The 2023 Growth Stack: Top product-led growth tools
Product-led growth is rapidly emerging as the key go-to-market strategy for modern SaaS companies. This guide outlines the essential software categories needed to execute a successful product-led strategy.
Product-led growth has become an essential strategy for many technology companies looking to acquire, engage, and retain users through their products rather than traditional sales and marketing tactics. To execute a successful product-led strategy, organizations need the right set of tools to support key stages of the user journey and product development lifecycle.
This guide outlines the top categories of software tools needed for product-led growth, spanning user onboarding, product analytics, customer feedback, customer engagement and retention, customer data management, and product management. Adopting tools across these critical functional areas empowers product teams to build great user experiences, understand user behavior, and optimize their products to drive growth and retention.
Whether you're looking to implement a new product-led strategy or optimize an existing one, this guide highlights the must-have solutions to consider based on industry-leading tools and best practices. With the right product-led toolkit, organizations can scale growth in a sustainable, data-driven way.
The categories of tools needed for product-led growth include:
- User Onboarding: Tools that help new users understand and adopt your product quickly and efficiently, such as Userpilot.
- Product Analytics: Tools that provide insights into user behavior, engagement, and retention, such as Amplitude, Mixpanel, and Heap Analytics.
- Customer Feedback and Surveys: Tools that collect customer feedback through surveys, NPS, CSAT, and CES, such as Refiner.
- Customer Engagement and Retention: Tools that help engage users and improve retention through personalized messaging and real-time behavioral analytics, such as CleverTap and Pendo.
- Customer Data Management: Tools that collect, clean, and centralize user data for analysis, such as Segment.
- Product Management: Tools that support the complete product journey, from ideation to launch and beyond, such as ProdPad and Productboard.
These categories of tools can help product managers and teams execute product-led growth strategies, gain insights into user behavior, and optimize their products for better user experiences and growth.
Product Analytics
Amplitude
Amplitude is a product analytics platform purpose-built to help PLG teams understand user behavior, optimize product experiences, and drive growth.
With Amplitude, PLG teams get insights into every step of the user journey - from acquisition to activation, retention, and referral. Key metrics provided include user journeys, funnels, cohorts, retention by segment, and more.
Core capabilities of Amplitude for product-led growth:
- Identifying drivers of conversion, activation, and retention.
- Analyzing behavioral cohorts to understand user needs.
- Optimizing user onboarding and product workflows.
- Running A/B tests and experiments to improve experiences.
- Segmenting users by behavior to target and personalize.
- Tracking viral and network effects of product features.
- Monitoring health metrics to alert on churn or disengagement.
Amplitude provides the product analytics foundation needed for data-driven product development, growth optimization, and digital experience management. With these insights, PLG teams can build products and experiences that convert users and accelerate growth.
Amplitude
Amplitude is a product analytics platform purpose-built to help PLG teams understand user behavior, optimize product experiences, and drive growth.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a product analytics platform designed to help PLG teams understand user engagement, analyze conversion funnels, and optimize retention.
With Mixpanel, PLG teams get actionable data on key user actions and behaviors across web, mobile, and other products. This enables data-driven decision making to improve user onboarding, activation, and retention.
Key capabilities of Mixpanel for product-led growth include:
- Tracking core product usage metrics across acquisition, activation, retention, and revenue.
- Funnel analysis to optimize user flows and understand dropoffs.
- Cohort analysis to measure engagement and retention over time.
- A/B testing capabilities to experiment and improve experiences.
- User segmentation to analyze and target high-value user actions.
- Retention reporting to understand user fallout and churn risk factors.
- Integration with over 100+ platforms including marketing, support, payments.
Mixpanel provides the core behavioral analytics needed for product-led growth. Product teams can leverage these insights to identify friction in user journeys, optimize workflows, and improve experiences to drive user activation, retention, and growth.
User Onboarding
Dopt
Dopt is a developer platform for product growth that provides a component library, SDKs, and APIs for building self-serve product onboarding and education experiences. It allows product managers, growth practitioners, and engineering teams to create and iterate on onboarding and engagement flows quickly and efficiently. Dopt offers pre-built components and SDKs that make it easy to build getting started checklists, tours, contextual tips, and more.
Dopt matters for product-led growth (PLG) teams because it helps them build better onboarding experiences, which are crucial for user adoption, engagement, and retention. By providing a flexible and accessible platform, Dopt enables PLG teams to create tailored onboarding experiences that cater to their users' needs and drive success across the entire user journey. This ultimately leads to better user experiences, increased user satisfaction, and improved business outcomes.
