How to Achieve Product Led Growth with Boomi Product Manager Rahul Agarwal

To make sure that everyone knows how, we're kind of facilitating today's roundtable discussion. This is an interactive discussion. It's a 30 minute conversation. We do encourage all of you to keep your cameras on and your audio muted when you're not speaking. You can join the conversation in a few different ways. You can unmute yourself and speak. You can also include a comment or a question within the chat feature, the bottom of your zoom as well as the raise hand option within your zoom. These sessions are also being recorded just for your reference. So without further ado, I would like to introduce Raul Agual and I'm sorry, I think I didn't do that. Great job on your last name, Product manager at boomi. I'll pass it over to you and we can begin the discussion with the group joining us today.

Thanks a lot Lindsay. Are you able to hear me properly?

I am, yep, we can hear you.

And I don't think you butchered my name.

You're kind. Thank you.

Hey everyone, thank you for joining. Good evening. Good afternoon. I'm not sure which part of the world you are joining, but it's going to be a concise session. We have 28 minutes. They told me there's a hard stop in 27 minutes now so I will have content planned with you. We'll talk about how to achieve net growth. I will have some islands of questions in between where I'll stop for if you have any burning question and I'll also try to leave a few minutes at the end for questions and answers. But great to have you here. I always like small groups such as these where we can interact and learn from each other. So as Lindsay mentioned, I am the product manager at Boomi, which is a part of the Dell Technologies portfolio and it's cloud computing platform as a service company. But before we go into how to achieve product LED growth, I want to kind of share with you what is happening in the market and in particular talk to you about the enterprise and technology trends because we want to be grounded in reality before we actually hit the topic of how to achieve product LED growth. And I'm also assuming that we have a good diverse group of people here in the roundtable today with top questions such as how to spark innovation, how to define and plan your go to market and how to even plan for growth. And I will be in the minutes allocated to me, I'll be trying to answer those questions specifically in the later part of the session where we deep dive into how to achieve product LED growth but wanted to start with what is happening in the market. And the first thing which I want to touch is this accelerated creative destruction which is happening in the market right now. What you see in the graph here is the average length of a Fortune 500 enterprise. And just 25 years back you can see that the average age of an enterprise was 15 years. Now that trend is accelerating and Covid is just even accelerating it further with retail and oil. First companies to go. But the big takeaway what you are seeing from here is that no enterprise or business right now is sure of its business model. And what is driving this change, Data is driving this change, which is creating new paradigms out there. And one of the byproduct, or maybe to certain people out there say one of the drivers for this change is cloud computing. The rise of cloud computing, the rise of data and software on demand, which I want to touch next is this is a technology trend which we are aware of. And what you're seeing here in the graphic is that AWS in 2005 or Amazon, I would say in 2005 realized that they had these servers out there they were using. Why don't they rent it out and start the whole all in demand economy for infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and software as a service. Now that was last decade, that was the 2010 circa. We are in 2020. And what's happening right now is that as you can see from the top, there is software everywhere. People like you and me are creating data on a daily basis which is pushing the stack down, which is making this proliferation of software and data everywhere. At the same time you have the actual physical limitations of where to store that data and how to propagate it, which is the metal and the physics which is pushing the envelope up. And what is really happening in this churn is that the action is moving to the platform and that companies are investing to create platforms, companies are investing to buy platforms. And that's what and that is what is fueling the need for product led growth. The takeaway from these slides and share a lot of information here is that yes, there is enterprise disruption happening. So you need to reinvent rapidly because of data, Internet and cloud computing. You have new paradigms. So as entrepreneurs, as leaders of a company, how do you take advantage of these paradigms? And also we talked about Amazon, Google and all these other software firms moving into all verticals in society. So how do you as budding entrepreneurs navigate a market dominant biotechnology players? Which brings me to the definition of what is product led growth. And we will in touch. We will in particular deep dive into this notion of era of the end user. And this is one of my points where I kind of pause for questions. I talked about the need for it. I'm going to briefly go into the definition before we go into the how. But if anyone has any question or doubt for me, please see something come to the chat. Oh, that's Lindsay helping me. All right.

No one, no one has submitted anything in the chat box just yet.

