Product-led Growth: What We Learnt From The Product Leaders Of Top Consumer Brands At The Product Summit 2020

Having worked with multiple consumer internet companies over the past years, we at MoEngage realized that there is a lack of a strong community for Product, Growth, and Marketing functions to learn from each other and share insights. This led to the start of #GROWTH, our very own community for these functions, in 2019.

We conducted our first-ever virtual Product Summit on December 18th, 2020, to help Product owners discover new paths to growth.

Product Managers, Entrepreneurs, and Technologists from all over the world tuned in to learn how to drive Product-led Growth in a consumer-first world. Over the course of 6 sessions, Product leaders from over 15 top customer-centric brands shared plenty of interesting learnings, leading to some very fun questions from the audience as well!

Here are some of the key learnings for Product-led Growth from the Product Summit 2020:

Keynote: Product-led Growth With Anand Chandrasekaran

Speakers:

1. Anand Chandrasekaran, VP, Product Management & Design, Five9
2. Raviteja Dodda, Co-Founder & CEO, MoEngage

In the Keynote session, Ravi and Anand spoke about Product-led Growth. Since Anand has built products in both the consumer and the B2B space in both India and the United States, he spoke about the differences between the two ecosystems.

Anand also shared his approach to defining the product vision, the strategy roadmap, and metrics in a consumer product, by quoting Keith Rabois’s analogy of a successful product:

Building on this analogy, and adding from his own experience at Wynk Music, Anand described what Product-led Growth at a consumer product looks like by taking examples from e-commerce, music streaming, and online payment apps.

In an audio streaming app, ‘time spent on the app’ cannot be treated as a growth metric. A much more impactful metric to look at should be ‘audio playback time’ as users can spend a lot of time on your app just looking for the right audio content to play.

While discussing the importance of collaboration between the Product and different functions (like Marketing or Growth), Anand shared a personal story that taught us that reducing the number of recurring decisions and establishing veto rights is the key to reduce friction while collaborating.

Anand summed up this session by sharing how he picks companies to invest in. After investing in more than 50 companies over 6-7 years, this information was very valuable for the audience!

What Does An Ideal Product-led Growth Setup Look Like

Carrying forward the conversation on Product-led Growth, the next session in the Product Summit saw Product leaders from Grofers, OLX, and Pratilipi discuss the role of the Product function as an important driver of growth and how to solve the hurdles along the way.

Speakers:

1. Vakul Agarwal, Head – Retention, Product & Customer Lifecycle Marketing, Grofers
2. Jasjit Singh, Associate Director – Product & Dealer Experience, OLX
3. Shally Modi, Co-founder & Product Head, Pratilipi
4. Ashwin SL, VP Marketing, MoEngage

The session started off with Vakul, Jasjit, and Shally explaining what Product-led Growth means for their respective products and what they do to achieve Product-led Growth. They also listed down what metrics they track to measure growth, and why. The common, underlying theme in all their definitions was Customer Delight and tracking North Star metrics that solve their users’ problems.

Next, the speakers walked the audience through the process of structuring Product-led Growth teams, and how these teams scale in fast-growing companies. An important learning was how Product Management teams mirror Brand Management teams and why experimenting and proving hypotheses is key to Product-led Growth.

There is no substitute for consumer experience. No matter how big your bank balance is, you cannot buy a consumer experience.

Before wrapping up this session and answering audience questions, Vakul, Jasjit, and Shally shared the challenges and hurdles they’ve faced in their Product-led Growth journeys.

How To Drive Collaboration Between Product, Growth, And Marketing Functions

In this session, Product folks in the audience got to learn how different functions can work together to achieve a common customer-focused goal and how brands can tackle the problems that arise when these functions collaborate.

Speakers:

1. Shivangi Srivastava, General Manager – New Initiatives, Swiggy
2. Nikhil M, Head of Products, Rapido
3. Lijo Isac, VP Product Management, Byju’s
4. Anjan Bhojraj, Head of Products, HealthifyMe
5. Shivangi Boghani, Head of Sales – India, MoEngage

The session kickstarted with Shivangi, Nikhil, Lijo, and Anjan explaining the importance of collaboration between Product, Growth, and Marketing functions in consumer products. By sharing their own stories from fast-growing ecosystems, the speakers went over some of the strategies involved in maintaining successful collaboration and removing friction as teams grow and scale.

