In product-led growth (PLG) and AI companies, traditional marketing and product thinking can be a massive barrier to success. Bill Macaitis, the former CMO of Slack and Zendesk, discusses hard-earned insights on how marketing and product teams can collaborate to create seamless growth loops that fuel exponential success.
1. Aligning Marketing and Product
In the early stages of growth, companies often segregate marketing from product development. Marketing is seen as the team responsible for creating awareness and driving sales, while product development works to refine the user experience. However, Bill Macaitis emphasizes that this isn’t optimal for how the modern PLG & AI should operate. “You cannot have marketing be separate from the product itself,” he says.
Bill sees growth as inherently tied to the product experience. Macaitis’ approach is clear: marketing must be embedded into the product itself. By weaving marketing elements—such as engaging onboarding flows, in-app upsells, and viral referral mechanisms—directly into the product, teams can amplify their growth efforts exponentially. By leveraging every customer interaction, whether it’s through an email, product interface, or customer support, the growth process becomes much more fluid and effective. This integration allows marketing efforts to work in harmony with the product, creating a loop where each success feeds into the next.
2. The Power of Feedback Led Virality
Bill’s advice on building an effective growth loop is grounded in the idea of creating a continuous cycle of feedback and improvement.
To create a seamless growth loop, teams must focus on integrating feedback at every stage. This includes gathering data from customers in real-time, analyzing behavior, and adjusting marketing and product features to reflect those insights. For instance, if marketing finds that a specific feature within the product is getting a lot of organic attention (such as a chatbot or referral system), that could indicate the potential for virality. Marketing teams can then amplify that feature by creating additional content around it, running targeted campaigns, and promoting it across channels.
Similarly, the product team must be aware of how users interact with marketing materials and adjust the product experience to align better with customer expectations.
3. Attribution Models that Work for PLG Companies
Macaitis highlights the importance of using attribution models that reflect the nuances of PLG businesses.
The Challenge of Multi-Touch Attribution
In PLG and AI companies, growth often comes from multiple touchpoints—content marketing, in-app prompts, word of mouth, and more. For example, Slack’s growth wasn’t solely due to its viral loops or witty release notes. It was the cumulative effect of multiple, well-coordinated strategies, over a period of time. Traditional attribution models, which focus on the first or last touchpoint, often aren’t the best candidates to influence decision-making and growth strategies. Suitable attribution models are necessary to provide the insights teams need to prioritize features and marketing efforts that truly impact growth.
4. Balancing Efficiency and Experimentation
While product-embedded marketing is central to PLG, Macaitis cautions against relying solely on the most efficient growth strategies. He emphasizes the importance of balancing efficiency with experimentation to uncover incremental growth opportunities.
For example, Macaitis describes how Slack combined efficient PLG mechanisms with offline campaigns to reach new markets and audiences. While offline campaigns —such as events and conferences— were more expensive, they exposed the brand to new audiences and drove incremental growth, ultimately lowering the blended cost per acquisition (CAC). Macaitis’ approaches growth with a “blended CAC” mindset, where the combined efficiency of all efforts justifies the investment, and helps companies to accelerate their reach.
For PLG and AI companies, experimentation might involve exploring unconventional marketing channels, targeting niche communities, or investing in regional campaigns to expand into untapped markets.
5. Empathy as a Competitive Advantage
Another cornerstone of Macaitis’ strategy is customer empathy. At Slack, the team’s guiding principle was to make work life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive for users. This customer-centric mindset shaped every decision, from feature prioritization to marketing messaging.
Macaitis believes that empathy-driven design and marketing not only improve the product experience but also differentiate a brand in crowded markets. For AI companies, where trust and usability are critical, demonstrating empathy through transparent communication and choices that delight users can be a significant competitive advantage.
This article is based on a recent podcast conversation between Bill and Pranav Piyush, CEO of Paramark—a platform used by modern CMOs and CFOs at fast-growing companies to understand marketing’s incremental impact, set budgets, run experiments, and forecast results accurately. For more insights from Bill, visit saasCMOpro.com.