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Is Product-Led Growth (PLG) Dying, or Evolving Into Hybrid GTM in 2027?

By Kory White · Updated Nov 2026 · 6 min read
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Direct answer

The published evidence does not say PLG is dying. It points to PLG being combined with sales, and the strongest source for that is McKinsey's August 2023 analysis, which found that the few product-led companies with outsize performance do so by "increasingly developing a hybrid motion known as product-led sales (PLS)." McKinsey also says "most public, once-pure PLG B2B companies have now deployed their own sales teams."

That is one firm's reading of 107 public SaaS companies, and it is nearly two and a half years old. The newest data read for this page is an Extruct scan of 474 Series A startups from October 2025, which found 39% enable PLG or self-serve and 61% stayed sales-led. It does not measure whether PLG is growing or shrinking.

No source read for this page publishes a current, audited count of how many companies run a hybrid motion, and none shows PLG disappearing. "PLG is dying" is an opinion that some commentators hold; "PLG is evolving into hybrid" is the more common reading, and it is also an interpretation. The sections below separate what was reported from what is forecast or argued.

What was reported: PLG was growing, then growth cooled

In June 2022, OpenView's third Product Benchmarks Report said product-led companies, especially those with a freemium model, were "2x more likely to grow revenue 100% year over year as compared to sales-led models." It also said PLG adoption had grown from 45% to 55% since the first report in 2019, and that 61% of companies in the Cloud 100 used a PLG model. OpenView, the venture firm that coined the term, called PLG "the new normal." That is a report from the firm that promoted the model, so read it with that in mind.

A year later the picture was less bright. A Wing Venture Capital summary of OpenView's 2023 report, which OpenView ran with Pendo across approximately 1,000 top PLG private companies, says only one-fifth of companies kept growing at least 75% year over year, down from nearly half (49%) in 2021. In the previous survey PLG companies had grown 50% year over year against 21% for traditional SaaS companies, but Wing says PLG growth rates "have contracted sharply." I could not retrieve the 2023 report itself, so these figures come from Wing's summary, and the report is now more than two years old.

The case that PLG is fading

Evidence that supports the "dying" reading is thinner than the headline suggests, and most of it is about slowing growth rather than disappearance.

The case for hybrid: PLG plus sales

Several sources describe PLG as a front door that sales then builds on. McKinsey says "more and more PLG companies are realizing that an exclusively self-serve approach is incapable of sustaining a company's growth trajectory," and defines the hybrid as using "different product- and sales-led tools and tactics" simultaneously "for different personas." The firm does not say which companies, or how many, have moved.

A clear example is a company that still calls itself product-led while selling. In a July 2021 post, Figma wrote: "As a product-led growth company, our sales team has a unique and critical role to play." The same post said the sales team had open roles in San Francisco, New York City, London and remote in the US. Figma's published view in 2021 was PLG with a sales team, not PLG instead of one.

Buyer and metrics data lean the same way. In McKinsey's survey of 625 SaaS buyers across five software categories, 65 percent said they strongly prefer both sales- and product-led experiences. OpenView's 2023 report, per Wing, found "product-led sales maturity" was the most influential growth lever, and tracking product-qualified leads or accounts increased the likelihood of fast growth by 61%. Both are surveys with stated methods, but neither is recent.

What the most recent data shows

The Extruct 2025 scan, published October 15, 2025, looked at 474 Series A startups. It found 39% enable PLG or self-serve and 25% offer a free tier. Among 122 developer tools companies, 50% are PLG, 47% self-serve and 34% offer a free plan. Extruct says the 61% that stayed sales-led "aren't behind," and that many are in categories where human-led sales wins on economics and risk. It names Equals and Superhuman as companies that swung between sales-led and self-serve before settling into a hybrid.

Limits of this data: Extruct does not explain how companies were selected or how the scan was run, and it covers one funding stage only. It is a snapshot of a single year, so it cannot show whether PLG is rising or falling.

Where PLG fits and where it struggles

Extruct says PLG struggles with "complex implementations, multiple stakeholders, heavy compliance." McKinsey adds that no one approach fits every category: 59 percent of enterprise infrastructure buyers surveyed prioritized a free trial, while just 10 percent prioritized a proof of value or pilot, and in cybersecurity the trend was reversed.

The Product Coalition piece quotes earlier commentary by Noa Ganot that "up until $10M ARR, it's much easier to succeed without PLG than with it," and that after $10M ARR the opposite is true. That is a quoted claim in an opinion newsletter, not a study read for this page, so it should not be used as a rule.

What to watch for in 2027

McKinsey's forecast is that as start-ups go upmarket, "companies may have to consider the merits of embracing the product-led sales model-or potentially face the risk of disruption." That is a prediction from 2023, not a measurement. No source read for this page publishes a 2026 or 2027 count of hybrid companies, so any figure you see for hybrid adoption should be traced to its source and checked for sample size and date.

Bottom line

The evidence read for this page supports a narrow claim: pure, sales-free PLG looks harder to sustain than early advocacy suggested, and the sources that address it describe sales being added on top of self-serve. It does not support the claim that PLG is dying. Whether hybrid becomes the default by 2027 is a forecast that no source here can confirm.

Questions people ask

Is product-led growth dead?

No source read for this page shows that. A March 2026 newsletter says "PLG isn't dead" but that PLG alone was a mirage, and Extruct's October 2025 scan found 39% of 474 Series A startups enable PLG or self-serve. Those are an opinion and a one-year snapshot.

What is hybrid GTM or product-led sales?

McKinsey describes it as a motion in which different product- and sales-led tools and tactics are used at the same time for different personas, for example a live demo for executives and a trial for end users.

Do PLG companies outperform sales-led ones?

OpenView reported in June 2022 that product-led companies were 2x more likely to grow revenue 100% year over year. McKinsey's August 2023 analysis of 107 public SaaS companies found most companies adopting product-led motions were not enjoying any boost, with a subset of outperformers driving the gap.

Did Figma stop being product-led when it hired salespeople?

Figma did not say so. In July 2021 it described itself as a product-led growth company with a sales team playing a unique and critical role. That is a company statement, not an independent study.

How many companies run a hybrid motion?

No source read for this page publishes a verified count. Be cautious with any single figure that does not state its sample, method and date.

Sources

Figures here come from the sources linked above, read on November 4, 2026. Surveys and forecasts are attributed to whoever made them, and their ages are stated where known.

Top photo: Screenshot of the Figma Design editor from figma.com/design (c) Figma, Inc.

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