UserPilot
Userpilot is a product adoption platform designed to help PLG companies optimize and automate user onboarding.
The platform provides capabilities to guide users through onboarding checklists, in-app messaging, tooltips, and product walkthroughs. This enables a more seamless user activation and onboarding experience.
Key features of Userpilot for driving product-led growth:
- In-app guidance and messaging to increase user adoption.
- Onboarding checklists and flows to reduce fallout.
- Feature announcements and tooltips to promote engagement.
- Usage tracking to identify bottlenecks in onboarding.
- Segmentation to target and personalize onboarding.
- Integration with tools like Intercom, Mixpanel, Slack.
- A/B testing to optimize onboarding flows.
With Userpilot, PLG product and growth teams can onboard users faster, increase product adoption, and deliver more value sooner. This helps convert and retain more users through an optimized post-sign-up experience.
Pendo
Pendo is a product experience platform that offers user insights, in-app messaging, and user guidance capabilities. It enables product teams to understand usage patterns, customize onboarding, and drive product adoption. Pendo aims to improve user engagement and retention.
Sales
Attio
Attio is an account intelligence platform designed to help PLG companies identify and engage their ideal accounts through product signals.
It syncs usage data from the product with firmographic data to create 360 account profiles. These profiles enable sales and marketing to target high-intent accounts.
Key features of Attio for driving PLG:
- Account identification based on product usage signals.
- Firmographic data enrichment to build account profiles.
- Account scoring and segmentation based on product engagement.
- Sync usage data to CRM and MAP tools.
- Prioritized account-based outreach and campaigns.
- Analytics on account metrics and trends.
With Attio, PLG organizations can leverage product usage data to understand which accounts to target, what they value, and how to personalize outreach. This aligns sales and marketing to product signals for account-based product-led growth.
Pocus
Pocus is a sales engagement platform designed specifically for product-led growth sales teams. It enables PLG organizations to scale their user acquisition efforts through automation and analytics.
With Pocus, PLG sales reps can identify ideal customer profiles, monitor product usage signals, and reach out to activated users via in-app messaging or email at the optimal time. Pocus provides the data and insights needed to convert engaged product qualifiers into paying customers.
Key capabilities include:
- Usage tracking to identify ideal customer profiles based on product engagement.
- User scoring and segmentation to prioritize outreach to product qualified leads.
- Multi-channel tools for in-app and email outreach to users.
- Analytics on user metrics and sales rep performance.
- Sales automation workflows based on product signals.
- Integration with marketing automation and CRM systems.
By leveraging Pocus, PLG sales teams can scale 1:1 sales engagement as product usage increases. Automated segmentation and outreach engines allow reps to focus on the highest value conversations. This drives sales efficiency and conversion of product qualified leads for product-led growth organizations.
Data
Hightouch
Hightouch is a data activation and syncing platform designed to help PLG companies leverage their data to power experiences.
It acts as a piping layer to move data from warehouses and databases to all downstream teams and applications in real-time.
Key features of Hightouch for powering PLG:
- Pipelines to sync user data to tools like CRM, email, support, etc.
- Reverse ETL to move data from operational tools back to analytics.
- Transformations to prepare data for activation.
- Schedulers and triggers to automate data syncs.
- APIs and integrations with 100+ martech and data tools.
With Hightouch, PLG teams can unlock their data, activate it across tech stacks, and create highly personalized, engaging experiences. This powers product-led motion through data-driven orchestration.
Segment
Segment is a customer data platform designed to help PLG teams collect, clean, and control user data from any source. It serves as the central hub for user data infrastructure.
With Segment, PLG teams can easily connect data sources like web/mobile apps, CRM, email, and more to enable a complete view of the user journey. Segment automatically structures the data and routes it to other systems like analytics, marketing automation, warehouses, and personalization tools.
Key capabilities of Segment for product-led growth teams include:
- Collecting user data from any source via Segment APIs and integrations.
- Cleaning and structuring data to make it analysis-ready.
- Unifying data into profiles with identity resolution.
- Enabling analysis of the entire user journey across tools.
- Building audiences for activation across multiple channels.
- Routing data to downstream tools to optimize experiences.
With a Segment data foundation, PLG teams can understand their users, identify trends, engage users based on behavior, and optimize the user experience across the product and business. This enables data-driven product development and growth.
Feedback
Refiner
Refiner is a customer feedback and survey solution designed for SaaS companies. It allows product teams to capture NPS responses, understand customer churn drivers, and collect feedback across the customer journey. Key features include targeted surveys, advanced analytics, and integration with popular SaaS platforms.
Further Reading
Stephen M. Walker II