Apart from the KPIs that different teams chase within a company, Trust, an immeasurable metric, forms the core of frictionless collaboration between Product, Growth, and Marketing functions.

As Product leaders, the speakers went on to highlight what other different functions they end up collaborating and working with the most to drive successful Product-led Growth. It was interesting to see the evolution of this collaboration with different maturity stages of a product. The key highlight of this session was how different teams at Swiggy, Rapido, Byju’s, and HealthifyMe maintain a common Analytics dashboard and what metrics they look at regularly.

The speakers wrapped up this session by what the future of Product-led Growth looks like at their companies, and what trends are they expecting to see in the consumer tech ecosystem.

How To Leverage User Insights And Analytics To Maximize Engagement

In this session, Product leaders from Rapyd, Samsung, and Housing.com shared their take on how Product teams should rely on user insights and analytics to achieve their North Star Metrics and overcoming Analysis Paralysis.

Speakers:

1. Shivani Mukherjee, Head of Product Solutions – APAC, Rapyd
2. Niraj Bajaj, Director – Product Management, Samsung
3. Sangeet Aggarwal, Head of Products, Housing.com
4. Anand Rajput, Senior Product Manager, MoEngage

Shivani, Niraj, and Sangeet kickstarted this session by describing what user engagement looks like at their respective products, and what key metrics they track to measure growth in engagement. Adding to this, the speakers also highlighted the key milestones in their user’s journeys and what goals are defined for the Product team. It was interesting to see how closely these milestones and goals mimic their user’s buying behavior.

Next, the speakers explained the different growth drivers and breakers for Product teams at Rapyd, Samsung, and Housing.com, and how they leverage analytics and user insights to make data-driven decisions.

Analytics do not mean much without understanding the ‘why’. Observing how your users interact with your product helps teams define better target personas and track more effective milestones.

This session concluded with the speakers sharing a few Product-led campaigns that have contributed to improving engagement scores, and how important analytics is going to be to run similar campaigns in the future.

Everything You Should Know About Product-driven Engagement

Speakers:

1. Arindam Mukherjee, Senior Director – Product, User Experience & Growth, Flipkart
2. Mithun Madhusudan, Director of Product Management, ShareChat
3. Yash Reddy, Chief Business Officer, MoEngage

The penultimate session of the Product Summit kicked off with Arindam and Mithun describe what Product-led Growth looks like at Flipkart and ShareChat, and how it translates to the future of both these companies. The speakers also listed what different metrics they track to measure the impact of Product-led efforts on improving User Engagement.

Arindam and Mithun then explained how the Product teams segment users by creating different cohorts and run highly targeted campaigns to drive more user engagement – language, geography, and user behavior are some of the factors both they consider to create cohorts.

Looking at different cohorts, analyzing their behavior, and understanding consumer psychology helps build an effective growth model to drive Product-led Engagement.

The speakers also shared instances of how automation enabled the Product teams of Flipkart and ShareChat to drive stickiness and retention, and what role technology will play for Product-led Growth and Engagement for them in the future.

A Data-driven Approach To Product Onboarding

The consumer of today takes well-informed decisions before signing up for a product. We found Product Managers asking themselves, ‘How well can I get my users started? How accurately can I predict their behavior inside my product?’. In the final session of the Product Summit, Product leaders from Byju’s, Razorpay, and Paytm shared their thoughts on a data-driven approach to Product Onboarding.

Speakers:

1. Sharavan Tickoo, Lead Product Manager, Byju’s
2. Siddharth Arora, Associate Director – Product Management, Razorpay
3. Prashant Singh, Entrepreneur and Ex-VP – Product, Paytm
4. Nalin Goel, VP – Product, MoEngage

Shravan, Siddharth, and Prashant started this session by defining what an effective onboarding looks like for their users and explaining the importance of a successful onboarding for the Product team. They then deep-dived into how their respective Product teams ensure that their users have a seamless first-time experience on their product.

Your brand may have a glorified vision that the entire company would like to pursue, however for your users, the micro-moments spent on your product matter more. Contextual nudges, seamless experience, and ease of performing an action lead to delightful first impressions.

The speakers also highlighted the importance of data in defining effective product onboarding journeys, and how it eventually leads to better lifecycle management. One interesting learning for Product Managers from this talk was to sign up as a new user for products you’ve been using for a long time (for example, Facebook) to learn the differences between the two experiences.