrepreneur and has a pang for technology, product, and design. At Softr, she pioneers in building the right product, listening to customers, and building ecosystems for software enthusiasts. She prioritizes the customer’s needs by simplifying software building so anyone can set up businesses without being intimidated by their tech skills. Today, let’s listen to Mariam as she tells how Softr went from zero to 45,000 users in just a year.  Show Notes [0:57] What initially drove her to start Software.io?  [1:56] How did she start exploring different ideas for the platform? [6:01] What did she do to get the product into people’s hands? [9:20] On pursuing user growth and monetizing your product [12:20] The passionate software community, the product’s simplicity, and virality got them from zero to 45,000 users  [18:33] Mariam talks about empowering the community, creating ecosystems and a place for people to thrive [21:53] The importance of being mindful of anything that you add to the platform  [29:04] Understanding what customers value and how much they want to customize? [29:59] Intuition and understanding of the customers on what  types of things are they trying to build  [38:55] Build a great product where people feel like a magician About Mariam Hakobyan Mariam is a graduate of Yerevan State University. Her colleagues highly respect her as she is passionate about her job and is always one step ahead in providing service to others. She started her engineering career in her early 20s and is now a force to be reckoned with in her field. But most importantly, Mariam is now a loving mother of two.  Links Softr.io  Airtable Profile Mariam on LinkedIn

Brandon Leibowitz runs and operates SEO Optimizer, a digital company that helps small to medium-sized businesses in getting more online traffic and converting them into clients, sales, leads and more. He has the experience and knowledge to help people build their websites by performing SEO (search engine optimization). In today’s chat, Brandon will discuss how to take advantage of someone else’s R & D, optimizing your search engine and branding your company’s website to keep up with the trends.  Show Notes [4:09] Think about branding yourself and building trust with people that are coming to your website  [4:30] What are the business lessons that he’s learned throughout the years? [5:50] How exactly does he optimize his SEO? [9:32] The importance of text content [12:14] You have to optimize your website for Google, but you also have to optimize it for people [12:49] How does he exactly bump up his conversion rate? [18:49] Quality backlinks are from relevant websites [19:50] The more significant the website, the more values are they going to pass on [21:18] Key takeaways that he would like to give out to the listeners [21:27] On adding good content to your category pages and the importance of making a good site structure [23:15] To achieve optimization, fix your website and your conversion rates About Brandon Leibowitz After graduating from college with a degree in Business Marketing, he dove headfirst into the business world and landed his first job in Internet Marketing. Now, Brandon is a master in the internet marketing industry. Specifically SEO, Google Adwords, Social Media Marketing, Analytics, and more. His primary goal is to help others learn how to market themselves online and grow their web presence. Links Schema.org SEO Optimizers Profile Brandon Leibowitz’s LinkedIn Brandon Leibowitz's YouTube Brandon Leibowitz's Instagram Brandon Leibowitz's Facebook Brandon Leibowitz's Twitter Brandon Leibowitz's Buzzsprout

Ken Babcock, Co-Founder of Tango and Zachary Dewitt of Wing Venture Capital, is in the show today to give us the nit and grit on how their company achieved 10,000 sign-ups in just less than two weeks. These business connoisseurs will also guide us through how we should target the right buyers and celebrate our end-users success—ensuring that there's connectivity between what you're building and what your customers need. They will also reveal the story behind Tango and how it evolved throughout its first initial launch. Grasp as much knowledge as you can by listening to these two geniuses.  Show Notes [2:12] Tango helps create a flexible documentation tool that allows you to generate documentation for your workflow. And alleviate your maintenance burden. [7:13] On optimizing the right go-to-market [9:23] What other tools is Tango replacing, and what do you need to do for the documentation you are creating? [15:40] The importance of setting up suitable measurement gates and understanding when to know how things are successful [16:31] How does the operation cadence work? [18:18] Being data-driven is important and complementing that with a customer focus [23:00] Why is it essential to be time-bound? [23:47] Honing your most active users in the pilot is key [24:47]On Finding different company sizes and types to understand your customer and your persona [34:49] Sales vs. Product led is different in terms of messaging  [36:12] There's a different approach to targeting buyers and users [39:27] What does it take to have your first successful launch? [45:55] Your end-users success will eventually become your success About Ken and Zach Ken is the CEO and Co-Founder of Tango. Before diving into the world of Tango, he spent more than four years at one of the world's famous platforms, Uber. After learning the depths of entrepreneurship at Atomic VC, he teamed up with his co-founders and founded Tango in 2020.  Zachary "Zach" Dewitt is a partner at Wing Venture Capital. Wing Venture helps founders establish businesses around their ideas. In the company, Zach mainly focuses on enterprise application, technology and product-led growth to propel businesses forward. Links: Wing Venture Capital Tango Product Hunt Profiles: Zach Dewitt Ken Babcock

