Leader Spotlight: Investing in product-led growth, with Mike Ly

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Mike Ly is Vice President of Product at BeyondTrust, an identity security software leader. As part of the product leadership team, he is driving a shift toward a platform-based strategy and launching products to address evolving security vulnerabilities.

Before joining BeyondTrust, Mike held product leadership roles at ClickSoftware, Esri, and CrowdStrike. At ClickSoftware, he worked on AI-driven products for a fast-growing scale-up, contributing to its acquisition exit by Salesforce. At CrowdStrike, he led platform product teams and the product-led growth (PLG) team, developing multiple direct PLG revenue lines of business.

In our conversation, Mike talks about the potential that comes with leveraging product-led growth, often in addition to sales-led growth. He discusses his experiences entering new markets by catering current products to different users. Mike also shares insights for “setting the stage of innovation” within teams to promote technological developments.

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Setting the stage for innovation

To start, could you share how you go about cultivating a culture of innovation and excellence within your product teams?

First of all, you have to set the stage for innovation. To set the context for this, I ask my team to swing for the fences — I ask them to consider what game-changing ideas they would have if they were unhindered by fear or unknowns. I also ask them to find out what things others are not doing. With that, you have to set the environment and the stage to be engaging and invigorating. I call this “idea shaping” — where people can bring voice to their concepts. This only works if they feel like they’re in a supportive team environment.

I always ask people to think bigger. Think in terms of a home run — something that you have in your mind, but you’re afraid to say. This process brings out people’s best ideas.

Do you have an example you could share of a breakthrough moment or idea you’ve experienced?

At CrowdStrike, we had this initial notion of how to bring cybersecurity down to small and medium-sized businesses. Our market data was telling us that adversaries and hackers were concentrating on and penetrating small medium-sized businesses, as SMBs often had no (or very inferior) cybersecurity controls. CrowdStrike, as a major platform and leader in cybersecurity, focused mostly on enterprise-grade security. Its technology was not accessible for an SMB to pick up, so we had to be very innovative.

We started by taking the existing product and removing some features to make it a little more intuitive. But, we were just not getting there. So, we took a big swing for the fence that was inspired by Nest products. Nest thermostats completely changed people’s mindset of how to heat, light, and control their homes. They’re so intuitive the user just scrolls through a circle on their screen. Of course, there’s AI behind it and learning technology, but what the user sees is extremely simple.

We wanted something extremely simple and intuitive as well. To set the stage, we talked about how we wanted something where a user didn’t have to know anything about cybersecurity but could get it up and running in a few minutes.

We built a complete overhaul of our product, which we called Falcon Go. This product included our powerful capabilities but it was extremely intuitive. We had a brand new, clean UI interface, and it was very easy to set up. The user could get to protection in just two clicks Users got information back to assure them that they’d done the right thing. We took a giant leap by kind of setting that innovation principle.

Addressing new markets

Can you talk about how your team gathers market intelligence and uses it to identify new markets?

I start it by asking the team, “Where are people zigging that we can zag?” This is an approach where you look for where competitors are stuck in conventional approaches. Where can we then come in and take a fresh and differentiated approach to the problem? We also look at entrenched assumptions in the market where we ask, “What if those assumptions are wrong? How do we challenge the status quo and find opportunities people are missing?”

Of course, we look to solve real, tangible problems. I call this market asymmetry — there’s an untapped gap or need where we can present a clear opportunity to capitalize on that. Once you have that and the table stakes, it’s all about understanding the potential growth of the market and emerging trends to make sure that there’s a big enough market to serve.

What approach do you take to ensure that the products you might be creating align closely with the unique needs and challenges of new markets you’re targeting?

When addressing new markets, I see many people fall into the trap of looking solely at the product and only partially answering the product problem. Product is absolutely core — you cannot be successful without the product being phenomenal. Yet, you can have a great product and still fail. The key to market alignment is having a deep point of view that aligns with how your target users discover, reach value, implement, use, grow, and scale with your product. You have to answer every aspect of that.

For example, my team takes on the role of ICP. If it’s a green field and we develop a new product, we will go through the process of discovery, implement the software, work the software, and try to teach other co-workers how to scale it. Then, we look for friction. How does it feel? This comes down to walking in your users’ shoes and going through the process. It’s remarkable where you’ll find a lot of hidden gaps.

At one point at CrowdStrike, we launched multi-product bundles. Unbeknownst to us, when users would buy a bundle with three products, they’d get three different emails about how the product was delivered. Each email said, “Welcome to CrowdStrike, here’s your new product.” It’s that level of detail that you have to get right and have to solve for, that’s why it’s best to use it and see it before our customer does.

When you’re thinking about ensuring that your products are aligned with those customer needs, does customer segmentation play a role?

Absolutely. Even when we look at SMBs, different segments make up that cohort. Within those segments, we then also look at different stakeholders or personas that we have to convince, whether that be the technical buyer, the economic buyer, the user, or the admin.

