Who do I hire first for PLG, and what should the team look like once it is ten people?
Do not hire a Head of Growth first. Your first hire should be a builder who can ship an experiment end to end, because the initial growth model has to be created by the founding team and a senior leader parachuted in will either copy someone else's playbook or produce a strategy nobody adopts. Match that first hire to your actual bottleneck: if activation is the problem, hire someone product-shaped, and if acquisition is, hire a marketer who can code a landing page. By ten people you want the four growth areas covered (acquisition, activation, monetisation, retention) with a dedicated growth engineer and an analyst, because in PLG the analyst is not overhead, they are the whole feedback loop. Sequence the squads in the order your funnel is leaking, not in the order the org chart looks tidy.
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4 resources, 1 India-specific, 4 link-checked.
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Built from interviews with 12 growth leaders, and it argues hard against the thing most founders want to do, which is hire a Head of Growth as a shortcut. Hire the builder, match them to your bottleneck.
Product leaders from Razorpay, Byju's, Swiggy, Flipkart and ShareChat on data-driven onboarding and growth team structure. Indian scale, Indian constraints, in their own words.
The funnel audit method Hila describes here is the single most useful thing to run in your first month on a PLG team, and hearing her talk through it is faster than reading a framework.
Hila Qu built PLG at GitLab and scaled Acorns, and this is the rare free piece that maps the sales-led funnel against the product-led one side by side so you can see exactly which stage you are actually changing.
