"The Playbook to PLG, Dev Experience and Enterprise ARR" with Okta's VPE and Product | SaaStr 2023

Product marketing at Okta. How is everyone doing? Great. Great.

It's between us and happy hour here. Seems like. But this is going to be an interesting one. So let's get started.

Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers.

Developers.

Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers.

Yes.

Okay. I'm Monica Bajaj. I'm the vice president of engineering at Okta and I lead the developer experience product portfolio. And you all might be wondering why an engineering leader is speaking at Saster, which rarely happens. Its founders, VCs, sales, marketing. But the perspective which I want to bring in today is most of the times engineering organizations are focused on delivery and execution, whatever product tells them. And the whole circle fits in best. When as an engineering leader, I'm able to correlate it with dollars, dollars, the full circle comes in and, and that is not possible just by working by myself or my teams. So what I have to do is I need to partner with our marketing folks, sales folks, PLG folks together, in order to understand what the customer requires and at the same time also make sure that I'm working together in the journey of those customers. And that's why I'm here together with Priya today. Priya, why don't you introduce yourself?

Thank you, Monica. Hi, I'm Priya Ramamurthy. I lead platform and partner product marketing at Okta and work obviously very closely with Monica. And why you heard Steve Ballmer in the background was because we are going to talk about plg, Devex and enterprise ARR specifically for developer focused companies. Any of you here in the audience selling to developers. All right, sounds great. Anybody unfamiliar with plg? I'm guessing I don't have to start from the basics. Okay. No, I'm glad to. Okay. Product LED growth, it's been a key buzzword across the ecosystem, I would say for a long time, but becoming significantly more important, especially right now in this macroeconomic climate where you have to spend more dollars in order to get those enterprise customers. So product led growth, if you don't already have emotion, is specifically making sure that your product is the one which is sort of doing that work for you in terms of customer advocacy, in terms of acquisition, in terms of retention, and so on. And so throughout our talk here, we will talk specifically about what is plg, how do you grow that and how do you then scale into enterprise ARR? But before we go there, why are we here? Why are we talking PLG? Well, per McKinsey, product led outperformers generate 10 percentage points higher in ARR and 50 percentage points higher or 50% higher in valuations compared to sales led growth outperformers. So let me just repeat that. Product led outperformers generate 10 percentage points higher in ARR and 50% higher in valuations compared to sales led growth outperformers. So how do we do that? Let me pass that over to Monica to kick it off.

