Usha Iyer is Hivebrite’s Chief Customer and Growth Officer, leading the community engagement platform’s go-to-market customer success and revenue strategy. On June 26, her opening presentation kicked off Keynote Day at ITX’s Product + Design Conference. Right after she exited the stage, Usha joined Sean Murray and Dan Sharp for this episode of Product Momentum, recorded in front of a live conference audience.

Our conversation with Usha follows the customer journey, meeting at the intersection of product management, business growth, and customer success. And it covers key themes like connecting product work to business outcomes, the Bow Tie Model for customer journey alignment, and AI’s role in optimizing business processes. At the close of the conversation, Usha offers practical advice for product teams on engagement and roadmap management.

Here’s what we learned:

Product’s Connection with Business Impact

SaaS product teams need to focus on the outcomes of product work that drive real business impact. Even small, seemingly minor changes to your product can significantly affect engagement and business metrics.

“Oftentimes, you’ll find as a product person that the smallest, most inconsequential feature that you develop actually has the biggest impact,” Usha says. “The least amount of effort sometimes gives you the biggest satisfaction…. So it’s important to connect the dots and go from what you’re doing day to day, the output to the outcomes.”

Aligning with Go-To-Market Stakeholders

To deepen (even expand) business acumen, Usha recommends that product teams collaborate with their counterparts in the go-to-market organization.

“Learn to align with your marketing team, your sales teams, your customer success teams,” she advises. “Ask to join discovery calls with prospects, or do a ride-along with a sales rep to gain direct market insights.” Engagement fosters empathy, strengthens business alignment, and deepens understanding of customer needs and industry dynamics.

The Bow Tie Model

Usha introduces the Bow Tie Model as a framework that coordinates product, marketing, sales, and customer success around shared business goals. In addition, she emphasizes leadership alignment on key metrics like GRR, NRR, and ARR to create feedback loops that enhance the customer journey and drive sustainable growth.

“It boils down to leadership at the go-to-market level and the product level,” she adds. “We’re all working toward company success, so if we can internalize that and build it into the culture of the organization – including your product and engineering activities – it becomes a flywheel.”

Growth Drivers in SaaS Companies

As Usha points out, SaaS companies’ main growth drivers are retention, expansion, and new business; but then she introduces a fourth: efficiency.

“Investors are getting a lot more stringent about where they put their money,” she continues. “Whereas top line metrics drive revenue metrics, which drive your presence in the market, efficiency drives your residence in the market.”

AI-Assisted Organizational Buy-in

To gain organizational buy-in for adopting frameworks like the Bow Tie, Usha suggests leveraging AI to connect diverse data sources – such as sales conversations, marketing signals, and product usage – to generate actionable insights. AI tools accelerate the process by automating tasks like generating QBRs and providing sales teams with tailored pitches.

“The answer lies in being able to take your product metrics and align it to the company metrics,” Usha says. “That’s really where it starts. That’s how we drive change management. And AI can play a big part: you can take any metric and connect the dots with another metric pretty easily with AI.”

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