Product Led Growth

Pantheon's purchase path was entirely sales-assisted. New customers could start for free, but upgrading to paid features meant filling out a sales form and waiting. Every customer, from a solo developer buying a basic plan to an enterprise account, went through the same process.

This created real operational drag. The cost to acquire each customer was identical regardless of deal size. The business goal was to route 100% of one account plan through a self-serve path entirely, freeing the sales team to focus where they added the most value.

I worked with product and engineering partners to run alignment workshops before any design work began. These sessions mapped the current customer journey, analyzed customer cohorts by deal size and behavior, and stress-tested proposed solutions against delivery constraints. Low-fidelity mockups were used to test feasibility and build shared understanding, not to commit to a direction.

The workshops produced three distinct paths to explore: requiring payment before account creation for new users, letting new users create an account first then purchase in-product, and enabling existing users to upgrade from gated feature screens.

Validation with 7 participants shaped the final release scope. Key findings:

The release was structured iteratively so value shipped at every sprint rather than waiting for the full end-to-end flow to be complete.