Thank you. Priya. As you heard the famous McKinsey quote Today we are here for a specific reason we want to learn about. I want the audience to remember one word scale throughout this journey and we will cover three important facets. One is how do you scale product LED growth? The second is how do you build a stellar developer experience and still it continues to scale because the user base goes crazy overnight. And the third one is enterprise ARR and who doesn't like whether it's a PLG model or an SLG model, Everybody likes to understand what does it mean to scale enterprise arrangements. So as you know Priya mentioned about what is PLG in plg product is the driver. And when it comes to sales led model, sales led growth, the salespersonnel is very, very important. You may have the best product but if your salesperson doesn't know, the product goes nowhere. So why now? Why are we talking about product led growth today in this world as you know the SaaS market has been ballooning. The market is getting crazy and competitive and the traditional sales model doesn't scale because not every company has all the bells and whistles to fund marketing, sales support and all those things. So we want to focus more on the product led growth and how it can help scale across the board. So first and foremost thing it is very, very important to know your users because your users are basically going to provide the value and measure the value on the product. So important thing is get to know your users. Second is lower customer acquisition costs. And the reason I say is lower customer acquisition costs because your users are going to become your leads if they love the product. If there's a stickiness and engagement in the product, suddenly they become the voice of the product and you don't need as much sales and marketing which you tend to use in sales led model. Realized value. Realized value is the value which the users derive from the product itself. And the more the engagement is there, the more retention is there, the more stickiness is there for the users to hang on to those products. Higher revenue per employee. It is really important. Who doesn't want, you know, I would love to have higher revenue per employee as an employee working for a company and how do you get this? Because you are not investing as much dollars in messaging, in marketing, in building all the big sales teams and that dollar goes back to the employee. And then overall higher customer satisfaction because you are empowering the user in this journey. So as much as you want to empower the user, the customer in this journey, in the PLG model, it leads to higher customer satisfaction. Now if you look at the sales led growth, there's a limited customer feedback because the salesperson is always interested in closing the deals in the shortest amount of time. And the communication between customer and the companies is not as much as it happens in the PLG model. Higher customer acquisition cost, you have to throw in lots of teams around sales and marketing and support and customer success and whatnot in order to achieve that, in order to get and it gets into higher customer acquisition cost overall. And you never know whether the deal is going to close or not. Perceived value, you heard about realized value, but perceived value is all about the subjective assessment that the user derives while they are working on the product in the sales led growth and it's not realized at that point in time. And then risk of overselling. This is one thing which has driven me crazy as an engineering leader all the time because many times my sales folks oversell, overcommit over promise and then suddenly it comes to us and say like we need to Deliver this in 2 months because XYZ customer is asking for it now. We walked through the difference between importance of product led growth and how it compares against sales led growth. It's up to the organizations, what works the best for them. But in current market, in current economy, I would encourage you to look at the PLG model because it definitely leads to a better product, a faster growth and a better TAM across the board. So we would love to hear from you a few things. How many of you are worried about your customer acquisition cost? I would love to see some hands raised if you are truly worried about it. Okay, there are a few hands. What does a stellar developer experience means to you in one word? If I have to ask the audience if they want to say in one word whether you are a user or whether you are a builder of that developer experience. And remember, when I'm talking developer experience, I'm not talking about developer productivity here. I am talking about you are building a product which is solving a specific business use case. Like in my role, I'm building an identity solutions for customer identity cloud, right? So I'm solving a specific business case and I'm building that developer Platform simple, right? That's true. And then how many of you have been exploring the potential of PLG strategies to scale your enterprise arrangements? Great. So definitely this is a topic which is of interest for many of you and we will walk you through certain things here. So let's take a journey in this orbit. As we talked about that PLG is all about where the product that you are building, the you are strengthening the muscle for the product by providing, making it frictionless, building this really great user experience across the board in order for it to be successful. So the first thing is assess. When I say assess, at this point in time, the user wants to know three things. One is what is the product about? The second thing is how does it differentiate? And the third thing is, is it easy to use? Somebody said simple. I'm saying, is it easy for me to use before I touch the product? At this point, the user is a stranger. They are strangers. They are assessing. The second is activate. Okay, now the user is getting into the weeds. They love the product. They are trying bells and whistles of the product. They are also incorporating their user journey. And as a organization, who is building that product, I want to stay in touch with my customer or my user to understand their user journeys, their user behaviors across the board. And I want to bring them closer to the product. And as I bring them closer to the product, they are no more strangers, but they become explorers at this point in time. The third one is adopt. At the time of adoption, what is happening, the user is starting to feel very confident about the product. Product. And they get it like, okay, this is the product which is going to meet the needs of my, you know, my application, my business. And I am going to try all different use cases in this. They start building that trust. And from explorers they start becoming pioneers. And then the next one is amplify. And when I say amplify, what the user is doing is now they have adopted it, they feel good about it. Now they want to try some complex use cases. And in this journey, not only they are trying and amplifying the capability of the product, they are teaching us as a product company, they are also teaching us how far the radius of the product can go. So it's a sharing and learning experience happens here. And at this point in time, your users are becoming experts. So you saw from strangers to explorers to pioneers to experts. And the last one where we talked about the scale earlier is they become your advocates, right? And they become your champions, which is the last part. So with that I'm going to hand it over to Priya to talk about how this magic happens in the funnel.

