Unpacking B2B Product Growth
Let's make sense of growth concepts in B2B SaaS
When it comes to the concept of "growth" in business, the vocabulary is surprisingly limited. Growth encompasses everything from social media engagements to an entire organizational structure. It’s a source of confusion, and sometimes in conversations I explicitly ask my peer what they mean by growth 🤷♀️
And because I seem to evangelize Product Growth, I felt the need to clarify the term. The heck is it? A shorthand for product-led growth? PM-led growth? A skill? A function? A team? A title? An outcome? It depends. Joking. It’s a bit of everything, frankly.
But to get there I suggest to take a step back and outline the B2B growth “system of coordinates” to keep us on the same page.
B2B Growth: What Are We Really Talking About?
I think I was so much in my own buble, that only after quite a number of conversations and research with PMs, marketers, founders, etc, it finally struck me that everyone mean their own thing by “growth”:
For 80+% of people, growth primarily means new customer acquisition. In SaaS, most discussions about growth revolve around marketing (especially performance marketing) and sales. C’est la vie.
Others define it as revenue growth.
A select few, typically in executive roles, referred to profit growth.
Let’s make this clear: Profit growth > Revenue growth > Customer growth.
So new customers acquisition is just one of the several growth levers, yet 80+% of conversations orbit this single point, like a black hole.
I totally get why it’s top of mind for startups. But for many it stays a priority forever, like other levers (retention, expansion, efficiency optimization) don’t count. And they miss out.
Well, sure, everyone’s aware of churn, but not everyone fully appreciates the long-term revenue impact of even small churn improvements. And even when they do — it’s kinda hard to do it and unclear where to even start. Acquisition feels more straightforward and predictable. And expansion? Mostly just a luck game.
(B2B) Product-Led Growth
Moving on to Product-Led Growth. Fundamentally, it is a go-to-market strategy where the product itself serves as the primary vehicle for customer acquisition, activation, retention, and monetization (conversions and expansion).
It’s a company-wide strategy that is inherently cross-functional:
Marketing leverages the product to generate demand flywheels.
Sales qualifies high-intent prospects through product usage data.
Customer Success enables self-serve customers to achieve success without extensive human support.
Design crafts intuitive, clear, and coherent experiences, speeding the customer through their lifecycle with minimal friction.
Engineering builds a product with high time-to-value and robust technical performance.
Product Managers identify the best opportunities to improve this motion and achieve desired growth outcomes.
Each company department contributes to this strategy, while maintaining its “core” functions, e.g. new product value creation for core product teams, reaching and closing high-ACV deals with buyers for core sales teams, etc.
Core and growth teams have to be separate as they have distinct strategies, targets, priorities, skillsets, and operational systems. Maybe in the future they will merge back into a single function (and I believe they will!), but not just yet.
The PLG Spectrum
One of the most common (and dangerous) myths about PLG is that it is incompatible with upmarket-focused products.
PLG is not binary — it's a spectrum. It can range from minimal application, like offering a free trial, to a 100% product-led company. This means that even enterprise-focused products can strategically implement specific product-led tactics to help their growth.
Real people at real companies share the same narrative — their enterprise products struggle. With customer retention, expansion, and, inevitably, new customer acquisition. It leaves them vulnerable, and basically invites the competitors to eat away their market share by starting in lower market segments, growing their brand, and gradually moving upmarket.
I think that today, product-led growth strategy is non-negotiable for B2B SaaS to at least remain competitive and attractive through a strong, modern product — no amount of human touch can save a flawed one. The question is to find the right place on this spectrum.
B2B Product Growth 🧐
We’re narrowing down. I have to admit, the terminology here is muddled. At this time, I don’t have a better term in mind (share if you do!) So bear with me.
Product Growth as a Specialized Function
In practical terms, Product Growth refers to the specialized sub-org or team within a company’s Product Organization, that is tasked with executing product-led growth strategy.
These are Growth PMs who lead Growth teams. They optimize for key growth outcomes through rapid experimentation and data-driven insights. They have less product innovation and maintenance work, which allows them to swiftly uncover growth levers and bottlenecks and work with them. They possess specialized skills, resources, and a distinct operational rhythm.
