We are going through this right now. Product-led is where users drive the full funnel of marketing, sales, and hopefully, product + engineering. Consider GitHu

We are going through this right now. Product-led is where users drive the full funnel of marketing, sales, and hopefully, product + engineering. Consider GitHub: Marketing: You get invited to collab on a github repo and make an account. People share links to OSS repos you depend on. You see a Add CI/CD/Actions button on the PR review page and eventually click it. Sales: You need to make a private repo, and convert from freemium. Your company grows, and so does your seat count. You hire a CISO, and they demand upgrading for SSO. You get a phone call that you added SSO but not scans. You get an email that they ran a scan, and here are the first 3 Caves on one of the 3 languages you use, and would you like a consultation on that + price optimization? Product: Your actions are recorded by analytics for everything, your google searches mined, and basically you live under a digital microscope for where dropoffs and slow growth are around inbound, usage, conversion, internal growth, and churn. Pricing scales with value/use. Engineering: Feature requests are tied to teams analyzing the above, both internal and external. Things like observability and fast deploys matter more as teams are explicitly interested in experimenting with users. Product-led doesn't mandate other orgs go away nor freemium, but does emphasize flywheels around self-serve and usage patterns / funnels, which rethinks a lot. It requires heavy product market fit (and helps get there). For something like big b2b, that is super hard, but if you hit it, sales flips from slow, expensive, and oppositional top-down to more of a lead-rich, warm, and even automatic flow, which is amazing. The original article showed a misleading view of product-led by doing a bad strawman, or maybe from pre-use/fit that's not tied to customers ("if you build it, they will come" is not product led). Product-led is generally slow (ex: SaaS) and hard to get fit, which is a tough spot and IMO why VC funding needs to be of a limited and patient sort for early stage. ("You're spending too much and need to do layoffs to get time to get to better fit" said no VC ever.) The article _does_ make a good point that value-driven leaps are tough, and doing 0-1 stuff requires different work than 1-n, and especially when product-driven.