Thank you, Monica. So when we think about this is the typical enterprise funnel. And of course anybody who's been in marketing and sales, you know, the usual is, oh, the funnel is broken. This is not actually how things go. And that's all true. What we are trying to specifically say here is in a typical enterprise funnel, you go from awareness consideration to finally hopefully buying the product to enterprise ARR. And obviously some of them would have potentially already used it before or would have heard about it, might go into consideration, then go into enterprise ARR. But at the end of the day, all of this is based upon your salesperson doing that stellar job. And it's based on the perceived value they have not really had a chance to really explore your product and really play with it. Now, in contrast, this is the typical PLG funnel. People hear about your product, they probably try it maybe free. You offer up a variety of features which are free enough for them to be interested. Then you offer the next set of products where you potentially can start charging for it. Even so, it's much more nominal compared to say enterprise ARR. And then finally a subset of those customers will continue to sort of go down and say, yes, you know, my company's expanding, I really need this. I've played around with it, maybe done a weekend project, what have you. And. And then they say, okay, now I'm willing to pay a full price for this. Now the important piece throughout this funnel, be that somebody in free self service or all the way down to sort of the premium enterprise to keep track of, is that you always need that healthy funnel. And that is why both Monica and I are here. Because it's about bringing people in at the top of the funnel and some of them just will not make it to the bottom of your funnel because maybe didn't solve their problem, maybe they didn't have the money, maybe this was a side project, what have you. But that's okay. The funnel always needs to be healthy. But here's how it's kept healthy through plg. That's because you've provided them with realized value. They've had the opportunity to come and play with your product throughout this life cycle. So let me take a step back. So at the beginning of this talk, we said, hey, we are here specifically to sell to developers. And I started my career as a software developer. So let's talk about what does a software developer look like when that person is a user and buyer. And I Say this with a lot of empathy. And it's also somebody like myself, right? Once a software developer, in some ways, always a software developer. I am skeptical today as a product marketer, when people come to sell me anything, my first thing is like, hmm, what does this actually do? Show me the value first, right? I don't believe in somebody just selling me marketing material, really, because quite frankly today I do that for a living. So what do I really care about? Well, is it going to solve my problem? So are they really telling me and helping me solve that problem? And quite frankly, if I'm a developer, I think I can do this myself. So if somebody is going to try and sell me a developer product, not just does it need to be stellar, but it needs to be significantly more efficient. It really needs to solve my problem. Because if it's not better than me building my own, why should I buy that? The other piece is, hey, as I'm a larger enterprise, if I'm a developer, I have to have many other considerations. Does this integrate with all the other technologies that my company has invested in? Because then we are talking about a much larger scale problem. It's not just about solving that one piece within that larger area that I'm trying to resolve for. And then as a developer, how do I learn? Like I said, hey, I'm skeptical, right? So I learn from my community. It could be a Node JS community, it could be a Python community, it could be a specific community like in our case around identity. But it's about developing those advocates who are neutral. So I would much rather listen to somebody who's a neutral person rather than marketing. And finally, I'll adopt only if I can try it myself. So now how does that happen? Yes, we're going to provide that free self service. We're going to do all of these pieces. But along that journey, what's really important is that you provide the right level of documentation and that you make it easy for me to adopt so that I don't have to get on the phone either with a salesperson or get on a zoom call. Because that's not something that I want to do. Especially as we all know, there's many here who are developers or started somewhere in that journey. Okay. And as we know, we could be doing projects at 11 o' clock at night. There's nobody here to take a call at 11 o' clock at night most of the time, right? So these are sort of the pieces to keep in mind when you're actually selling to developers. Think like them now in order to help you understand how to scale, I'll pass it back to Monica.