Sure. So let's move on. So let's talk about what do I mean by error of the end user. And so one important notion to take care or to understand here is that sales is now an expansion play or it is fast becoming an expansion play. And that users like you and me are finding products on their own and not with the help of sales. And I'm going to give you a kind of this whole presentation is wrapped around the enterprise software as a use case, but I believe it is applicable to other products and other industries as well. So for example, you have these three product lines which a leading software company out there, Microsoft, is using to penetrate into the cloud computing market. Microsoft is one of those rare firms who have stood the test of time over decades and still in the fortune, I would say top 10 because they have been reinventing rapidly. But it's safe to say that a company like Microsoft has their channels in play. And how customers are adopting these products is that salespeople are going saying that hey, you already own the Windows Server, why don't you use the Microsoft Teams? Or you already have Microsoft Teams, why don't you use Azure Active Directory? But a company which is inventing that rapidly is itself getting disrupted by products which users love and they propagate. So for example, we at Boomi, we use Slack, we use Linux and we use Okta. And I'm here to kind of propagate these products because we found them on our own and we like using them and we propagate that in our community. And that's the tenant or the crux of what product led growth means. To even kind of drive this point through, I want to take a like a few seconds pause and help you kind of go through the definition because the next 15 minutes or so we will just deep dive into how to achieve product led growth. And the most important part of product led growth is that usage and adoption matter the most and that the primary factors of what you say growth are customer acquisition, retention and expansion. This is a definition which many players in the market are working with. So this is an example of what we at BUMI work with and what Open View, an up and coming venture capital firm in San Francisco. So it's kind of a mismatch. It's a mixture of both definitions of what product led growth means. So in the last I think eight, nine minutes, we talked about the why, like why should you even thinking about product led growth. And I gave you a brief definition of what it means and what end user error means. With this, I will move into how to actually start thinking of achieving product led growth. And my way of thinking about is looking at these four tenets which will help you achieve product led growth and starting with product vision, product roadmap, product launch and customer success. Now these are, I would say, tenants which are already there. There are many, many things written on them as well. There are many people talking about this. What is unique here is my own way of expressing how these four things connect with each other and how keeping each one of them is super important as you move ahead with your startup strategy, product strategy, go to market strategy, say what you might want to say about it. The first thing which we want to check here is product vision. Sure, Kim, thank you for the question. I'll try to answer that either through the presentation or maybe at the end. So you have spent time. Sure, go ahead, Lindsay.

Oh, keep going. We can take that question later then.

