Letting software sell itself

The idea was simple: optimize the signup flow. Just a few required fields, auto-filled content, and boom, users would land in the product before they had time to get distracted. But when the proposed change hit the planning meeting, it sparked something bigger. The product team couldn’t ship it without marketing rewriting the funnel. Marketing couldn’t reroute that traffic without coordination from sales. Sales, for their part, were wondering: If everything was self-serve now, where exactly did they fit?

This is the quiet friction that underpins most attempts at product-led growth (PLG). While the concept has become a favorite in SaaS strategy decks—let the product sell itself—executing it in the real world often reveals something less tidy: structural dependencies, entrenched habits, and unclear ownership. Getting users into the product faster is rarely a product team victory. It’s a company-wide negotiation.

PLG has become shorthand for delivering fast time-to-value, seamless self-serve onboarding, and a buyer experience that mirrors how people actually want to adopt software today. But those outputs—and the growth they promise—depend entirely on inputs that are harder to measure: cross-functional alignment, flexible org structures, and a shared definition of success.

At Freshworks, several PLG initiatives over the past year have illustrated this reality. Some paid off, others didn’t. But nearly all of them revealed as much about how the company works as they did about what customers want.

"Engineering plays a crucial role in making PLG real for customers — whether that’s through seamless onboarding flows, embedded security, or backend improvements like anti-spam," says Jeykar Watson, vice president of engineering at Freshworks. "Every technical decision directly shapes how fast and how well customers see success."

A personalized approach to boost engagement

The team initially developed a general-purpose setup experience with sample content—placeholder tickets, empty inboxes, a few knowledge base articles—to help orient new users. It worked reasonably well. But after a few rounds of iteration, industry-specific content was layered in: Support teams in healthcare would see mock data from fictional patients; e-commerce companies would see sample customer orders. This personalized approach significantly improved trial engagement and early product adoption. It also meant the product, content, and CX teams had to coordinate weekly to update assets, review language, and align success metrics.

Read also: Meet the AI-augmented engineers at Freshworks

Elsewhere, a gamified three-step setup guide—encouraging users to connect their email, invite team members, and explore their inbox—helped anchor users in the product’s core functionality. But the real unlock came not from the UI, but from embedded in-product video. Users who watched even a single clip tended to complete setup at far higher rates.

Giving users more choice turned out to be a growth lever

Early iterations of self-serve upgrades assumed that the vast majority of users would move through the funnel without sales assistance. But because some wanted to talk to someone first, rather than routing them through traditional qualification steps, a simple Calendly link was introduced. Letting users schedule time directly with a rep increased trust and didn’t harm the self-serve funnel—in fact, it gave high-intent buyers a path to a higher-tier plan.

Not every win was visible. One of the more successful backend interventions came through targeted anti-spam measures. By tightening up signup restrictions, the team saw a notable improvement in account quality and data integrity, both essential for understanding how real users were engaging with the product during the trial period. While it didn’t show up in the interface, it changed how the product could be measured, improved, and iterated.

PLG reveals how aligned your teams really are

All of these efforts underscore a simple point: PLG isn’t just a product approach. It’s a company strategy. Moving fast on onboarding is easy—unless marketing owns the first click, sales owns the close, and product owns retention. Many teams say they’re aligned on growth. But PLG often reveals the gaps in that alignment, because it demands that teams stop measuring success in isolation.

"A successful PLG motion relies on understanding your customers and their trial to conversion journey, and creating experiences that anticipate and meet their needs through every step of that journey," says Venki Subramanian, senior vice president of product management at Freshworks. "Teams in product, engineering, user experience, marketing, and other stakeholders work closely as a cohesive team to deliver this. Engineering plays a crucial role in ensuring the right capabilities are exposed at the right time in the journey, and by enabling critical integrations with internal and external systems for seamless experience."

For companies experimenting with PLG, the takeaway isn’t to chase what worked for someone else. It’s to examine where growth is being slowed by handoffs, silos, or assumptions. The product can only lead if the company behind it follows.