9 Product-Led Growth Experts to Follow in 2024

There is a huge change in the world happening right now in the way that users buy software.

Companies of all sizes are rapidly making transitions from traditional sales and marketing-led growth to Product-Led Growth (PLG).

Why is it the perfect time to become product-led?

Because PLG makes your end-users experience at first hand the value you're proposing and trying before buying is actually way less risky for them to purchase your products.

Here in this article, we'll go through a number of PLG masters that you can learn all the tricks in the book of Product-Led Growth from and grow your SaaS business:

#1: Wes Bush

Wes Bush is the bestselling author of "Product-Led Growth", and the name and face that has been identified with PLG for over a couple of years now.

Covering the most important aspects of PLG in his book, Wes offers a number of priceless frameworks for the successful implementation of PLG strategies, e.g. Bowling Alley Framework laying out the basics of what an effective user onboarding should look like.

Having also been running Product-Led Summit and Product-Led Podcast, and holding countless webinars going over invaluable PLG concepts, Wes Bush is definitely the most prominent Product-Led Growth master to follow for success.

#2: Aggelos Mouzakitis

Aggelos Mouzakitis, the founder of Growth Sandwich and Growth Product manager at various different SaaS companies, made the difference, a few years ago by being among the very few people globally that introduced Jobs-to-be-done in practice, not just in theory.

Aggelos' secret weapon is not necessarily charts or analytics but mainly the power of empathy and the Voice of the Customer. With a scientific experience in conducting interviews that get into people's minds, he manages to reveal the true unmet needs and get feedback that can totally redefine your saas marketing.

He has worked with very prominent businesses in the industry, from small startup teams to unicorn techs, and recently launched one of the few practical pieces of training on how to perform Jobs-to-be-done research and make use of it to sell and build better products.

#3: Despina Exadaktylou

Being an established Product-led Growth expert and an onboarding strategist that has mapped PLG in her original research a while ago, Despina Exadaktylou is the founder of Product-Led Growth Hub, World’s 1st PLG Academy, which aims to build the first generation of PLG organizations and evangelize their practices across the SaaS spectrum. 

Having been featured in countless Product Led Growth related events, Despina brought PLG in Europe this January, while now she is putting together the academy’s first accelerated training program.

Despina commits herself to indoctrinate PLG practices to a wider usage and redefine the SaaS growth mindset from the Product-Led Growth perspective. 

For those who'd like to get trained on PLG or become part of a close-knit Product-Led community, you will find great deals on Despina's work both on ReinventGrowth and Product-Led Hub. or just apply for one of the academy's training programs.

Here's Despina’s 1st part of the research on Product-Led Growth and Product-Led Onboarding (PLO),.  

#4: Ramli John

Having started his career as a software developer and moved on to growth marketing, Ramli John uses his multi-disciplinary skills in SWD, marketing, and design to help SaaS companies scale their businesses.

Best known in the Product-Led realm for his Product-Led Podcast that he co-hosts with Wes Bush, Ramli is the founder and host of the Growth Marketing Today podcast. As a seasoned PLG strategist, his expertise involves improving activation rates, from both free and trial to paid conversions, decreasing churn rates, and boosting average revenue per user (ARPU).

For anyone that'd like to know more about PLG, the Product-Led Podcast co-hosted by Ramli John would be a perfect start.

#5: Fred Melanson

Because the way we're selling software is changing, and companies embracing that shift are winning big.

Fred Melanson on Product-Led Sales

As one of the top experts on Product-led Sales, Fred Melanson brings a ton of value to sales teams in the software space.

He is a strong advocate of making the necessary changes in the way sales teams work, to help them catch up with the changing patterns in the way we buy software. Spoiler alert: it's all about feeding your sales teams with insights from product usage and marketing data. 😉

Fred regularly posts about PLG and product-led sales on his LinkedIn. But you'll find the most valuable resources he and his team put together on the Youtube channel of Bliinx and their blog.

If you want to make sure your sales team is performing at their best in a B2B space that's strongly invested in product-led growth, give Fred a follow!

#6: Kieran Flanagan

Kieran Flanagan, the current VP of Growth at HubSpot, one of the most prominent marketing and sales software company, is literally a Growth machine.

Having been helping some of the biggest brands in the industry, such as Aviva, SalesFore, and Marketo, Kieran Flanagan too places Product-Led Growth at the center of his practices.

Together with Scott Tousley, another growth marketer from HotSpot, he runs The GrowthTLDR Podcast, examining into how companies making transitions from marketing or sales-led mindset to PLG for explosive growth.

Make sure you check it out!

#7: Eric Keaten

Eric Keaten is the VP of Marketing at Appcues and a prominent Product-Led Growth strategist with more than 15 years of experience in SaaS.

He is especially well-known for his appearance on PLG summit instructing companies on how to build Product-Led businesses, offering great insights into PLG metrics and The Product-Led Growth Flywheel, a proven framework that prioritizes UX for compounding growth.

The concepts thought by Eric Keaten is fundamentally important to build your PLG strategies upon, so make sure you take a look!

#8: Kyle Poyar

For software companies, pricing is one of the crucial determinants of growth.

In Product-Led Growth, pricing has even greater importance. Being the VP of Growth of OpenView, Kyle Poyar has domain expertise in SaaS pricing, instructing companies all over the world how to attract users into their products without friction through free(mium) and bottoms-up sales strategies.

If you'd like to know more about the foundations of PLG and what a correct SaaS pricing strategy looks like from the PLG perspective, Poyar must be in your list of PLG masters to keep up with!

#9: Mickey Alon

Mickey Alon is the CTO and Founder of Gainsight PX, a Product-growth platform, and the former CEO of Insightera, a real-time targeting and personalization platform acquired by Marketo; a real practitioner and the first-hand evangelist of Product-led Growth.

He has co-authored "Mastering Product Experience in SaaS" examining into how to deliver personalized Product experiences with a Product-led Strategy.

To learn the Product-Led Growth concepts in detail and how you can kickstart your PLG strategies, make sure you have checked out on Mickey Alon's work!

In Short

PLG has been a part of our lives for a long time, and I can only assume that it will continue to do so.

That's why getting accustomed to it would be a good step for businesses, especially growth teams; that's where online content where you can learn more about the concept of PLG.

Let me list down the names this article includes:

• Wes Bush
• Aggelos Mouzakitis
• Despina Exadaktylou
• Ramli John
• Fred Melanson
• Kieran Flanagan
• Eric Keaten
• Kyle Poyar

Mickey Alon

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