Self-Paced · ~2 Hours · GTM/PLG Pillar
Designing a PLG Program
For GTM leads, PLG operators, and founders weighing a self-serve motion: what a real PLG motion looks like, and how to tell if yours will hold.
Who this is for
GTM leads, product-led growth operators, and founders who are considering a self-serve motion (or who already have one and aren't sure if it's built right). You don't need to have shipped a PLG program yet. You need to be close enough to the decision that the outcome of this course has somewhere to land.
Not for: founders who don't have a product in market yet, or organizations where the entire revenue motion is enterprise and no self-serve signal exists.
What you'll be able to do after this course
- Determine whether your product and ICP are actually PLG-ready, before you build anything
- Score your potential user segments by stickiness and conversion likelihood (not just size)
- Identify whether you have one PLG product or two different products that need to be separated
- Design the free-to-paid moment and the friction that makes activation meaningful
- Build a 90-day readiness roadmap you can actually execute
Lesson Outline
01Is Your Product PLG-Ready? (The Honest Answer)
Most products aren't. This lesson gives you the diagnostic questions (activation speed, time-to-value, self-service ceiling) and the framework to score your readiness before you build a motion around the wrong assumption. You'll leave with a clear yes, no, or “not yet with these changes.”
02Who Is Actually Stickier? (ICP by Stickiness, Not Size)
The instinct is to go after the biggest segment. The better move is to go after the stickiest one. This lesson covers the ICP-by-stickiness method: score your potential user segments by time-to-convert and long-term retention, not headcount or logo prestige. You'll build a segment scorecard and identify which ICP to lead with in your PLG motion.
03One Product or Two? (The Feature Flag Rule)
PLG breaks when you try to serve two different audiences from one product and one message. This lesson teaches the feature flag rule. When your platform does two different things for two different users, you need two SKUs, not one complex product with a confusing homepage. You'll audit your current product for this and decide whether to split or simplify.
04Designing the Free-to-Paid Moment
The activation event isn't when a user signs up. It's when they get the value they came for. This lesson covers how to identify your activation moment, what friction is useful (and what kills conversion), and how to design the upgrade prompt so it lands as obvious rather than pushy.
05Building Your 90-Day PLG Readiness Roadmap
You've done the diagnosis. Now you sequence the work. This lesson walks through how to stack the changes that have to happen before you ship (instrumentation, onboarding, pricing, sales motion alignment) and how to decide what to tackle in what order.
Ready to go deeper?
This course maps to two things on the platform: the PLG Diagnostics tool (a 190-point readiness diagnostic with a roadmap) and Fractional GTM, for founders who want someone to design and run the motion alongside them.