Sure. So you have spent time, you have decided to join SASTA for the roundtable sessions and you have specifically chosen to come to my session. So I thank you for that. And there is one slide apart from maybe this model which you want to take through is product vision. Because without product vision, there is no circle and the entire model kind of falls on its feet. So the one thing which you want to take away from this presentation are these three points is that first is as a founder, as a product manager, as a product leader, as a marketing leader, you need to hire yourself first in a market which is dominant of players out there with competition. You need to first find your own core competencies, your own passion, your own expertise and your own knowledge which is unique to you. Then and only then can you really form that fundamental thesis of your own product which will drive development. Second is business alignment is after you have formed that thesis, after you have found that core competency, whether it lies within your product or your company, is then it's the time to start thinking about your investors, your market, your team and your consumers. And this is a time when you use that thesis to figure out what are you going to Build, what are you going to buy and what are you going to borrow? Because when you're actually building stuff, it's too late to kind of figure out, oh, I should have really borrowed that stuff and not built it myself. As a startup, the definition of a startup is that you have less resources and so you really don't need to be doing such mistakes like that. So after you have like hired yourself, built a thesis, done the sanity on the market and the investors, the third thing you do is keep that learning mindset going on and keep pushing the boundary of what you have set for yourself and what you have and what, what coalition you have done by talking to your investors and consumers. So the picture you're seeing on the right is Voyager 2. It is right, right now, outside the solar system, sending data to scientists on a daily basis. And I think that's what the spirit of this slide is, is that you don't build your thesis and put it in a folder and look at it. After a year, you keep building it and you keep discovering new things. After you have a good hold on the product vision and what you want to do, then comes the part around product roadmap. You know what you want to do, but now it's time for executing, it's time for delivering. And the first and most important point here is make sure that you're building for humans. What do I mean by that? Like, it's easy to build features, it's easy to copy features and remember why we went around product LED growth, that whatever you build can be easily copied. So if you focus your development on humans, you focus your development on user Personas and their pain points. At a very early stage in your product development, you focus on UX design and make sure that you don't build a feature factory. I think that's the first step for you to actually achieve product led growth. The second tenant to product roadmap is adopt platform thinking. A very easy way to think about platform thinking is short term versus long term. And how I think about short term versus long term is this principle of least common denominator. You need to be building something which is essential to the problem of your users. And the more essential the feature or product that you build, the more long term it can be used. And that's how you're actually moving towards a platform level thinking and not a product level thinking. How this helps you is that with vision, with the right platform thinking, you are able to build the right weapon of choice. Now, in the example of David versus Goliath, David was able to win with a slingshot, so there was a weapon of choice he used. Your product vision will help you not go in a gunfight with a sword. But once you have done that in your product vision, defining what weapon you want to actually create is all about thinking about the platform long term, the lowest common denominator. So you have prioritized Personas, you have prioritized platform thinking. The next step here is to prioritize effectively. And there are many paradigms out there, there are many ways people think about prioritization. But there are two things which I regularly use in my own day to day business is old versus new. That is retention versus growth. Because you will always be in this dichotomy of whether to build products for your own users or for your new users. And I always say that you have to strike a balance, that you can't forget your old customers while building only for the new. And the second way you could think about prioritizing effectively is effort versus impact. So make sure that you're not. If you define something which is highly impactful for your customers and if it blocks your roadmap for a year maybe, then it's not the right use of your time and of your team's time. The last two. So we thought about vision, we talked about roadmap in the last six minutes or so before we move on to questions. You want to talk about product launch. And the first thing we want to think about there is go to market planning. And go to market planning is all about the right messaging and the positioning. So you have to find a spectrum of product market fit. So there would be certain things which only one user like and there would be certain things which most of the users like. Well, you can't really commit yourself to either one of them. And that's what I say is that you have to really find a spectrum where you can really go to market with. And the right messaging, the right positioning really helps in that. And another thing which helps in go to market is thinking step function versus exponential. The vision should take care of the exponential part. But when you are in go to market, you should really think about the next step. Not forget that you really have to go one step to reach that exponential growth. Secondly, invest in partnerships. So customers are pretty demanding right now and we already looked at how they are finding products on their own. So you as a budding entrepreneur or a young entrepreneur or a young company or a young product should always provide the full solution to the customers. And that's why partnerships are Important build what you think you are the best for, but you also give a path to the customer, to how they can find other solutions or platforms out there to complete the customer journey and you're not leaving it out for your competitor to solve that problem for them. And lastly, reduce the time to conversion. I talked about sales and expansion play and and not an acquisition play. So we have talked about, or we thought about freemium versus contract model. That's something which goes into this bucket. Also providing early access, something you should probably think about if you're not already doing it. And lastly, qualifying leads through the product and then passing it onto the sales channel for them to expand and not the other way around are some of the ways you can reduce time to conversion. And you're not spending money on acquiring customers which are really not very good fit for your platform or your own product. So you have built a messaging which is appealing to your users, you have built investment in partnerships and you have tried to reduce time to conversion by maybe giving early access. The last and the most important part which will keep your model alive and running, is customer success. There are three tenants to it. The first is enhancing customer experience. Now you have given early access to of your product to your users. You need to make sure that they have the right support and assistance around it. And you can't really rely on a partner to support your customers. You should be doing that yourself. You should be building a community where users, your users help other users. You should be building training content yourself so that if it's a hard to use product, they don't have to go somewhere else to understand it or they don't stop using it. And lastly, focus on documentation from a very early stage. Whether it's a highly technical product, whether it is an API or whether it is a hardware which you're building, documentation, both internal and external, will help that keeping that customer experience. Secondly, celebrate success. So once you have given early access, once you have enabled them through training, make sure that you are the marketeer for your customers and that you are telling their success stories. Maybe collaborate through user groups, conferences, councils, whatever your budget says. You really don't have to. There are different ways you can do it, but the main point is that once adoption is there, make sure that you are celebrating success because the virality will come from here and nowhere else. Like a slide could give you virality, marketing campaign could give you virality. But if users like me are promoting other users, such as I did for Slack in the beginning of this presentation, that's where Virality probably comes in. The last part is that don't forget about healthy unit economics. We are all aware of exponential growth. We are all aware of we want to go 10x and 10x. See venture capital right now is not needed for setting up a business or running a business. Venture capital right now is needed to scale the business. So these are all the things you should already be doing before you even think about VC Money and customer success will give you that Healthy unit economics will give you the short term cash flow and will be that forcing function in your model so that you're not really shooting yourself in the foot. So for example, I'll take example of SpaceX here. Like SpaceX has a vision to go to Mars, but why are they building a satellite network for Internet? That happens to be their forcing function in the model that they get the short term cash flow make customers happy at the same time maybe in the future fulfill their vision. So with that I think I'm almost on time, five minutes going to start but wanted to kind of wrap it all around. I think it was a very rapid dissemination of information so I hope I was able to portray or convey my point across. But think of these four things whenever you think about product led growth because it's easy to forget about one component while working on the other and let me know how I can help going forward. These are all the things I told you were set in practice and not theory so you can really go and actually free try my product at that link above. You can even reach out to me personally if you have any questions. Lastly, I want to thank the Dell for Entrepreneur program for enabling sessions such as these. So that's what I had for today. I thank again Saster and Lindsay for setting this up and let me know if you have questions. Please unmute yourself and let me kind of see if Kim, your question is answered or do you have follow up questions on that or anything else you want me to kind of get into Right now. The critical success factor to me is customer success as you like. I mentioned that if users are not saying good things about the product then no level of marketing can help in bringing that critical success. And I'll maybe say because this is something which I measure on a daily basis, one is customer sentiment and the other is raw product data, raw adoption data. So if adoption is not going up then there is a big fundamental problem either in your go to market or your product.