Such team(s) are crucial to driving your company’s PLG success, even if it is just targeted implementation of product-led tactics for market defensibility.
Organizational Setups
Here things start to get really interesting. Org design varies from one company to another, and evolves with the company’s maturity and commitment to PLG.
For the startups and scaleups I work with, I typically see these pathways:
Scenario 1: Growth teams within Product Org
Very often, PLG originates in the Product Org as a single initiative driven by a small, often temporary, cross-functional “tiger team.” With proven success, it may grow into the first “official” growth team that moves swiftly across various product surface areas, trying to plug glaring gaps in the self-serve product.
With time and some success, the single team can split into several, where each focuses on their owned area (e.g. Activation team, Acquisition team, etc.) This leads to Product Growth “sub-department” with its own Head/Lead who oversees Growth PMs. This Head works with other Growth Heads (e.g. Marketing, Analytics, Design) on executing PLG strategy.
Scenario 2: Growth teams within Marketing Org
When acquisition is the primary company’s focus, PLG may originate and develop in the marketing department — starting with the Acquisition team, then expanding into activation, monetization, engagement.
This may be a tricky setup, as it’s not entirely clear who Growth PM(s) should report to — VP Marketing? VP Product? I’ve encountered both cases. Not without problems, but not entirely disfunctional. IMO - if it works, it works. In reality, I don’t believe there’s an ideal org setup — each has disadvantages and trade-offs.
Scenario 3: Dedicated Growth Organization
When PLG starts scaling, a company may choose to create a separate Growth Organization led by a Head/VP of Growth. Typically, they lead Heads of Growth fuunctions such as Product, Marketing, Design, Analytics Growth.
Reporting lines may also be not entirely straightforward here. I know a Head of Growth with marketing background, and in their team, Growth PMs and Designers report to VP Product, while this Head of Growth leads Growth Marketers and Analysts🤯
Growth setups are complex, often rooted in organizational legacy, executive mindset, and actual company needs. And this only adds to the general confusion surrounding Growth, PLG, and Product Growth. It is what it is.
Product Growth as a Functional Imperative for the Product Org
But what about core (and platform) product teams? Wouldn’t it be odd if a product-led company would just let core product teams operate in a traditional “feature-factory” way? I say it would.
Core and Growth teams must work together. Core teams solidify insights from growth experiments into foundational product experiences, and embed long-term growth mechanisms into user experience and lifecycle. Their efforts must amplify and supplement each other, ensuring the entire product ecosystem drives the company's strategic growth.
In fact, I believe that even if there are no dedicated growth teams in a company, the Product Organization should still act as a growth- and business-focused function (due to the 3 seismic shifts I’ve explored earlier). Any product team — core, platform, AI, whatever else — should become a growth team. Not in their operational approach (though certainly some things can be borrowed), but in that they deliberately drive business growth and success through product value.
To do so, Product teams must go beyond their traditional imperative of "just build new value" and expand it into a wider Value Ecosystem:
Build new value: Innovation remains crucial. Product teams find the best opportunities to solve their customers' problems and translate this intelligence into relevant solutions.
Connect users to value: It’s not enough to build it — teams must ensure that users can discover, understand, and successfully adopt new product features. And consider this feature’s wider fit with conboarding, conversion pathways, pricing structure, marketing content, and support. Leaving this to chance will almost always result in lackluster impact on product KPIs.
Capture business value: This is where the rubber meets the road. The Product organization must be accountable for important business outcomes (e.g., Retention, LTV, ARPC, costs, etc.), and its teams should understand, plan for, and prove their contribution to these outcomes (whether direct or mediated).
In this sense, core product teams are also growth teams, even though they will always focus deeper on innovation, foundational architecture, and keeping-the-lights-on work.
Final Thoughts
While in a more common sense Product Growth relates to the Growth PMs sub-department leading Growth teams, to me it means a growth-focused Product Organization imperative, because the old "Product-should-only-care-about-users-and-just-ship" one just doesn’t cut it anymore.
I hope that we do talk more about this in the B2B environment, because clarifying this concept illuminates the strategic role of modern product management in driving revenue and profit, and outlines the necessary evolution for product teams to remain relevant and impactful.