Product-led growth (PLG) is the go-to-market motion in which the product itself drives acquisition, activation, retention, and expansion. Users self-serve through signup, onboarding, value-delivery, and purchase without sales involvement, with expansion typically following bottom-up adoption inside teams or organizations. The term was popularized by OpenView Venture Partners around 2016 and has since become the default GTM motion for most modern developer tools, productivity SaaS, and consumer-prosumer software.
PLG depends on three product-level mechanics working together: a free or freemium entry point that lets a user get to value without a sales conversation, rapid time-to-value that delivers a meaningful outcome in m...