The Product-Led Growth Handbook
A 12-chapter, 30,000-word guide to building a product-led growth engine. Learn how to design free tiers, optimize activation, build growth loops, price for expansion, qualify leads through product usage, and scale PLG into the enterprise — with metrics, examples, and playbooks you can apply this quarter.
What You'll Learn
Design Your PLG Funnel End-to-End
Map the full product-led funnel from first visit to expansion revenue, identifying the levers that matter at each stage and the metrics that tell you whether they are working.
Build a Free Tier That Converts
Structure your free offering so it delivers genuine value while creating natural upgrade triggers — without giving away so much that paid plans feel unnecessary.
Optimize Activation and Onboarding
Get new users to their first moment of value faster. Design onboarding flows that reduce time-to-value and increase the percentage of signups who become active users.
Create Self-Reinforcing Growth Loops
Build viral, content, and usage-based loops where each cohort of users generates the next — reducing your dependence on paid acquisition channels over time.
Implement Product-Qualified Leads
Replace gut-feel handoffs with a data-driven PQL system that routes the right users to sales at the right time, based on actual product behavior.
Scale PLG for Enterprise Customers
Adapt your self-serve motion for larger accounts with longer sales cycles, procurement requirements, and multi-stakeholder buying committees.
12 Chapters Inside
What Product-Led Growth Actually Means
Establish a clear, working definition of product-led growth. Understand the economic and behavioral forces driving the shift from sales-led to product-led go-to-market, and learn why "just add a free tier" is not a PLG strategy.
The PLG Funnel: From Visitor to Champion
Walk through the six stages of a product-led funnel — awareness, signup, activation, conversion, expansion, and advocacy — and learn how each stage feeds the next.
Designing Your Free Tier
Compare the four major free tier models, learn the decision framework for choosing one, and design the feature boundaries that drive natural upgrades.
Activation: The Most Important PLG Metric
Learn how to identify your product's activation moment, measure it accurately, and design the onboarding flow that gets the maximum number of users there in the shortest time.
Who This Guide Is For
Growth-Focused PMs
You own activation, retention, or monetization and need a structured playbook for improving your PLG funnel. This guide gives you the metrics, experiments, and decision frameworks to move those numbers.
Founders and Product Leaders
You are building or transitioning to a product-led model and need to make high-stakes decisions about pricing, free tiers, sales-assist, and org structure. This guide covers the strategic layer, not just tactics.
Growth and Revenue Teams
You work in marketing, sales, or revenue ops alongside a PLG product team. This guide helps you understand how product-led funnels work so you can align your efforts with the self-serve motion instead of fighting it.
Tim Adair has spent 15+ years in product management, leading teams at both product-led startups and enterprise software companies. He has built and scaled PLG motions from zero to millions in ARR, and coached dozens of PM teams through the transition from sales-led to product-led go-to-market.