“History tells us that “how” you sell is just as important as “what” you sell.” – Wes Bush, The Definitive Guide On Product-Led Growth.

Slack’s revenue has grown 52 x since its launch in 2014: The channel-based messaging platform reported that revenue went from $12 million in 2014 to $630 million in 2020.

Their secret? …. Product-led growth.

Product-led growth (PLG), otherwise known as the “try before you buy” approach has helped companies like Dropbox, Netflix, Hubspot, and of course Slack go from Startup to scale up in record time.

But, the product-led growth approach isn’t just about trying before buying. There’s more to it than that. In fact, to truly be product-led you’ll need to choose between a free trial or freemium model; determine if you’ll be targeting the makers or the shakers of an organization; decide which sea you wish to sail when following the Blue Ocean Strategy; and, choose whether your strategy wants to focus on the bottom-up or the top-down.

Feeling confused? Don’t worry, this post will help clear things up. I’ll go over what product-led growth actually is and help you decide if the approach is right for you. I’ll also take a look at Slack and Hubspot, the poster children of the PLG approach to show what it looks like in practice.

To jump to a specific section click on the appropriate link below.

• Product-led growth in a nutshell
• Product-led growth as a go-to-market strategy
• Is the product-led growth approach for you?
• Key metrics for measuring product-led growth
• Product-led growth in practice: Slack
• Product-led growth in practice: Hubspot
• Product-led growth: Key takeaways

Let’s get sailing…

Seema is a Product Expert at Revv, a leading document management software and eSignature company that provides business document templates that help run your business. She believes in the power of words and storytelling and loves spending her time creating exciting and knowledgeable content of the SaaS world, which is why she’s the best person to write about business plan vs. business proposal. When not working, you can often find her watching adorable pups videos, or experimenting with recipes!

“Ok, so you sell things.”

Well, honestly, I wasn’t surprised or peeved at the half-baked knowledge of my friend’s father when he made a snap judgment and conveniently labeled my marketing profession as sales.

After all, this wasn’t my first time when someone tagged me as a salesperson. So, I took a deep breath and explained to him how sales are different from marketing.

We, humans, dwell in a herd mentality and hone our word skills from our surroundings. Sometimes, we are simply careless, sometimes oblivious, but most of the time, we actually don’t know that the word has a different meaning.

This can be ignored in a casual conversation, but using the wrong words in a business space can change the implied meaning and lead to miscommunication. For example, cost vs. price, digitization vs. digitalization, warranty vs. guarantee, machine learning vs. artificial intelligence, etc.

“Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.” – C. S. Lewis

This Process Street guest post untangles the confusion between two crucial terms – business plan and business proposal. These are used interchangeably in the business world, but their meaning and application are pretty different.

Words are the building blocks of communication. There is a French phrase for using the right word – le mot juste.

Let us strive for le mot juste!

Hop on and be a part of this fantabulous journey.

• What is a business plan?
• What is a business proposal?
• Business plan vs. Business proposal: What are the differences?
• Bonus: How to make ‘wow’ business plans and business proposals?
• Winding-up: Key takeaways

Here we go!

Bored of Scrum and Kanban? Thinking about making the move to Shape Up?

This post is here to get you clued up on what the development methodology Shape Up looks like in practice. I’ll be giving you a sneak-peak into what we do here at Process Street as our EPD team shares their secrets. Learn how Shape Up facilitates the smooth running of a cross-functional team.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Shape Up, or if you’re interested in the Design part of the E-P- “D = design” team,or maybe, you’d like to get your hands on 3 Shape Up workflows to plug straight into your team, check out the following posts:

• Shape Up vs Scrum: 6 Months to 6 Weeks – How We Cut Our Dev Cycle 75%
• An Interview with Ivy: Shape Up From a Product Designer’s Perspective
• Ditch Scrum! 3 Shape Up Processes & Checklists to 5x Your Dev Cycle

In this post I speak to Process Street’s Product Lead, Michael, and our Full Stack Engineer Herbie. We talk about all things Shape Up and discuss how the methodology facilitates the success of a cross-functional team.

