Meet Ryan Lock, Head of Product Management at Planes, a London-based product studio where he excels in helping clients build and grow their digital businesses. With a track record of creating new ventures like Collectable and launching innovative propositions for established companies such as Ennismore, Ryan is a seasoned pro in his field.
Recently, Ryan took part in Product-Led Growth Certified: Core in London, a one-day, in-person event designed to achieve product-led growth mastery. This elite course not only provided him with certification but also accelerated his career through expert guidance and valuable peer collaboration.
Armed with robust theories, frameworks, and inspiring case studies, Ryan is now even more of a Swiss army knife in product management. Check out what he had to say about the course!
The value of a PLA course
I'm part of the PLA Slack group and was contacted directly by someone in PLA about taking the course. The most valuable thing from the course was the stories from the people in the room, particularly the course facilitator, Ryan Soosayraj, who presented and facilitated.
Ryan has an amazing ability to draw an example to support himself in whatever he’s talking about. By the end of the day, I had thirty different examples of really interesting product stories that he'd raised. Having those examples to support the ideas within the course material was just really valuable.
Transferring what I learned into practice
The discussion that I found really interesting was around part of the acquisition funnel, which product-led growth (PLG) really focuses on. Product-led growth is about letting the product drive user adoption. There’s this idea that if you have really good engagement, then you turn your users into advocates of the product. That helps drive adoption, referral, and retention. Focusing on engagement was an interesting way to frame PLG
Another part that I found quite interesting was the pricing strategies. Lots of the products I've been involved in use different pricing strategies, but I've never really spoken in depth about how different pricing strategies work for different products.
We discussed the merits of freemium, free trials, and feature-based pricing strategies and how companies use them. We looked at how nearly half of SaaS companies are currently moving towards usage-based pricing just because they find it’s the best model for balancing customer benefit and revenue growth.
Product-Led Alliance
Networking
The networking Ryan S created was fantastic. He'd had a wealth of experience, and it was amazing to hear his stories. It was a small group, which is wonderful because it allowed everybody to be engaged in the conversation. When there are only half a dozen people sitting around a table, everybody is participating. It's easy to let the conversation flow.
It was nice that people came from a diverse range of backgrounds. We had people from both B2B and B2C, big companies and startups. It was wonderful to hear diverse opinions and perspectives on business.
Professional growth
I think that no matter what stage of your career or what role you're in, one of the most important things for professional growth is to be engaged in your community and to pursue continuous learning. A lot of the material I was already familiar with, but I was able to sit around the table with other people who I hadn't met before from industries that I hadn't worked with.
To hear their war stories and how PLG applied to their businesses and work is always going to help you grow professionally. On the continuous learning side of things, no matter how well you know a topic or if you've been exposed to it before, being able to refresh yourself and hear different perspectives is just a crucial part of professional growth.
Join our exclusive live virtual training to get certified and boost your career with expert insights and peer collaboration.
Master key theories, frameworks, and real-world case studies to become the ultimate PM multitool.
Product-Led Alliance