Thank you Priya. We started with product led growth and we started with how to scale. So we went through the orbit. Now I'm going to show you some of the key elements which you need to keep in mind when you are scaling your plg. If you have a PLG model already in place, something to think about understanding your users, it comes full circle. No matter what stage you have your product led growth model in understanding your users is really important. Understanding what value you are bringing in and most importantly it's not one time, it's a continuous cycle, continuously. You are aligning with your user base to understand. As the market needs are changing, the user behaviors, the user journeys are changing. And we see this in identity where identity is changing drastically. The needs of the users are increasing, the complexity is getting more and more when they need the way of recovering their email or their passwords through multiple methods. So we have to constantly align with them to understand what the user needs. The second thing is compelling product. When I say compelling product, the messaging which comes across has to align with the value of the product itself. Because if the messaging is not correct, the purpose is not explicit, the product goes nowhere. And it's important. There are few things to keep in mind. One is user satisfaction. Is the user satisfied? Does the user feel good about the product? Is the product solving the needs of the user? So that's where the user satisfaction comes into picture. As the needs of the user gets fulfilled, suddenly the confidence builds in and that's where the confidence part comes in. And overall the value which the user is provide, the product is providing is really, really important. Now the combination of the value, the satisfaction and the confidence builds together the trust. And when the trust gets built it is really important that the received value comes into picture which we talked about. The third one is monetization. Now how do you monetize it? Right? So as Priya talked about the funnel, that is one way of monetization. But remember the realized value which you're bringing on the product has to turn into a customer lifetime value. And that's where the key magic happens. The aha moment happens when the activation start. And remember when you are building developer focused products, as I mentioned earlier, the user base, if your application is like, you know we had like OpenAI is a classic example. Everybody knows the usage of OpenAI went drastically up, right? So like those applications, you know, the usage can go skyrocketing at any point in time and you have to make sure that your systems are able to handle it. And the last one is channel. We talked about how the users can become your ambassadors and advocates. This is where the magic happens. The channel increases as the users start talking about how awesome the product is, right? And they become your leads and on top of it. That's one way of channel. The other is in your product. You are also providing the capabilities to integrate with other third party as well because you are solving a specific business case. But remember, like for example, if someone wants to solve an identity solution, they work with us, they get this, the identity part. But at the same time, if they want to integrate with Stripe for payment, they we need to be able to have that. So the API first mindset really helps in building that external channel as well. So with that let's jump into what is developer experience. We talked about plg, we talked about why and how and the processes and the players. I want to focus more on developer experience. Now the next topic. So when it comes to software development itself, as a software developer I have been in software development all my career. There are three key pillars which are really important for me when I am building our developer experience focused product or I am being a part of buying something which is focused, which is as a developer, I want to use it. The three pillars are usability, findability and credibility. The goal here is to build that stellar developer experience nice and tall. Sitting on these three elements. But how do you do that? I want you to understand one acronym which we are going to talk about which is called as few. And when I say few, it's fast, easy and works. A few things take us far. And everybody knows this is a saying, but it applies here as well. Do few things which are really really good which are going to make the product, solve the critical business use cases and make the customer really happy rather than spreading all over the place is going to be really, really important. It will unlock lot of opportunities. So let's talk about fast. What does fast means when we talk about developer experience? So fast first is onboarding. You touch the product, you want to onboard smoother, you want to have a faster onboarding, a smoother, a frictionless onboarding which is really important. Now when you are building developer focused product, it's a little different. Of course you want onboarding smooth and faster than any product. But in developer focused products you have to understand the Personas. You will meet all kinds of developers. There are developers who are like no code, like one click experience. They just want building blocks. Hook it up and the magic happens. The second one is low code where they want some code which is able to integrate nicely with their own applications and they're able to make some tweaks and they're good to go. Then there are pro code developers who say like okay, great, I get this code snippet, but I'm going to customize it, I'm going to add my code on top of it so that it meets the needs of my workflows which I want to build. So that's really important. So you need to have all these three Personas and you still need to make it smooth and fast and easy for people. Flexible. When we talk about flexibility, it is all about are you supporting multiple languages, are you supporting multiple locale, Are you having all kinds of bells and whistles which are needed in terms of making can I do observability in my product? Can I look at logs and metrics and understand what is going behind the scenes? So that is the flexibility we want to provide. And then quick integrations like any third party integrations, any API integrations which you want to build through the product has to be there because that's where the richer marketplace comes into picture. For developer focused products, the next one is easy. As Priya mentioned about stellar documentation. Why do you need a stellar documentation? It's important because it helps in increasing our case deflection. It helps our customer first teams sit tight and focus on customers rather than dealing with these incorrect documentation. Also, the documentation has to be quick and easily searchable because we all write documents. But is it easy to search? That's really important. And then it is a live document so it's constantly being updated. And I know in developer experience what we are building in customer identity cloud we focus a lot in terms of making sure we have tagging and we have quick search on our documents so if a user is stuck they can easily refer. This is where the self service comes into picture. Great support. When I say great support and I touched briefly on self service, it is not just through documentation but a lot of times we build certain tools for our customer first teams in the product itself so that when they get stuck they can take the benefit of the product and support their customers rather than opening all the tickets for engineering which is very, very heavy on the engineering as well and very expensive. So that's really important. And then establish patterns like reusable code. Snippets are always coming in helpful. If we can provide those as a good starting point, it becomes much easier for our users and Then the last one is works. I'm sure each of you who have built software or who are building software, these are no brainers. When I Talk about available 4Nines is the basic table stakes at the moment. Customers are asking for five nines which means you need to be able to handle the system if the disaster happens, right? So you need to have proper disaster recovery mechanisms, you need to have fault tolerant, you need to make sure your services are up and running even if they're running in degraded mode, but they should be available. So these are really, really important. And then measuring all the SLAs around uptime is really important if you want your product to be really, really stellar. Predictable when I say predictable means a really solid observability. Mechanics have to be in place. I am able to see the insights or get the insights on how am using a product or how my product is being used. Remember, I'm playing a role of a buyer and a seller both at this time. But when it comes to predictability, I want to be proactive. When I'm a seller, I want to be proactive before customer opens a case, right? I should be able to understand what is happening in the system and what actions I can take and then scalable and secure. When I say scalable and secure, what I mean is you need to build. If you are a developer building a product, you need to make sure that you are looking at scale right from the beginning. You may not be scaling at the moment, but the architecture and design which you're building has to keep scale in mind. That's one. The second thing is security. Now we know that in earlier days security used to be like afterthought, like okay, we'll build the product, then it will go through the testing and we'll figure out if something happens. But nowadays secure by design is the first principle. Make security folks partner with you right from the beginning when you are doing all the planning and design and system design of your product because it hurts pretty badly if you touch it in a later stage, especially the compliance pieces. So with that I'm going to hand over to Priya to talk more about how to scale from a sales perspective.

