Jamie Quint on the oldness of PLG, and the impact of ChatGPT on growth and product teams

Product State Q&A

Jamie Quint is a General Partner at Uncommon Capital, Co-Founder at Rye, and Growth Advisor to companies like Twitch and Substack. He is the former Head of Growth at Notion, and former Sr Director of Product/Monetization at Reddit.
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EC: You’ve called out that the ‘PLG’ term is somewhat of a re-branding — a content-marketing stretch of sorts — of existing SaaS concepts. What would you say might be the negative effect of the popularization of PLG?

JQ: It’s not so much that there are any negative effects.

This just isn’t really anything that new.

Companies like Atlassian have been doing this kind of thing for quite a while.

EC: What may be the impact of tech like ChatGPT on growth teams?

JQ: On the Growth side, it probably helps facilitate content marketing — which will likely get ruined as a channel by being overrun with shitty content.

Or everyone will start just consuming AI summarizations of shitty AI content, lol.

Also, it probably helps with sales cold outreach email personalization (also will get ruined as a channel, if it hasn’t been already).

It will make it easier to make high quality ad creative.

There will be other more important innovations that are harder to predict (e.g. fully automated CRM?).

I think ChatGPT could write a spec today from a template better than 50% of PMs.

Maybe it enables PMs to be more productive.

EC: What would you say distinguishes the best PMs from the rest?

JQ: The best PMs can effectively prioritize (good instincts for what will work).

They can push Engineering and Design to make the right tradeoffs on quality/speed.

They know when to use data and when to use intuition/history as a guide.

Really solid Growth PMs maybe index more on being very good and self-sufficient with data (e.g. Can they write a window function in sql? A cohort analysis? 😛).