This is Part 5 of my 6-part series on business literacy for DevRel. Start with Part 1 if you missed it.
We've covered sales, marketing, and finance - the three core business functions you need to understand. But there's one more concept that ties everything together, and it's especially critical if you work at a developer tools company or any company with a self-serve product: Product-Led Growth (PLG).
If you've been around tech for the past five years, you've definitely heard this term thrown around. And if you're like most people, you might have a vague sense that it means "the product sells itself" but aren't totally clear on what that actually means or how DevRel fits in.
This is the missing piece. Because understanding PLG fundamentally changes how you think about the relationship between DevRel, sales, marketing, and product.
What Product-Led Growth Actually Means
Product-Led Growth is a go-to-market strategy where the product itself is the primary driver of customer acquisition, expansion, and retention. Instead of relying heavily on sales teams to convince people to buy, the product experience convinces them.
Think about how you adopted tools like Slack, Figma, or GitHub. You probably didn't talk to a sales rep first. You or someone on your team just started using it. The product was good enough that you kept using it. Eventually you needed more features or more seats, so you paid for it. Maybe your whole company ended up adopting it, even though it started with one team.
That's PLG in action.
In a traditional sales-led model, the sequence is: Sales → Trial → Adoption → Payment
In a product-led model, it's: Product → Adoption → Payment → Sales (maybe)
Why PLG Matters (Especially For Developer Tools)
Developers hate being sold to. You know this. I know this. We all know this.
Developers want to:
- Try things before buying
- Evaluate on their own terms, not on a sales rep's calendar
- Get hands-on experience without talking to anyone
- Make technical decisions based on actual experience, not marketing claims
This is why so many successful developer tools companies use PLG. It aligns with how developers actually want to evaluate and adopt tools.
Companies like Stripe, Twilio, HashiCorp, MongoDB, and countless others have proven that PLG works incredibly well for developer products. And it's a model where DevRel can be absolutely critical to success.
The PLG Funnel (It's Different)
In a traditional sales-led company, the funnel looks like:
Awareness → Lead → MQL → SQL → Opportunity → Customer
In a PLG company, it's more like:
Awareness → Sign-up → Activation → Active Usage → Power User → Paying Customer → Expansion
Let's break down these stages:
Sign-up: User creates an account. This is easy - usually just an email address. The barrier is intentionally low.
Activation: User completes the critical actions that demonstrate they "get" the product. For GitHub, this might be creating their first repository. For Stripe, it's making a test API call. This is often called the "aha moment."
Active Usage: User is regularly using the product and getting value from it. They've integrated it into their workflow.
Power User: User is deeply engaged, using advanced features, bringing in teammates. They're getting significant value.
Paying Customer: User hits some limit (features, usage, seats) and converts to paid. Critically, this often happens without ever talking to sales.
Expansion: Customer uses more features, adds more users, upgrades tiers. Again, often self-serve.
Where DevRel Fits in PLG
Here's where it gets interesting for you: DevRel is absolutely critical at almost every stage of the PLG funnel.
Awareness Stage
This is classic DevRel territory. Your conference talks, blog posts, podcasts, social media presence - all of this drives awareness. The difference in PLG is that you're not trying to generate leads for sales; you're trying to get people to sign up and try the product.
Your call-to-action isn't "talk to sales" - it's "try it yourself right now."
Sign-up to Activation (The Critical Gap)
This is where a LOT of PLG companies struggle. People sign up, poke around, don't understand the value, and leave. The activation rate might be 20-30%.
DevRel can massively impact this through:
- Great documentation that gets people to their "aha moment" fast
- Quick-start guides and tutorials
- Sample projects and templates
- Video walkthroughs
- Office hours where people can get unstuck
You're essentially reducing time-to-value. The faster someone gets value, the more likely they activate.
Active Usage to Power User
Once someone is using the product, DevRel keeps them engaged and helps them go deeper:
- Advanced tutorials and use cases
- Community where they can learn from peers
- Content about best practices and patterns
- Events and workshops that teach advanced features
You're helping users get more value from the product, which increases stickiness.
Power User to Paying Customer
This conversion often happens naturally when users hit limits, but DevRel can influence it:
- Case studies showing how others use paid features
- Content that highlights the value of premium capabilities
- Community members sharing their experiences with paid tiers
You're not selling, but you're helping people understand when and why to upgrade.
Paying Customer to Expansion
DevRel helps customers expand their usage:
- Training on enterprise features
- Best practices for scaling
- Community connections that show what's possible
- Advocacy that keeps them engaged and excited
PLG Metrics That Matter to DevRel
In a PLG company, the metrics you care about shift a bit:
Sign-ups: How many people are creating accounts? Your awareness activities drive this.
Activation Rate: What percentage of sign-ups reach the "aha moment"? Your onboarding content affects this.
Time to Value: How quickly do users get value? Your documentation and tutorials impact this.
Product Qualified Leads (PQLs): Users who have demonstrated high engagement and fit the profile for conversion to paid. This is PLG's version of an MQL.
Free-to-Paid Conversion Rate: What percentage of free users convert to paid? Your content about premium features influences this.
Net Revenue Retention (NRR): Are existing customers expanding their usage? Your community and advanced content affect this.
Community Engagement: Active community members are more likely to convert and expand. Your community building directly impacts this.
The beautiful thing about PLG is that DevRel activities have clearer, more direct metrics. You can often see: this piece of content led to X sign-ups, Y of whom activated, and Z of whom converted to paid.