When you reach that prime of triumph, it’s so easy to count the wins, but what we don’t realize is that it takes years of reinvention to get there.  Justin Dignelli and Peter Zawistowicz are the masterminds behind helping MongoDB drive from sales-led to product-led growth. To give you an overview, MongoDB is an open source database platform that is designed to unleash the power of software and data for developers and the applications they build. In this episode, we got a chance to chat with these two moguls as they look back on their years of helping MongoDB in fortifying its systems, building special product teams and achieving continued success. Show Notes [1:46] The genesis of Atlas: Why did MongoDB start incorporating Atlas? [2:49] What is the main focus of MongoDB? [6:11] What does their initial team look like? [13:03] The benefits of incentives and how it drives people’s behavior? [19:57] How did they come up with their initial wins? [27:20] What are some milestones that contributed to their success? [31:46] What are some of the biggest changes that their sales team has to make to reach their company goals? [33:46] Collaborations and being thoughtful when it comes to making broader changes  [39:33] 5 useful steps in transitioning from Sales-Led to Product-Led About Justin Dignelli Justin is the former Senior Director at MongoDB. He helped in expanding and drove the company towards a cloud-first go-to-market. He also contributed to MongoDB’s transformation into a more product-led growth model plus enterprise sales. About Peter Zawistowicz  The former Growth Marketing Manager at MongoDB. He pioneers in driving demand and growth at product-focused, enterprise software companies (with a specialty in SaaS/cloud). Moreover, Peter has experience with developer-focused programs, product-led development (PLG), digital acquisition, field marketing, and the like.  Links: MongoDB Pace App Profiles: Peter’s LinkedIn Justin’s LinkedIn

Krish Subramanian, CEO, and Co-founder of the leading subscription and billing software called Chargebee, will be sitting in today’s show to answer that question. Chargebee is a global subscription management platform that automates revenue operations of over 4,500 high-growth subscription-based businesses from startups to enterprises across verticals, including SaaS, eCommerce, e-learning, IoT, Publications, and more. Krish and his extremely dynamic mind will be sharing first-hand experiences on how they evolve their go-to-marketing strategy over the years and learn how to straddle sales-led and product-led motions together to drive fast growth. He also talks about the trials and setbacks that they’ve encountered and how they move past those obstacles to generate wins. Shownotes [0:59] Krish talks about their journey of reflecting on their mistakes and wins at Chargebee [1:56] What got them into solving this problem of helping subscription companies understand their business much better? [7:11] The relevance of understanding your subset of customers  [8:42] How do they identify their best customers? [10:36] Getting that value metric and Northstar metric is the biggest revelation for them [15:33] On building more features for your most successful customers [{21:21 Why does he think the pricing is so important to be Product-Led as a business? [25:03] Your end user’s success will eventually become your success  [30:00] Advantages of having both self-service and pre-sales [31:15] How did Chargebee evolve the way they structure their teams? About Krish Subramanian: Krish Subramanian is the co-founder and CEO of Chargebee, a global leader in subscription billing and revenue management solution for scaling businesses. He is an engineer by profession and a problem solver at heart with over 20 years of experience in the software field. As an ex-consultant, Krish strongly believes that business value is defined by service and experience to the customers and the people. He is referred to as the “nice guy” within the company, the tech community, the media, and his mom.  Profile Chargebee Krish on LinkedIn Krish on Twitter

