The State of Product-Led Experience Part Two: Research Overview & Emerging Product-Led Metrics

7 min readAug 26, 2019

This article is an abstract from “ The State of Product-Led Experience” - The most comprehensive research on Product-Led Growth to date. Claim your free copy here

The article refers to the research’s overview, competing product metrics organizations use to assess product experience and onboarding ownership.

Authorship Despina Exadaktylou founder at ReinventGrowth-the Product Experience Agency.

Research Scope:

To uncover the challenges and competing strengths Product-Led organizations employ, we embarked on a mission to define product experience in the SaaS landscape. To achieve this, we surveyed 40 SaaS organizations and interviewed 50 executives who own or lead Onboarding and GTM practices.

The goal of our effort is to map, through real-world examples, Product-Led techniques used and estimate how they affect critical aspects of the customer journey. We believe that our massive data sample and thorough analysis will enable SaaS organizations to align their internal teams and optimize product delivery. Our commitment is to help reshape the SaaS growth mindset via the lens of Product Led practices. The survey’s results directly guide those efforts, and this extensive report will highly reflect on them.

Exemplary Research Participants:

HubSpot, Typeform, Segment, Pendo, Gainsight, Intercom, Drift, Filestage, Appcues, Viral Loops, Chargebee, Vidyard, Lemlist, Supporthero, Salesflare, Close, GoSquared, Autopilot, TravelPerk, Yesware, Receptive.io, and so many others.

Section One: Product-Led Onboarding

Please see The State of Product-Led Experience: Opening Thoughts

Section Two: Assessing Product Experience

To make products competitive and an investment reflecting customers’ expectations, product teams ship feature changes and improvements constantly. The word “agile” is part of their DNA, a quality following the onboarding process too. In-app educational practices introduce those changes on time, flawlessly by providing the right context. Product management should measure those interactions on a day to day basis to reassure they yield the necessary results.

Each department holds a different set of business metrics accountable for the productivity and input to the customer journey. Following this logic, product metrics need to be established and add value to existing KPIs by measuring activation, retention, and engagement levels.

Capitalization on product data, make this possible and delivers insights on every move a user makes in-app. The learnings derived can give a better indication on which user interactions the human involvement is necessary, or the product can pave the way.

On the always online era where the power of a sole user may jeopardize an otherwise “done” deal, onboarding is no longer a process measured insufficiently or lacking personalization. On the contrary, it becomes the single source of truth when referring to products’ capabilities and predicts the anomalies caused by multiple users lacking context or proficiency.

In the foreseeable future, new terms will rise to describe the intimacy levels of the User-Product relationship. The first associated term established so far is the Product-Qualified lead (PQL), referring to prospects that signed up and demonstrated buying intent based on product interest, usage, and behavioral data.

The PQL term is limited to the point where a paid conversion is made. Product managers, need to create unique benchmarks directly associated with onboarding interactions to effectively measure product engagement levels.

Onboarding having as a mission to deliver both initial and repetitive value needs terms like Product Onboarding Efficiency (POE), a term coined by ReinventGrowth, to measure and calculate the effectiveness of its activations. Those calculations can accurately monitor and guide onboarding efficacy on the customer journey.

Depending on which stage of the customer lifecycle a user is in, the POE can be based on four product engagement variables:

Breadth of use: An alternate form of (team) activation, product breadth helps product managers realize the extent a product is being used on an account level. As a product metric, it monitors account health and helps product managers and data owners proactively manage churn.
Depth of use: How extensively product key features are utilized is something that constantly troubles product managers. Onboarding should enable users progressively exploit a product’s features to their maximum extent. Depth of use is about adoption, both on a user and account level.
Efficiency of use: The difficulty level to complete common tasks is a critical evaluation of the onboarding flow. For efficiency to be measured accurately, product teams need to be aware of the total number of users per account who begin a task, versus those who complete it.
Frequency of use: Frequency of use is concerned with how frequently and for how long users engage with a product’s features. Reminding users why a specific feature is there in the first place and how it may further optimize their workflow is also something reliant to onboarding activations.

All things being equal, Breadth, Depth, Frequency, and Efficiency of use form an adoption loop. The loop’s implementation is viable when the maximum number of an account’s users exploit a product by using its features extensively in an efficient manner and repeating those actions frequently.

Again, the decisive role initiating this process is (team) activation. But for the adoption loop to be consistent, on every stage of the customer journey, all four metrics should be considered. Depending on the onboarding strategy at play, the loop is being supplemented by additional business KPIs and parameters.

Section Three: Research Overview

What Affects Product Delivery?

User Acquisition: Acquisition rates, with 43% of participants favoring a freemium and 22% a free trial model

Product Value: Optimized product Value delivery, with 14,5% mean preference across free trial & freemium.

Customer Segment: Whether or not product delivery fits the customer segments served, with 14,5% preference across free trial & freemium.

GTM Strategy: The Go-To-Market strategy, with 14% opting for freemium and 8% for free trial.

16% of Self Serve adopters onboard only sole users.
The majority of organizations onboard both teams and sole users, with 66% and 47% preference on Human Assisted and Self Serve onboarding, respectively.
33% and 11% of Human Assisted and Self Serve adopters respectively focus on Team Onboarding.

Who owns onboarding?

On Human Assisted, Customer Success (76%) and Sales (69%) take ownership. At the same time, Product Management (38%) and Marketing (23%) come last.
On Self-Serve the role is dispersed across Product Management (81%), Marketing (77%), Customer Success (68%) while Sales (40%) come last.
From the human resources’ allocation, it resonates that the KPIs following the two strategies vary.

Those results are not surprising since:

GTM Transition: The industry’s transition towards Product Led practices and discrepancies on GTM practices execution are expected.

Multiple KPIs: A main Product-Led challenge for organizations is that internal teams consider different metrics when evaluating product experience.

Buyer-Seller Dynamic: Increased involvement of customer-facing teams on Human Assisted onboarding is inevitable since strategic decisions need to be taken both by both sides.

High Touch vs. High Tech: The argument implying Self Serve onboarding practices do not apply to Human Assisted still exists. Thus, the minimum involvement of Product Management.

Silos Abandonment

Silos abandonment, Product Led practices bring on the table, will not be achieved until internal teams learn to think as a unified force. The deployment of a unified agenda will bring alignment and clarify which parts of the customer journey may be neglected or falsely handled.

Product Management

Product Management, being the product’s main gatekeeper, should be involved and align with internal teams on every step of the customer journey. This is how product experience will become an intentional effort across an entire organization.