Persona
Growth Owners: Growth PM, Head of Growth, PLG owner
The one persona that opens on AI-First Growth language. Champion, not economic buyer. Their comp depends on activation; speak in their metrics or not at all.
Who they are
- Own: activation, conversion, day-1/7 retention, churn, ARPU, experiment velocity. Usually measured quarterly.
- Company trigger: free trial / self-serve exists; activation plateaued; the adoption stack disappointed.
- Deal role: champion and evaluator. Line up a VP Product/CPO (or Marketing) economic buyer behind them.
Where they live, what they trust (external research)
- Newsletters and voices: Lenny's Newsletter, Leah Tharin's ProducTea, Kyle Poyar, Wes Bush (ProductLed), Ramli John (Delight Path). Our GTM partnerships with the last two are the persona's trust shortcut.
- Communities: growth/PLG Slack groups, product-led communities; peer recommendations in private channels are the most-trusted evaluation source (64%, Sopro).
- What earns trust: named metric lifts, playbooks they can run, calculators/diagnostics (clicktax.ai), teardowns. Register: spiky growth-operator vocabulary (Lenny/Poyar/Bush register).
Key messages (sheet) and how to say them
- Click Tax: name their invisible enemy, then quantify it. It's our owned vocabulary; use it in every asset.
- PLG → AI-First Growth: "PLG solved access; it broke on outcomes." Superset framing, never replacement. (Say "AI-First Growth" externally, never ALG.)
- Engineered Champions: champions stop being trained and start being engineered; every user gets expert output on day one.
"Your onboarding has a click tax. Here's what it costs you."
"Tours teach your product. Agents deliver its outcomes."
"PLG got them in the door. The agent gets them to value."
Features that matter to them
| Feature | Frame it as |
|---|
| Product Agent + Remote plugin | Numbers move this quarter; no engineering queue |
| Generative onboarding + starters | First outcome in the first session; activation as outcome, not checklist |
| Agentic-surface experiments | Iterate in hours, decoupled from the release train |
| Intent signals (Conversational Analytics, early access framing) | Prompts as demand data; experiments informed by what users literally asked for |
Proof pack
MixMax day-1 retention 57→90% (day-7 40→60) · Qonto activation 8→16% · AskCody +344% daily AI actions · TTV days→<60s. All anonymized externally until cleared.
Vocabulary
Say- Their metrics, by name, with numbers
- "Click tax," "time to outcome," "experiments in hours"
Never- "AI-powered," "AI Copilot," "personalization at scale," "in-app tours," "PLG is dead"
- Architecture talk: layers and protocols lose this room
Motion note: this persona arrives in the TOOL motion almost always; for motion mechanics, competitive frame, and CTA ladder see
the TOOL page. If their company has declared an AI-Native rebuild, arm them as the measurement champion and route to Product/Engineering.