The Sales-Assist Model (PLG + Sales)
Here's where it gets nuanced: most PLG companies still have sales teams. They just work differently.
In a PLG company, sales typically does one of two things:
1. Sales-Assist for Expansion: Free users become paid users on their own, but when they want to expand significantly (more seats, enterprise features), sales gets involved to help close bigger deals.
2. Land-and-Expand: Sales might not touch small deals at all, but once an account reaches a certain size or shows certain behaviors, sales reaches out to help them expand.
This is sometimes called "Product-Led Sales" - sales that's triggered by product usage signals, not traditional lead gen.
What This Means for DevRel in a PLG Company
If you work at a PLG company (or your company is moving toward PLG), your role is even more critical:
You're a growth driver, not just brand building: In traditional sales-led companies, DevRel is often seen as brand/awareness. In PLG companies, DevRel directly impacts the metrics that matter - sign-ups, activation, and conversion.
Documentation and onboarding are strategic: These aren't afterthoughts; they're core to the business model. Investing in great docs isn't nice-to-have; it's mission-critical.
Community is a growth engine: Active community members are more likely to convert, expand, and bring in new users. Community building isn't just feel-good work; it's a competitive advantage.
Your content directly impacts the funnel: That tutorial you wrote? It's not just TOFU content - it might be what gets someone from sign-up to activation. That's directly impacting conversion.
You work more closely with product: In PLG, the line between product and go-to-market blurs. You need to work closely with product teams to ensure the product experience supports the PLG motion.
PLG Changes the Business Literacy Conversation
Remember all that stuff we talked about in earlier posts about explaining your value? In PLG companies, it's often easier because the connection is more direct:
To Sales: "DevRel is filling the top of the funnel and helping users get to PQL status faster, which gives you higher-quality accounts to work with."
To Marketing: "DevRel is driving sign-ups and activation, which are our primary growth metrics. We're also reducing time-to-value, which improves our conversion rates."
To Finance: "DevRel investments directly correlate with sign-up growth and activation improvements. Here's the data showing how tutorial usage maps to activation rate."
To Product: "DevRel is hearing user feedback at scale and seeing where people get stuck in the onboarding flow. This intelligence helps you improve the product experience."
The Dark Side of PLG (That Nobody Talks About)
PLG isn't magic. It has challenges:
The Free User Problem: In PLG, you have tons of free users who may never convert. Supporting them costs money. DevRel needs to help free users get enough value to convert, without providing so much support that it's not sustainable.
Activation is Hard: Most people who sign up for a product never activate. This can be demoralizing if your sign-up numbers look great but activation is terrible. DevRel can help, but can't fix a fundamentally confusing product.
Self-Serve Isn't Always Better: Some products are complex enough that they need human help. Forcing a pure PLG motion when the product isn't ready for it doesn't work.
Support Burden: When you have thousands of free users, the support and community management burden can be enormous. DevRel often ends up carrying this, and it needs resources.
Traditional Sales-Led vs PLG: Not Either/Or
Here's the thing: most companies aren't purely PLG or purely sales-led. They're hybrid.
You might have a free tier and self-serve paid tier (PLG), but also have a sales team for enterprise deals (sales-led). This is really common.
Or you might start PLG for small teams, but sales gets involved when an account grows to a certain size.
Understanding both models - and how they work together - makes you more effective. You can support the PLG motion for individual developers and small teams while also supporting sales when they're working with larger accounts.
How to Think About PLG as a DevRel Professional
If your company is PLG or moving toward PLG:
Embrace it: PLG aligns really well with DevRel values. Letting the product speak for itself, empowering users to evaluate on their own terms, removing barriers - this is all good stuff.
Get closer to product data: Work with your product team to understand metrics like activation rate, time-to-value, and conversion funnel. Ask for access to dashboards. Understand what users are actually doing in the product.
Focus on onboarding: The period between sign-up and activation is critical. Invest heavily in making this smooth.
Build feedback loops: PLG gives you tons of data about what's working and what's not. Use it to improve docs, content, and even influence product decisions.
Think about the full journey: Don't just focus on awareness. Think about how your work impacts every stage from sign-up to expansion.
The Bottom Line
Product-Led Growth isn't a replacement for sales or marketing. It's a different go-to-market motion that changes how everything works, including DevRel.
In PLG companies, DevRel isn't just "nice to have" - it's essential infrastructure. Great docs aren't a nice-to-have; they're what makes the PLG motion work. Active community isn't just engagement; it's what drives retention and expansion.
Understanding PLG helps you:
- Position your work more strategically
- Focus on the right activities
- Measure impact more directly
- Collaborate better with product, marketing, and sales
- Advocate for resources more effectively
If you're at a PLG company and you haven't been thinking about your work through this lens, start now. And if you're at a traditional sales-led company but serve developers, consider whether some PLG principles could make your work more effective.
Either way, understanding PLG is part of business literacy for modern DevRel. Add it to your toolkit.
Want to Go Deeper?
Some resources on PLG:
- Product-Led Growth by Wes Bush (book)
- OpenView's PLG resources (they coined the term)
- Is Product Led Growth the DevOps of DevRel? (Daniel Bryant's talk at DevRelCon 2022)
Next up, we're bringing it all together in the final post - how to actually use this business literacy in your day-to-day DevRel work. How to translate what you do into language that resonates with stakeholders. How to speak business without losing your soul.
As always, comments are open below if you want to discuss, debate, or share your PLG experiences.
Previously: Part 4: Finance 101
Next up: Wrapping it all up
Top comments (0)