• Q1: Summarize what the EPD team is, and your role within the team.
• Q2: As a Product Lead what would you say are the key differences between Shape Up and say something like Scrum or Kanban?
• Q3: How do you find working in small highly focused cycles as opposed to Sprints
• Q4: Does the Shape Up method allow for more asynchronous communication (and less meetings)?
• Q5: As a Product Lead/Engineer am I right to think you work on a parallel track with other members of the EPD team. Could you talk me through this process?
• Q6: What does Shape Up empower you to do?
• Q7: This is your area of expertise, what are your key takeaways when it comes to Shape Up, how it works alongside the EPD team, and so on.

Let’s get started!
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We’re all using multiple apps for work, and we know how quickly this work becomes inconsistent and messy. You don’t always know what’s been done or what to do next.

For years, Process Street customers have been automating work and showing us first-hand the value of integrating Process Street with other tools to create powerful workflows like updating Salesforce opportunities, filing Jira tickets, and sending DocuSign contracts.

On top of that, a number of our enterprise customers have asked for more visibility, more security and fewer third-party points of failure.

So we took all that great functionality and made it native within Process Street.

Automations allows teams to streamline multi-app workflows into a simple, cohesive process.

Allow me to introduce Process Street’s Automations feature!

Our no-code Automations editor makes connecting and building with different applications as simple as writing a checklist. Always enjoy easy visibility into how your automation is configured and when it’s running.

This post provides a workflow stack packed with all the information you need to get started building your own Automations. Whether you’re a Sales manager trying to onboard a new customer, an HR manager onboarding a new employee, or you want to report a technical error to the development team – we’ve got you covered.

• How (& why) to optimize your processes with Automations
• How do Automations work?
• 2 HR workflows to kick-off using Process Street’s Automations
• How to use Automations to streamline your customer success workflows
• How to use Automations to report technical issues
• Need more guidance on how to use Automations?

Ready set … automate! ⚡️
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Today, we’re excited to announce Automations, a new set of direct integrations helping you create and run custom processes using built-in functionality from some of the world’s most popular software tools.

Anyone who’s ever updated an opportunity in Salesforce or created an issue in Jira knows the power of those applications. It can feel like a world of endless possibilities right at your fingertips. It’s what we love about these tools, and why teams like us use them every day.

But sometimes, instead of endless possibilities, you need a specific set of tasks done quickly and correctly. You need a process. That’s what we’ve helped thousands of companies with, and that’s why we’re so excited to announce our newest feature, Automations.

Automations brings your critical apps together to drive your team’s most important processes. Powering Automations is a new set of native integrations with:

• Salesforce
• Jira
• Slack
• DocuSign
• Google Sheets
• Plus powerful new functionality within Process Street itself

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“In the midst of every crisis lies great opportunity.” – A. Einstein

I’ll refrain from attempting to mask something as devastating as the coronavirus with a silver lining. Nonetheless, there’s no denying that while the world goes bust there is one industry that continues to boom: Tech.

Since the first half of 2020, health and fitness app downloads have soared, growing by a whopping 46% worldwide.

What has been the pandemic’s influence on the femtech and wellness app industries? In this Process Street post, I feature an interview with Hélène Guillaume, founder of a femtech platform (Wild.AI), and Reeva Misra, the founder of a wellness app (Walking on Earth).

Wild.AI is a fitness platform that empowers female athletes by providing AI-powered personal trainers that adapt to the user’s needs. Walking on Earth is a wellness app and platform that offers every user access to personalized coaches and treatment plans.

• How it all comes together: The pandemic, wellness apps, & femtech
• Introducing the founders: Reeva Misra & Hélène Guillaume
• Developing a wellness app
• Developing a femtech platform
• Attracting investor attention as a wellness app
• Attracting investor attention as a femtech platform
• Finding product-market fit during a pandemic

Let’s get started.
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It’s 4 p.m. and you’ve got a welcome call with your newest team member. Ideally, you’d feel full of life, ready to welcome her with enthusiasm and get her excited about the weeks to come.