We have another question that's come in from James. What if your admin user gives you a 35 NPS. But regular users give you under 30. Which number is right?

When you say admin users, can you give me more context? Like what do you mean by admin users? They're power users. All right. I am a fan of power users. I think I'm little biased towards that they make the purchase because see at the end of the day there are two points here which you need to take care of is remember what I told at the roadmap slide that what you should be building is for your old versus new customers. That how do you want to be prioritizing your roadmap? So the few old users you should be prioritizing your roadmap are the power users. So I would say that the admin users NPS is right. And I would either change my go to market to make sure that I am focusing, I'm getting more of those admin users on the platform, or I separate my budget to deep dive into that minus 30. But I don't mix the two. Thank you man. Thanks Rahul. Or a better and not ask the NPS score from regular users. Well, NPS is a tool. You can ask that with anyone. It's up to you. What do you want to do with that number? So to Kim's question, it could be like if your admin users are really happy, they would be asking other admin users to use your product. Okay, great. So NPS is just a temperature check, but if the problem is there then you'll really get to know it from some other venue I would say. But I really like that question. That's why I like roundtables because this makes me think about my go to market as well. And like do you ask the admins for the reviews on third party sites versus the regular users? Right. If you have it seems like there's two types of users on one's product. So depends on roadmap is super important in making sure. How do you define this? So if in your planning phase you have defined that the primary Persona of your product is X user, then I would just focus on that X user. And given that if you are already building a platform, a platform by definition has multiple users. So you will always have this problem where there will be some users not happy with your platform. Totally. And some users very happy. So there are like a nuanced data you're getting from here. Is that a you're building a platform that there are more than one set of users, which is a good thing. But then how do you prioritize is focusing on the power users and then thinking how you can refine your go to market to either bring more power users or find an adjacent market. I hope that was helpful. Thank you. Sure. But happy to reach out to me. I do this because I'm passionate about it. I like to interact with people such as you and learn myself as well. So if I'm not able to answer your questions, if you have follow up questions for me, just let me know. I think, again, thank you for your time. I believe we are on time. Are you going to.

We're right on time.

All right.

We're right on time. Thank you again for leading this conversation today, Raul. And thank you for all of you for joining today. Have a good afternoon. Evening, everyone.

Thank you, everyone.

Bye. Bye.