They all serve different roles, and our product has to have a perspective of each of those. For example, what does the admin see? If an executive needs a proof point, how do we give that via the product’s canned dashboards or reports? We have to know how to solve for each of those segments.

The advantages to product-led growth

What kind of strategies do you lean on to overcome typical barriers to entry when you’re looking at new markets?

A separator advantage is product-led growth (PLG). This is an additive lane to augment traditional sales-led growth companies. I think more B2B teams should take advantage of this. When you look at large-scale enterprise B2B companies, they are traditionally sales-led. There is a very advantageous space where you can do product-led growth in addition to sales-led growth.

A lot of times, people wrongly assume an org has to leverage one or the other. I see PLG as an accelerator to the market that gives you rapid learning experimentation and a new framework to lead to market disruption.

How do you achieve product stickiness, and how can product-led growth help drive that process?

I define product stickiness as something habitual and invaluable for the company to operate. Three levers come to mind. One is getting yourself in the door. PLG can open a path to make users get started with a strong impression, and I think that’s core to product-led growth — multiple frictionless points of entry. These can be things like trials, freemiums, non-signups where you show the new product to existing customers, etc. The key is that the easier it is for them to engage and trust your product, the better adoption rates you’ll see.

The other principle around product-led growth is creating an aha moment and bringing that up the curve. That is absolutely critical — how can users see value in the quick win of the product? Sometimes, you have to fictionalize that. An example I’ll give is from CrowdStrike. Our endpoint security product runs in the background but doesn’t give you that aha moment until you’re in a breach or an attempted breach. In other words, it doesn’t fire until there’s activity. We initially found that we weren’t seeing the conversion rates we expected from the trial because users didn’t see that aha moment.

To fix that, we created a fictional experience for them. We gave them an artificial key vulnerability as part of the trial package and during the implementation asked them to detonate this fictional issue. This enabled us to demonstrate the power of the product — the needle in the haystack was found in the issue. The user became the hero in the process because we showed them how to extinguish the problem.

The third thing is what I call the response ripple. How do you create the network effect of more people using your product? Companies like Miro or Slack are experts in this area, and it’s all about how they invite people to their platforms. They create environments for co-work, and the response ripple means more people are relying on the product. You can create that effect within product-led growth.

Pivoting and scaling products for growth

In some cases, an organization could be sales-led for most markets but product-led for a small fraction of the business. As that new market becomes more mature, is there a world in which you’d start using a sales-led model there instead?

It depends. I’m generally following the same successful strategy and playbook from CrowdStrike in my role at BeyondTrust. At CrowdStrike, when we went down market, we created a product, but we also created a new channel for SMB and mid-enterprise to scale our business. We were trying to solve two things. The first was that customer surveys, data, and feedback told us that these were customers who would be happy if they did not have to talk to a human. The second was that we didn’t want to invest in higher volume, lower ASP sales. So, we had to create a direct line to market, which was ecommerce.

We built our own ecommerce capability from scratch. Users could purchase a trial or go straight to checkout from the website. We also had innovations where Falcon Go could be purchased on Amazon Business. This became a multi-million dollar, material line of business for the company, and it never evolved into the traditional sales model.

However, the beauty of our strategy was that we had customers who started from the ecommerce channel. These could be, for example, small or mid-enterprise hyper-growth tech companies going against the grain. These orgs don’t want to talk to sales, they want to just find the product themselves, purchase it, and then they graduate up to enterprise sales. This became a very powerful inflow of logos for us. We’d say, “Wow, Tesla reached out to us via ecommerce.” They purchased and now they’re a new logo for us, and we’re going to nurture that relationship. As they grow, we’d bring them up to an enterprise level.

Is that sales model able to adapt to market changes? Do external changes in the market potentially alter the user’s needs?

Yes. I believe so. When I was at ClickSoftware, I led an AI scheduling software product. It was the leader in the space and used by companies like Best Buy, Lowe’s, and Verizon. The software was used to optimize schedules for in-home technician visits. Companies like Best Buy are constantly balancing schedules and trying to maximize the number of calls per day.

Our market was steep in the retail space — installations, repairs, and even home healthcare. A lot of these verticals relied on outdated tech. They did not have a technology that served their needs, and we were able to make changes to our product to penetrate it. We eventually sold to the largest Medicare provider in the U.S. Even though the product was originally built for technicians, PAs or doctors needed the same scheduling technology. We were able to make changes and pivot our product to accommodate those users, and it was very successful.

How do you view the potential for product-led growth as it becomes more popular in companies worldwide?

I see it as having the disruption potential as SaaS cloud did about two decades ago. We had a product-led growth team at CrowdStrike, and we invest in it heavily now at BeyondTrust. Even within the last five years, the profiles that I’m seeing out there have grown tremendously. There are some very disciplined tacticians leading with these principles at highly innovative companies. It’s exciting to see.