Problem is, this is your 6th video call of the day and you’re overrun with Zoom fatigue.

You’ve been turned “on” (not in a good way) for the last 7 hours and are severely lacking in enthusiasm, let alone excitement.

The worst thing is, the majority of those meetings were unnecessary, everything covered in them could’ve been communicated asynchronously.

Simply put, asynchronous communication involves communicating remotely without expecting an immediate response. This can be done via iMessage, pre-recorded video/audio, making suggestions to an existing project (think: Google Docs/Sheets, Github, Jira).

The challenge is knowing, when and how to use synchronous vs. asynchronous communication methods. Fortunately, this post is here to teach you just that so you can avoid Zoom fatigue and stop being real-time, all the time. Feel free to skip to a specific section of the post using the links below.

• What is Zoom fatigue?
• Avoid Zoom fatigue by making sure communication is always intentional
• Avoid Zoom fatigue: Synchronous vs. asynchronous communication
• Advantages and disadvantages of synchronous vs. asynchronous communication
• Synchronous vs. asynchronous communication tools at Process Street
• Synchronous vs. asynchronous communication: Wrapping up

Let’s get started!
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We’ve cut our development cycle by 70% since making the move to Shape Up.

This alternative development method is a breath of fresh air from all things Scrum, Agile, Kanban, Scrumban, Fake Agile, Bad Agile… you get my drift.

What started off as Basecamp‘s internal approach to developing and shipping software at lightning speed, has become a clearly written (and illustrated), freely contributed, and easily accessible e-book: “Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters“.

Although I sincerely recommend you read the book, this post is here to save you from studying the 143 pages of text by providing you with three nifty checklist templates. The checklists take you through the Shape Up process and its 3 key phases: Shaping, betting, and building.

In this post, I’ll briefly touch on the fundamental concepts of Shape Up’s approach. I’ll also introduce each of the phases and their corresponding checklist.

• Shape Up process: Key concepts
• Shape Up processes to help you get started
• Shape Up process: Shaping
• Shape Up process: Betting
• Shape Up process: Building
• Shape Up process: Summing up

Let’s get shaping!
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I wrote a post about Shape Up, a development methodology, and you the reader wanted me to dive deeper. So, I did just that and interviewed Process Street’s Product Designer, Ivy.

Ivy answers common questions concerning how Shape Up works in practice, and although I briefly touch on the core phases of Shape Up’s approach, this post should be seen as a follow up to my original post which provides a full low-down of what Shape Up is and how it differs from alternative development methods like Scrum and Kanban.

So, make sure to read my last post on Shape Up so you have all the context you need for this post.

In this post, we’ll be covering:

• What is Shape Up?
• The makings of a Process Street Product Designer
• Shape Up from a Product Designer’s perspective
• Shape Up’s design process: Key takeaways
• The day-to-day Shape Up experience as Process Street’s Product Designer

Let’s kick things off with a brief re-cap of Shape Up’s key phases .
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I’m writing a post about Airbnb, from an Airbnb.

Ironic yes, but not unlikely.

In 2019, Airbnb hosted 272 million bookings globally. And, in 2020, despite a global pandemic restricting travel, Airbnb suffered relatively minimal losses of only 22%.

2020 was also the year Airbnb decided to go IPO, despite the global pandemic, a significant drop in revenue, and global travel restrictions.

How did they manage it? A growth strategy like no other, that’s how.

This Process Street blog post takes a deep dive into Airbnb’s growth strategy, how they got where they are today, and where they could be going. To skip to a specific section of the post click the appropriate link below:

• The history of Airbnb: From Obama O’s to turning over $3.4B in revenue
• Airbnb’s growth startegy: Product breakdown
• Airbnb’s growth strategy: Overcoming “stranger equals danger”
• Airbnb’s growth strategy: The sharing economy
• Airbnb’s growth strategy: Promise & deliver on value for everyone
• The future of Airbnb

Let’s start with where it all began, with 3 air beds.
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