Thank you Monica. We talked a lot about plg, we talked about Devex and now when you want to sort of scale into enterprise ARR, think about what does this product LED sales look like and what should you build for. And you know, hopefully this came across but if it didn't, let me just repeat, this is PLG and enterprise ARR, the two funnels are not mutually exclusive. Hopefully what you have is a PLG funnel which leads to enterprise arrangements. But then you could also have a separate funnel which is purely just enterprise ARR, which is running at the same time. So just to level set, those are not mutually exclusive. Now when you think about, okay, you need to scale to the enterprise, what should you build? There's so many things that you can do and what do you do? So if you want to become an outperformer within plg, here's a chart which sort of could help you sort of align that. Well, you need to have the value added features which drive up your usage. Well, how do you know which of these features are going to be value added? You talk to the customer. Monica talked about get to know your customer. This involves things like doing surveys, having that regular customer base, having those advocates who are actually telling you what's important, always serving the market, always what's actually happening in the competitive environment. All these pieces should basically give you that input that you need to figure out. What are those value added features that you need which are really going to drive up that usage? What you want to really see is that adoption. Now there's another piece which I'll talk about which is your usage is high. Great. But then especially in this macroeconomic climate, how do you make sure that what you're selling becomes mission critical as opposed to nice to have? Now, whatever you've built, it could be anything from a productivity product to a security product to what we have is an identity product. Right? But what you build, think about what can you add if your product isn't already there, which essentially generates revenue for, for the customer. That's when you actually become from a nice to have or a productivity cost efficiency type product to becoming more mission critical. So these are pieces to think about because this could really change the trajectory of where your company is today and help you make that leap from being PLG and having a healthy customer base to really driving up enterprise arrangements. And I'll come to now how to make this happen. Okay, maybe you have found that golden bullet right now when you think about an enterprise sale you were initially selling to the developer, the chain of command there essentially becomes that VP of Engineering and that cto. And depending upon sort of what your product is, there are a variety of other influencers. There could be the ciso, there could be the cio, potentially even the cmo, the Chief Digital Officer, who all become important players within that play when your salesperson is trying to make that pitch. So what I'VE laid out here is each of these folks has different incentives within that enterprise company, right? That's VP of engineering. It's the same. It's the time to market. We've talked a lot about integrations with existing technology investments that they've made and this becomes even more important when you start selling into the enterprise. So APIs, right? Performance and scalability that Monica talked about, the CISO, it's obviously security and compliance. But in this day and age, data residency, especially as you sell to global companies, not just here in North America, but all over the globe, how does your product at least adhere to, if not enable that? If you're talking about the cio, that person needs to be a good partner across the the business. And so what are you doing to help them from a cost efficiency standpoint, from an IT modernization standpoint, if you have a feature of your product which enables sort of that CMO and cdo, that becomes a real game changer. Now it is a different sell. But think about it from the perspective of you want them to help influence that sale. Because a CMO or a CDO is always looking for how do I grow my customer base and how do I retain them. So if your product can do something to help that VP of engineering be a good partner with that CMO and cdo, that could be an additional play. Now does that increase your sales cycle? Sure. But at the same time it also helps make more allies across the enterprise. So these are pieces to sort of think about in terms of what do you build and how does your sale and the sales process actually change once you start selling up market. Now of course there's a variety of other players and we're not going to talk about all of them. But what you see on this outside arc is everybody from investors and analysts and competitors who also have that year of your potential customer, your prospect. And then of course there are internal folks, be it sales and marketing, be it engineering, Devrel and so on. Again, this depends upon sort of what your product is and who the different buyers and the influencers can be. At the end of the day though, the few model works absolutely. When you're looking at enterprise ARR, it needs to be fast, it needs to be easy and it needs to work right. Time to value still is important. Flexibility is absolutely important. There's documentation, established patterns, scalability and performance become even more important depending on what your product is. If you're selling to a retail client and if your product breaks down on a Black Friday sale, that could be the end of that sales cycle and not just that it will spread in the industry. So this is where performance, reliability and scalability become exceedingly important. Now the other piece which I'll touch upon is a little bit more organizational. As you think about growing your company, what does your customer success look like? Obviously we talked about developing that advocate community, so that's important. Documentation is important, especially when you're top of the funnel. But as you start selling more into the enterprise, think about expanding into having a digital technical account manager, a digital tam, and then think about specific resources for premier support. Now of course in this day and age, you don't have to do all of this by yourself or you don't have to hire personnel. And this does not all need to come out of pocket in the sense of a specific resource. But obviously we use tools, gen AI to help you along in that process. Things to keep in mind as you sort of scale to enterprise. And you know, the other piece, you know, it would be remiss of us not to actually say this. PLG is a different model. It is a model where the culture of your organization is exceedingly important. This is why here we have Monica and me who technically don't necessarily talk to each other in most other companies, but are here on stage together representing this. Do you have a culture? Have you set that culture of experimentation, of being able to fail fast, of being age agile in your development and saying okay, this didn't work, that's fine, move on. So think about the culture that you're setting as founders across your organization. And we talked about this. What do your users think? What does your customer think? What's that feedback loop that you have few things to keep in mind as you think about growing and moving into that enterprise ARR in PLG driven companies. To talk a little bit more about mindset, I'll hand it over to Monica.

