A Deadly Gravitational Pull in PLG B2B: Individual-Centric Experiences

The result is inevitable stalled growth...

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A core part of what makes Product-Led Growth work in B2B also makes it extremely dangerous, often steering many B2B companies toward inevitable stalled growth and eventual downfall…

What do I mean? 

The whole B2B Product-led Growth revolution was built on the consumerization of B2B software—instead of sales-led, top-down distribution, companies started realizing that they could distribute things in reverse order. Instead of a sales team trying to convince an enterprise buyer to purchase a massive license for the entire organization, now, a product team can get traction by starting with the end users. With the users in power, suddenly everything is starting to look a lot more like our neighbors over in the consumer product land.

Just look at a B2B app like Slack—it seems to fit in the same category as a consumer app like Uber. But 20 years ago, B2B experiences were never anything like consumer apps.

Here is the catch though: Being a B2B PLG purist is just plain foolish—end users alone are almost never enough for B2B success (unless you are building for freelancers). To achieve those coveted 10-15X revenue valuation multiples (compared to single digits in the consumer businesses), B2B companies need to close 5-, 6-, and even 7-digit sales deals (blame the public market for this). The key to any successful B2B PLG strategy lies in connecting end-user adoption to enterprise-level deals.

But because B2B PLG often looks like, smells like, and acts like consumer product, it pulls product and marketing teams into a deadly gravitation pull of crafting consumer-like experiences focused solely on the individual value. While acquiring individual users is a natural first step, failing to consider the dire need to connect that individual to a team and a company level value WILL sabotage your future growth.

I know it sounds like an exaggeration, but I am 100% serious: If you do not address this teams issue early, your growth is destined to die. Some companies may achieve solid growth for years, even generating hundreds of millions in revenue through individual experiences (if there is a big enough moat). However, if a team-based experience isn't integrated from the early stages, it becomes a ticking time bomb where all up-market expansion efforts will be destined to fail.

The Individual Product Experience Trap: Why It Happens

B2B product-led experiences often start by acquiring individual users, which then leads teams to build their entire activation, monetization, and retention structures around individuals, too. The temptation to design for individuals is understandable:

• Activation: It can be challenging to get one person to that "Aha" moment, much less a whole team. Onboarding individuals involves fewer dependencies, simpler flows, and a faster time to value.

• Monetization: A user paying for themselves to use a product is simpler than convincing someone to buy something for their team.

• Retention: As long as that one user keeps coming back, that’s all you need to worry about! Keeping a whole team engaged is a different beast.

But a successful B2B product can't function like this. Having 10,000 individual users might look great at first—until you realize that they are not expanding and won’t help you land those sweet enterprise deals. It doesn’t matter how many individual users you have—if they’re not aggregating as teams and growing within their company, you're basically running a glorified consumer app. A real B2B product experience must fight the deadly gravitational pull of just serving individuals.  

How to Course-Correct Toward Teams

So, how do you ensure your product doesn’t fall into the individual-user trap? Here are three guardrails that can help steer you in the right direction:

1. User Journey Mapping for Teams

Your user journey should bring in individuals but quickly nudge them to activate as teams. Think of it as the difference between getting someone to RSVP by themselves, vs. getting them to show up with all their friends—teamwork makes the dream work! Start with acquiring individual users, but quickly transition into fostering team collaboration. 

The most obvious example of this? Onboarding that encourages users to invite colleagues or share their work. But every experience—from onboarding to day-to-day use—should consider how individuals can invite, share, or collaborate with others.

2. Define Metrics on a Team Level

You manage what you measure. Pay attention to team-level metrics and your organization will naturally move in the right direction.

• Acquisition of new Teams: New individual users joining is great… but new teams created in the new logos is even better. 

• Activation as Teams: Instead of measuring individual "Aha" moments, measure team activation. Are teams successfully collaborating and getting value together? Read my ‘I bet you are doing activation all wrong’ post.

  • Want a shortcut? Do a workshop with me.

• Engagement as Teams: Leave Weekly Active Users (WAU) for consumer business. Your focus should be WAT: Weekly Active Teams. Each WAT is an order of magnitude more valuable in B2B than a WAU.

