George Jurgens

Rather than running one-off campaigns, built a repeatable operating model for product-led growth inside a sales-led organisation: capture signal, route signal, enable action, measure outcome. Tested the mechanics with in-product nudges, tooltips, banners and in-app messages surfacing new features and upsell moments at the right time to the right users, then built the automated routing that turned a raised hand into a ticket for the right Account Manager, CSM or Support owner, with no manual triage. Once it worked, trained GTM, Product, Engineering, CSMs and AMs across the organisation to run and extend it themselves, through a reusable Pendo guide template library, shared documentation, and a Growth RACI model that gave Product and GTM clear, non-overlapping ownership.

Customers routinely exceeded their licence count, and the standard motion was an account manager chasing an overdue payment, an awkward conversation nobody enjoyed. Reframed it as a problem the customer could resolve themselves, in-product, at the moment of overage. The pilot made ~$50k ARR in 25 days, then grew 100% year over year, and the time from a flagged overage to new licences purchased dropped to often under 24 hours.

Overdue invoices were a manual, low-priority chase. Tested the approach in Postman first, then built the live workflow in Zapier once the API pattern was proven, later evolving the same approach into a Google Chat app used for a different workflow entirely.

A long tail of legacy free-plan tenants carried operational risk and technical debt, and no longer fitted the go-to-market strategy. Owned the sunset end to end: a 60-day notice period served in-product through Pendo banners to around 580 in-app users, and by automated HubSpot sequences to roughly 2,000 email accounts, phased against a hard sunset date and a final data purge 30 days later. Inactive accounts were soft-blocked ahead of the rest.

The part that mattered commercially was the retention path. Of the ~1,600 tenants, around 120 had recent activity and 17 were daily active, and the comms flow routed those to a commercial sponsor on the sales side instead of quietly switching them off. Sales, Customer Success, Support and the partner team were each briefed for the specific inbound they would get, down to distinguishing genuine concern from users who had created a free account by accident while trying to log in.

A free tier almost nobody upgraded from: 12 upgrade requests in 18 months, while most customers used it regularly. So the packaging question went to an experiment. 405 customers got full access to the paid tier, split two ways: a 30-day trial that expires, against one they could keep indefinitely.

The 30-day group was quicker to create a first form. The unlimited group created 146% more of them, and kept going. Urgency won the first action. Removing the deadline won the habit.

Two decisions followed: a licence price adjustment, modelled at a $345k expansion opportunity, and a reframe of forms usage as a retention lever, once the data showed customers on comms alone churned far more.

Owned the wind-down a year later too: countdown messaging in-product, and a usage-based cut of the tenant base so account managers could work the heaviest users first.

CRM contacts skewed heavily toward original buyers. For HR users specifically, only around 40% had a usable email address, and the rest weren't reachable through direct outreach because of GDPR constraints. Built a consent-based, self-serve persona-capture flow in Pendo, wired into Planhat and the CRM through Zapier and API automation, so admin-level users could identify their own department on first use instead of relying on acquired contact data.

Add-on licences and core licences drifted apart quietly. A customer could be badly under-licensed on an add-on relative to how many people they had on the platform, and nobody would notice without manual review. Built a Looker Studio dashboard sourced from Salesforce comparing total licences sold against add-on licences sold per tenant, so account managers and CSMs could spot the gap themselves rather than waiting to be told.

One review cycle flagged around $53k in incremental ARR opportunity across four add-ons. Refined with sales, CS leadership and RevOps over subsequent weeks to correct edge cases, such as global admin licences being miscounted as under-sold. This dashboard is one of the mechanisms behind the wider expansion opportunity identified across the business.

A fragile Zapier automation quietly handled every licence-overage exception, and it was getting harder to maintain. Rebuilt it using Codex, talking directly to the underlying APIs: CSMs and AMs can now pause or resume a customer's overage banner themselves through a single Google Chat command, with automatic 30-day re-activation if the account is still over threshold. The build itself took days; the real bottleneck was Google Cloud and Workspace access and governance approval, which took weeks longer than the build.

As the lead relationship owner across Apple, Google, Amazon, Roku, Samsung and LG, secured App of the Day placements in key Tier 1 countries and launched a kids' coding app that Apple featured regularly across the entire App Store ecosystem globally, later used internally at Apple as an example of a well-constructed listing. Owned a marketing budget of up to £1.2m a year across paid and non-paid channels, and built the reporting infrastructure behind it.

An existing peer-to-peer referral programme had no real way to validate a referral, which left it open to abuse. Brought in third-party fraud-prevention tooling to properly track and validate referrals, then launched a wider Refer-a-Friend programme and a scaled influencer strategy on top of a channel worth trusting. The targeting itself had its own constraint: the business monetised by selling aggregated, anonymised spending data to hedge funds and businesses for market analysis, so acquisition needed statistically representative coverage across UK regions, not just the easiest audiences to reach.