Thank you, Priya. So Priya touched upon the cultural aspect of the organization, but I want to touch briefly on the mindset and we discussed about it. It's really important to listen and empathize with your customers, users and across the board because that brings the value proposition for your product. Share and learn is really important because you are aligning with them, working with them in this journey journey which is going to help not only shape your product but also shape their ultimate needs as well and then prioritize and execute. We worked on the few concepts, you cannot do it all and many companies are at different stages. So it's really important what you pick, whom to sell, what to sell, how to sell, whom not to sell. Those are really, really important. And collaboration is the key. You know, Priya and I collaborate a lot and that's why that is our foundation that builds that trust. Before we end this talk, I want to leave you all with few key takeaways for each of these sections. Number one is plg. Remember, user is the key, the value is the muscle. So you remember that because without that the PLG function is not going to work well. Product is the driver and then data driven iteration means you're constantly getting feedback from the users. Devex how to build a strong and stellar developer experience is the fast model. The fast, easy and works. That's really, really important. And the third one is enterprise ARR, which means you need more influencers in the sale, you need more voices. The product has to be really, really viral. And that's the key thing. Expand on the realized value, the value which the product is bringing. Build on top of that. That's going to be the key. And then prioritize with few because you cannot do it all. But pick the right battles in order to make the PLG model successful. Thank you so much. And we are open for questions. We also have an okta booth in Saster, so definitely if you want to visit, we will be there as well. If you have any questions, go ahead.