• Team-Based Output Metrics: Look at metrics like net dollar retention (NDR)—which measure expansion from the existing customers. B2B has a unique trait that it can grow within an existing account (something B2C doesn't have an ability to do). When you grow team size within an organization, you unlock expansion opportunities and begin growing your existing revenue (in addition to new).

3. Design for Teams—Without Blocking Individual Use

Designing for teams doesn’t mean ignoring the individual experience. A great product keeps individuals happy while gently (and constantly) guiding them towards team activities. The goal is to still to have individual users without making them feel restricted, while building and optimizing within the context of the broader team & collaboration experiences. Specific design elements like invitations, shared dashboards, social proof, or collaborative prompts can help balance individual usability with team-oriented features. 

💡Check out my post on 9 tactics to grow individual users to become teams.

Real-World Examples: A Tale of Two Note-Taking Apps 

Sometimes it’s easier to see this kind of thing with a practical example. So, let’s look take a look at two very similar note apps and see how they did this differently:

Notion is a good example of a company that is currently navigating this tricky balance: they started by attracting individual users but quickly started building a path to bring in entire teams. When Notion launched in 2016, it was very much a personal note-taking/organization tool. But as they grew, they recognized the need to expand beyond this: By 2018, Notion launched team workspaces. Since then, they’ve consistently launched more and more team-based functionality to begin going upmarket and enable their self-serve experience to generate sales pipeline. This includes building out sharing, comments, mentions, and role-based permissions. Notion is still viewed by many as an individual tool, but they aggressively laying down the groundwork across their entire product to allow for team and org-wide expansion. Just look at their pricing page: it has words like ‘teams,’ ‘collaboration,’ ‘company,’ and ‘business’ all over the place.

Evernote, on the other hand… well, not quite the same. Evernote absolutely dominated the note-taking app space in the late-2000s and early 2010s, bringing a lot of functionality that basic note apps missed. But while they captured early excitement, Evernote never really prepared to evolve beyond individual use. They did eventually release Evernote Business in 2012, but it was more like an add-on than a real team experience. Even as they tried to offer shared notebooks and some task assignments, it felt clunky and more like a workaround than a designed solution. There were lots of other factors that impacted their growth—a bloated product experience, which apps like Notion and Bear took advantage of—but without a framework for a true, teams-based B2B offering, they were destined to struggle.

Leveraging Team Network Effects

Another way to see how important this is? Look at the products that do it really well. 

Some products have a built-in collaborative "Aha" moment—like Slack. No one's using Slack alone. Slack is a communication tool, so all of its features are all about the team experience. For products like Slack, collaboration is built into the DNA. 

Other products have to work for it, and I’ve seen this personally at a number of the companies I’ve worked with: For instance, Miro has done a great job of this—they let individuals use the product in a comprehensive way, while not so subtly reinforcing team-based behaviors like sharing boards, inviting teammates to collaborate, live cursors, and social proof on every board. But that had to be an intentional decision, because the ‘single-player’ mode of just designing things on your own board is a natural path for the product.

One critical strategy for resisting that individual-user gravitational pull is to harness team-based network effects. Basically, the more people you bring on board, the more everyone wins—kind of like a potluck where each new person brings an awesome dish. The more the merrier! For example, if every new user you add to a team improves the experience for all members—such as keeping a team in the loop that would otherwise have been excluded, or increasing data visibility—you establish a foundation for sustained growth. Just by thinking about things through the framework of network effects will help you to consider ways that you can optimize for the team experience.

Final Thoughts

The gravitational pull towards focusing on individual users is part of the deal, when it comes to PLG—to make B2B self-serve, you have to consider the end-user… just not too much. Understanding what people actually want from a product and iterating to deliver that personal experience is crucial. But to build a truly healthy B2B business, you have to activate teams, grow collaborative usage, and focus on metrics that align with team success. No, you can’t just create a consumer-style product and slap a B2B label on it. Instead, design intentionally for teams… and massive growth (and valuation multiples) will be yours!

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Edited with the help of Jonathan Yagel, Assistant to the Regional Memeger.

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