Simon Belak is a visionary; he speaks with outstanding clarity and has a true leader's heart. Working with Metabase has sharpened his skill in product leadership, and today he’ll be sharing his line of work with us and walking us through how he can build high leverage teams for his former company, Metabase. Product leadership has become an increasingly important subject in our field. It focuses on specific challenges on those leading product teams and is accountable for product performance and customer satisfaction. Someone can do this by leading a team with a product-centric strategy. Product leaders progress through creating cross-functional influence, product work, and scale. Listen to this episode, and gain value on Simon’s insights about the topic. Show notes   [3:29] The personal growth that he gets from such a different lifestyle is reflected in his leadership.  [4:27] Simon’s definition of product leadership. [4:47] The fundamental difference between management and leadership. [7:10] Leadership should be fundamentally about enabling people. [8:35] To earn leadership, you have to show that you’re always trying to better your team. [9:57] Taking into account the long-term vision of Product-Led in their company. [11:17] The evolution of leadership at Metabase  [15:23] Metabase created an environment where people can open up their thoughts and feelings without worrying about judgment. [18:39] How do you build a high leverage team? [21:36] How can a person adapt to Metawork? [23:54] The most value starts after you do Metawork in the long term. [26:26] The importance of acknowledging how fast the market is changing. [28:08] Actionable recommendations on developing and implementing new leadership strategies. [28:13] Interaction between company culture and leadership. [28:56] Implementing completely bottom-up and very concrete practices. [31:35] How does Simon get into this business meditative state? [34:50] Don’t think about solutions. Think about the problem harder. Create a hypothesis about the situation and provide solutions on how you can attest to the problem. [36:58] Start with introspection sessions. About Simon Belak During his time at Metabase, his time was split between data science, product leadership, and producing engineering work. Simon brings complex topics and simplifies them so people can understand them better. He is exceptionally customer-focused and helps you go beyond your boundaries by challenging your beliefs. Profile Simon’s Twitter Simon’s LinkedIn

Justin Bauer is known for his expertise in product analytics. He is always one step ahead in helping companies build better products by amplifying their growth. His primary role as an SVP in Amplitude involves creating teams that establish a deep customer understanding and generate inspired visions to produce unique product experiences that users can enjoy. He’s on the show today to share his insights in building excellent product analytics so you can increase engagement, growth, and revenue for your growing company. Show Notes [0:44] Justin’s journey in the institute  [1:47] The most significant milestones, experiences, and learnings along his company journey [3:59] How do we drive growth? [9:00] Shifting balance: How did they shift from product-led to an enterprise? [18:53] Changing the brand of the company as part of going enterprise  [20:33] How has pricing changed for their business? [21:56] Focusing on the product analytics market by making sure to build the best product  [28:25] How do they continue to build an excellent analytics product? [28:56] Make sure to understand your consumers because people want to buy from a company that understands them. [30:44] How investing in high-quality content can produce better results? [32:23] Always start with a strategy in mind [37:04] Understanding the Vision Strategy Roadmap About Justin Bauer Justin Bauer is the senior vice president of product at Amplitude. In his role at Amplitude, he leads product management, design, education, growth, and analytics for Amplitude's Digital Optimization System. Before he joined Amplitude, he was the CEO and co-founder of Rivalry Games, which was acquired by You42 in 2015. Profile Justin on LinkedIn Justin on Twitter Amplitude

Jeff Coyle is the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of MarketMuse, an industry-leading content planning technology. Today, he will explain how community management principles can support product-led growth. Jeff also discusses how community drives “sales-led growth” and the importance of employee advocacy in the success of a community. MarketMuse, his platform, identifies content quality issues and creates a channel for content optimization. Show Notes [1:10] Traditional product management and traditionally trained product managers do not typically come from the land of social media. [5:31] How has the community influenced overall product-led growth? [8:22] The importance of having thick skin is that you can experience what it’s like to have a negative emotion emerge and create more transparent communication. [15:54] Employee advocacy and its social impact [23:18] Key takeaways from this episode that listeners should consider. About Jeff Coyle Coyle is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of MarketMuse. This company assists content marketers in establishing topical authority, improving content quality, and transforming semantic research into actionable insights. Prior to joining MarketMuse, he previously operated his own marketing consultancy and managed the Traffic, Search, and Engagement team for TechTarget, a leader in B2B technology publishing and lead generation. Links Product Led Slack Community Profile Market Muse Email address: jeff@marketmuse.com Jeff on LinkedIn Jeff on Twitter