Firstly, thank you so much for such an insightful talk. So we are the founders of Typo and we are building a DevOps intelligence platform. So this was really kind of gold for us.

Okay, thank you.

So one question for you Monica. So any specific product, especially in our domain, Right. We would want leaders, managers, developers all to be a part of that product. But in the end the money or the buying decision comes from someone as a VP of engineering, for example.

Correct.

What really makes you take a decision that which product to use and how do you actually get to know? Hey, okay, this is the product that we would want to kind of go ahead buying and using it in teams.

Fair point. The way I do normally is if I talk to a founder, I always want to get a very simple message and not like, you know, overselling. That's really important. Tell me what works and what doesn't work. The second part, if I'm convinced, I work with a smaller group of developers in my team because they are going to be the users, I'm not going to be the users. So I want them to experience that and give me that honest feedback whether it is going to make them productive. Right. I hate to buy an additional tool and keep it on the shelf, which many big companies go through this. And then it's a hodgepodge. So very, very important before you buy a tool, is it. Or before I introduce a new tool, I want to see the people who are going to use it. Is it helping them or it's an additional overhead for them. But the second thing is lot of time developers have the tendency, oh, I will build it, not buy it. Right. That's where you have to. As a VP of engineering, what I remind them is what is your core expertise, what is your core business? And in my case, identity is the core business. Why I'm going to build DevOps solution. Right. So this is the messaging where I come into picture to convince them and bring them on board. Perfect. Yeah.

And if I can add one more piece, you know, I'll bring back pieces of marketing lens to things. So you can take it or not. But so the customer identity cloud, which is part of okta, which is sort of where Monica and I work, which is. It was an acquisition and the company was called Odd Zero. So as history I worked at a competitive product. Now I'm maybe like seven years ago. And I remember and Odd Zero was a super small startup at the time. And I remember seeing, I was like, oh, I'd heard about this Odd Zero. I'm like, what do they do? Let me go check it out. And I had seen their website and this is back in the day where you didn't have great video resources and or as a smart app, you just didn't have the money and the resources to make it. And there was this video with Harvard Medical School where they are talking about how they sold to Harvard Medical School. But basically the person on the other end was the IT guy, right? Or the developer who had actually used it. And then he is talking about, as an advocate, he's talking about, oh, I did this and I did that and otherwise it would have taken me so much time. So think about that advocate piece because that is something to sort of even get time with somebody like an engineering leader like Monica. You're like, yeah, you sold maybe to the lead developer, but then how do you get to Monica? So you need to have some of those resources. So use those advocates to do that.

