Product Led Growth (PLG) integrates the development and sales efforts of a product company (for background, see my introductory note on PLG). The product and your website are the primary ways you communicate with customers and the fastest way to demonstrate value. The goal is to accelerate the time for users to see value, increase the stickiness of the product gradually, and grow product evangelism. Companies should do an ROI analysis that compares lots of small deals against fewer and larger deals.
The EdTech market is very challenging because the procurement process is convoluted. Finding customers is difficult because there are at least a dozen teacher personas based on the grade and subject they teach, their students, the type of school, and their proficiency and outlook on technology in the classroom. Within the context of EdTech, PLG should influence product development to add or modify features that reduce friction across all personas and product adoption stages (see diagram below). Make the product attractive for all user personas to drive adoption across the school and make it an indispensable tool.
What features to add? You aren’t selling a product; you are selling an experience. Prioritize improving the UI/UX before adding new features. Don’t add more features until the existing ones are being broadly adopted. Jamming more features into a product may alienate some user personas and it will increase training costs. If you are considering adding premium features to the product, consider packaging them as a premium module or selling a separate product that solves an adjacent problem for teachers.
