The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab)

**Hila Qu** (0:00)
PLD, I always say, is actually fundamentally DLD, data-led growth.
So when you give away your free product, what you want to get in exchange are two things. One is the broader reach, because free product spread itself is lower barrier to entry. Two, you want to understand the usage behavior of those free users. Which features do they use? And which features kind of correlates with a higher conversion rate, retention rate, all of that. If you don't have a foundation of data and understanding of how to analyze those data, you are giving away a free product for nothing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:43)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Hila Qu. I've heard some listeners have been doing listening parties with this podcast, where their team listens to an episode all at the same time over Zoom and shares their insights and lessons in a shared chat. And I would say that this episode is a great candidate for that. It's incredibly packed with advice on how to start and optimize your product-led growth motion. We talk through common pitfalls that you probably run into, where to get started, Hila's favorite tools, what she recommends for an initial PLG-oriented team, how to audit your existing funnel, plus tangents on how to improve your activation and retention, and some foundational overviews of product-led growth and some of the core concepts associated with it. Like I say, at the end of the episode, this episode delivers tens of thousands of dollars in value, something you won't find for free anywhere else. I am really excited to bring it to you. With that, I bring you Hila Qu after a short word from our sponsors.
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Today's episode is brought to you by Miro, an online collaborative whiteboard that's designed specifically for teams like yours.
I have a quick request. Head on over to my Miro board at miro.com/lenny and let me know which guests you'd want me to have on this year. I've already gotten a bunch of great suggestions which you'll see when you go there, so just keep it coming. And while you're on the Miro board, I encourage you to play around with the tool. It's a great shared space to capture ideas, get feedback and collaborate with your colleagues on anything that you're working on. For example, with Miro, you can plan out next quarter's entire product strategy. You can start by brainstorming using sticky notes, live reactions, a voting tool, even an estimation app to scope out your team's sprints. Then your whole distributed team can come together around wireframes, draw ideas with the pen tool, and then put full mocks right into the Miro board. And with one of Miro's ready-made templates, you can go from discovery and research, to product roadmaps, to customer journey flows, to final mocks, all in Miro. Head on over to miro.com/lenny to leave your suggestions.
That's miro.com/lenny.
Hila, welcome to the podcast.

**Hila Qu** (3:28)
Thank you, Lenny, for having me. I'm so excited.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:31)
I'm excited as well.
I don't know if you know this, but you have the very unique distinction of having two posts in my top 25 most read posts of all time in my newsletter, which are the two parts of your series on how to add a product-led growth motion. And so I'm really excited to dig in to product-led growth and help more people be successful product-led growth.

**Hila Qu** (3:51)
Awesome. I should have made it three posts, three parts.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:57)
I like that ambition. There's always more.
Well, I think the next milestone is get into the top 10, get two into the top 10

**Hila Qu** (4:05)
Yes.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:07)
Maybe this podcast will be in the feed of the newsletter, so maybe we'll get there. No pressure.
One question I want to ask you is anything come out of writing those guest posts? Has anything good happened as a result?

**Hila Qu** (4:20)
I always take a very long-term view for writing. I enjoy writing myself. I spend actually four months on that one.
After it's published, I see a lot of shares, and people writing very long summary of it. That's always very encouraging.