Perfect. And I think this one's for you. So how do we market folks like Monica?

Well, I already sort of responded a little bit, but you know, I'll talk about this in a few different lenses. It's interesting. So we have another person or a few people who actually work with us. But in, in a typical sort of developer LED sort of company, you have a section of the company which is called DevRel or Developer Relations. Right. And historically not necessarily true anymore, but historically devrel is the one in these sort of developer focused companies which is the piece of the company which actually really first starts even before product marketing. And what do they do? Well, they are the ones who have the ambassadors and the advocates depending upon your company sort of all over the world, but who are literally actually going into these communities. The Node JS community. In our case it was like the identity communities and just talking about it and they're just making videos. Oh, I did this. And in our case, right, you're writing code scripts. Hey, here's a code script. If you want to do xyz, if you want to do abc, you know, whatever it is. So think about that sort of marketing and more importantly, sort of where you would place it would be whatever the communities that are important for your user base. I would start there. But also then think about, you know, from a product marketing lens, what's the message that you want to actually land? What's the value driver such that once it comes to a leader like Monica, then she's like, okay, she's thinking money and dollars and people in efficiency. The guy who's actually going to do it is thinking, oh this is so cool. Right? And then you have to sell to that person saying not does that solve this problem? Because otherwise then the developer is like, oh, this is no big deal. I can do that. Like two nights I won't sleep and I'll just get it done. But it's about saying, hey, this is the other pieces of our product which you may not be able to do and or suddenly this project is going to balloon.

Perfect.

Thank you so much guys. Thank you.

Thank you.

You're welcome. I'm so sorry.

Quickly to interject, I work with Priya Monica at Okta. If you guys want any more information on plg, you could just raise your.

Hand and I'll scan your badges.

We'll just be sending you information on plg, not Okta. So you just raise your hand, I'll come by, I'll scan you. Stay where you are.

Thanks again for that amazing talk. We actually have a few customers using us for knock integration. So nice. Got to experience the, I guess that whole process. So we're company so kind of PLG by default. One thing that I've found is that there are oftentimes like a team will bring us in the way they Think is extremely different from how the executive thinks, which is very different from how the mid market or middle manager thinks. And there's a lot of moving parts and sometimes I feel like people almost like don't make a decision not because they shouldn't, but because they don't even know how to like get for an organization. I feel like there's product marketing and content, but I can't write 5,000 pieces of content to do all that. How do you prioritize? How do you kind of. Do you have any just general tips of how to kind of navigate kind of a complex sales cycle when you're only like 20 people?

For you, for her or for me.

I can talk a little bit and you know, I'm sure you'll have thoughts too.

But.

Yeah, I think there's. So from a pure sort of a marketing lens I would think about, okay, who are the one to two Personas maybe within that sales cycle? If it's the middle manager, where do they go? They could be on LinkedIn, they could be on other forums, what have you, and talk about the value that you're able to drive. So totally understand you have very few resources, so think about what is it? And actually I would poll them and ask them where is the decision problem actually happening? Right. Maybe it's they're not able to get the time or they're not able to articulate it. And maybe you do have a champion in a particular company. What do they need? So I think it's much more about asking them and then building accordingly and then saying, okay, this is probably a theme that you're hearing, so as a result you'll build this way. I would go down that path to really figure out sort of where the friction point is.

Time is over.

Yeah.

We are happy to answer questions outside because I think they want it for the next talk. But thank you so much and we really appreciate you coming.

Thank you.