Product Analytics and Metrics that Matter - with Todd Olson, Founder and CEO Pendo

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics and form decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Todd Olson, the founder and CEO of Pendo. I've been trying to get Todd on the show for quite a few months here, and I'm just so excited that he's here finally. So we'll be covering three main topics with Todd today. First, the evolution of product-led growth. Second, what are some of the common attributes of world-class product-led organizations? And third, the product metrics that matter heading into 2023 Todd, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics It May Share Up podcast. Great.

**Todd Olson** (1:14)
Thank you. It's great to be here. My journey to being here, I had the fortunate opportunity to start Pendo around nine years ago, and the impetus for Pendo was formed by my prior experience. So before this, I led a B2B SaaS team as a product leader, and I noticed challenges that were merging in my job, challenges around how do we have good insights into how my users and customers were engaging in my software, which informed and answered questions like, hey, are the things we're building actually driving more engagement and are they leading to retention? That was one challenge. Another challenge I started seeing was, the way we enable and engage with customers need to evolve. We used to teach users, educate users, which, honestly, through physical media, through books and manuals, and I used to have a stack of manuals on my credenza and my cubes back when I started my career in tech. Now, software updates nearly every week. Couldn't keep a manual up to date even if you wanted to. Well, we don't have cubes and credenzas. Those are all gone, thankfully. So the way we enable, the way we educate, the way we communicate with users just needs to evolve. It needs to be in a much more product-led way. It needs to be more contextual, like it needs to leverage data. So I conceived of this platform that combines product analytics with the ability to communicate with users, all in the spirit of how do we drive a better experience for our end users. And we started working a lot with SaaS companies, and we still work with many, many SaaS companies. But I think the exciting thing for me is seeing this evolution of the market where, you know, we've heard this term, every company is a software company or software is in the world. These are terms we all know. We hear these things.
But like, I live this. And that is actually the thing that's most inspiring. You know, we now work with companies like LabCorp and Home Depot. And we have a company that makes bubble wrap that uses Pendo now. So like, it doesn't really matter what industry you're in. Everyone is thinking about ways to become more product-led.

**Ray Rike** (3:12)
Well, you are the perfect person to talk about the evolution of product-led. Because when you started 2013, there wasn't every expert in the world on LinkedIn pontificating about product-led growth, right? You were product-led before it became an official category. So I'm going to start with a really easy question for you, Todd. What's the future of product-led growth? Okay, that's a big question. So let's really talk about first, how do you define product-led growth? How do you, Todd Olson, define it?

**Todd Olson** (3:42)
Well, actually, I'm going to step back for a second. So product-led growth to me is a subset of this overall concept of being a product-led organization. If I think about what it means to be a product-led organization, it's a company that puts the product at the center of the overall customer experience. It's not like an afterthought, it's not like an additional thing. It is the primary way that customers engage with the companies through the product. So then let's take growth as a subset of that. So what does that mean for me with respect to growth? Well, growth means that the primary vehicle for obtaining customers is through a product-led fashion, through primarily self-service. So you think about that means there's a product-led way to market to customers, and that's often through references, referrals, viral loops. And we've all seen this. I mean, I think Zoom is a great example where like how did Zoom grow early days? You got invited to a Zoom call and you're like, wow, it's a great experience.