26 March 2026 09:45 - 10:15
Scaling PLG experiences in the Enterprise: IBM’s story
PLG is often associated with startups and developer-first companies, yet many enterprise organizations are now adopting the same principles to meet rising expectations for transparency, self-service, and faster time to value. In this session, IBM will share how it began transforming a large enterprise software portfolio toward a product-led model. Rather than focusing on a single product, IBM needed to enable more than 30+ software products to become PLG-ready by simplifying purchasing flows and allowing users to experience value directly through the product. This required building a scalable foundation that allowed teams to instrument their products, experiment on experiences, and adopt proven patterns without reinventing the process for each product.
The talk will explore how IBM leveraged its design system as a distribution engine for successful product experiences and scaled product analytics through automated instrumentation. These capabilities created a shared framework for measuring adoption, running experiments, and improving activation across a diverse portfolio of products. The session will also look ahead to the next evolution of product-led experiences, where AI-powered generative interfaces allow products to adapt to users dynamically and guide them toward outcomes, and share practical lessons for product leaders looking to operationalize PLG at enterprise scale.