Why Team Activation Is the Missing Piece in Your PLG Strategy 🤝
8 strategies and examples from multi-player PLG products like Miro, Loom, Notion, Canva, and more.
Hello everyone 👋 I’m Kate Syuma, and welcome to Growthmates.news — the newsletter where we explore growth stories to inspire your professional and personal growth. Join the community of 6,500+ Product, Design, and Growth people from companies like Amplitude, Intercom, Miro, Atlassian, Grammarly, Framer, and more.
Most Product-Led Growth strategies still revolve around activating the individual user. One person signs up, discovers value, and starts coming back. But in products designed for collaboration, that's only half the story. If just one person gets value while the rest of the team remains passive, growth slows down, adoption stays shallow, and expansion rarely follows.
Enough ignoring 😉 After 6+ years working on Miro, I’ve seen how team activation can become a true growth engine. When teams experience value together through shared work, real-time collaboration, or even async coordination, the product becomes stickier, more visible across the organization, and more likely to expand organically.
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In this post, I’ll break down things:
What Team Activation actually means — and how it's different from user-level activation.
How to define it and measure it in products where value depends on collaboration.
8 product strategies to drive Team Activation — with examples from collaborative tools like Miro, Notion, Loom, and more.
Now, let’s get right into it 👇
First, what is Team Activation?
If your product’s core value lies in collaboration, then activation should reflect that — not just at the individual level, but at the account (or team) level too.
User-level activation is about helping one person form a habit around your core value. This model works well for B2C or solo-use cases — the goal is to ensure each user independently finds value and keeps coming back.
But in multi-player PLG, this is only half the equation.
Team-level activation means the team collectively experiences value. The product’s core promise is only realized when multiple people engage through shared workflows, feedback loops, or co-creation.
This means your activation journey — setup, aha, habit — should include collaboration milestones, not just individual actions.
📌 Example of Team Level Activation
Let’s take Notion as an example — a tool built for both individuals and teams.
A solo user might activate by creating a workspace, writing notes, or organizing personal tasks, but that’s an individual value. Team-level activation happens when the workspace becomes shared — when one person invites others, pages are co-edited, comments exchanged, and documents linked across a team’s workflows. That’s when Notion shifts from being a private tool to a collaborative hub.
📌 How to evaluate the Team as fully activated?
To evaluate team activation, you need metrics that capture collective behavior — not just one person’s journey.
For example, you might track:
The number of members actively engaging with shared pages;
The frequency of collaborative sessions (e.g. multiple people editing or commenting);
What type of diverse roles (e.g. creator, reviewer, reader) are involved in the same workflow.
A team might be considered partially activated if 2 or 3 members reach the aha moment, like editing or sharing content in a common space. However, full activation typically means a significant portion of the team contributes to or benefits from the product.
It’s not just about one champion getting value — it’s about building shared momentum across the team.
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👉 8 Key Strategies to Drive Team Activation
1. Make Collaborative features clear in your positioning.
Miro is the top collaborative platform in the world. During my 6 years there, this was a key strategy — to show collaboration on every surface.
But even with this, many users still used it for personal tasks: individuals, small “teams of one”. This happens not just in Miro, but in any collaborative platform — Notion, Canva. Many people use these tools individually, though they are designed for teams.
The goal is simple: from the first glance, users should understand that this isn’t just a tool for individual productivity — it’s a space where teams come together.
Softr is showing how different roles can collaborate inside the product already on the website. Nice how teams work together with different permission levels — and this is a good way to present the depth of collaborative capabilities.
✅ How to apply this:
Communicate early (on your website) that the product is for collaborative teams.
Show collaborative features everywhere: in product visuals and website copy.
Make it very clear that collaboration is the core purpose of the platform.
Highlight permissions and team structures as part of your product story.
2. Segment users by their intent: Personal vs Team.
Claude has a segmentation question: Personal vs Teams. A key strategy is to segment users early — personal vs team. For example, they ask this question to users, and it helps both with personalization and identifying PQLs for B2B use cases.
When you know early that a user wants to work with their team, you can guide them:
Give them more prompts to invite teammates.
Share content that supports team collaboration.
✅ How to apply this:
Identify “Personal vs. Team” intent as early as possible (e.g. through onboarding questions).
Make it easy for users to invite others right away (as the next onboarding step).
Remember: team activation often leads to stronger individual activation and retention. Imagine you receive updates from a teammate, and they prompt you to come back and use the tool more frequently and actively.
If the product is collaborative (like Miro or Notion), team members sharing content with each other create extra motivation and external triggers, making it more likely that users come back, check their teammates’ updates, and stay engaged.
3. Don’t be afraid of adding an “Invite“ step into onboarding.
Loom (as many other collaborative PLG products) is adding "Invite" as a step to the sign-up flow. While usually the CR to invite is not high here, people who bring their team have higher Activation rates. See
insights on why this step matters in team activation.Many in the community worry that asking users to invite teammates during onboarding will hurt conversion. But actually, the drop at this step is usually not dramatic. If people don’t want to invite, they’ll simply skip it — no harm done.
What matters is that some users do come ready to collaborate. This is your chance to activate the team earlier. And as we’ve seen before: once teams are active, individuals get more external triggers to return and stay engaged.
✅ How to apply this:
Add an “Invite” step like Loom and other collaborative PLG products do. It builds early awareness about collaboration — even if users don’t invite right away, they recognise that it’s possible later.
Use it as a low-risk experiment to spot and support team-minded users early. If you identified some “team” accounts early on, you can leverage them as PQLs, attract customer success, and turn them into higher product tiers for more value.
4. Make the Core Sharing Experience very intuitive.
Linear is a great example. They show a very simple invite screen both during onboarding and inside the product. Users see clearly how to invite via a link — no complexity.
The product relies on the “power of defaults” by providing the easiest option to invite team members through the link. Finally, this experience is consistent throughout different touchpoints—during the Sign-up flow, in the Onboarding checklist, and as part of the core experience. For more details, check my previous article that explains key high-quality principles to support your Product-Led Growth.
Also, Softr shows guest permissions clearly, which reduces confusion about access levels when you invite someone for the first time to your database.
As a side note, they recently introduced Softr Databases. They allow teams to store, organize, and manage data collaboratively in one place with flexible permissions. You can even build full-stack business apps — all in one platform with AI, and invite your co-workers into these apps.
✅ How to apply this:
Keep the invitation flow simple and consistent across touchpoints.
Use “Power of defaults” — make the easiest invite option obvious.
Prioritise “Invite with link” as the most intuitive sharing option.
5. Explain how Roles & Permissions work.
Notion shows a great example of contextual explainers. When inviting guests, they explain the benefits of full membership, like creating personal sites and unlimited collaboration, instead of just pushing an upgrade.
This clear explanation motivates teams to upgrade members when they see the need and benefit of that. Imagine you’re inviting a teammate as a guest, but then you realise they will not have access to all other docs — isn’t it better to convert them to full member right away and avoid access problems later?
✅ How to apply this:
Explain limitations (guest vs. full member) contextually during invitations.
Highlight the benefits of full membership without being pushy.
Use this to softly encourage upgrading guest users to full members, boosting team engagement.
6. Convert Individuals → Team.
Canva demonstrates very well how to convert individual users into team users. When reactivating their 30-day trial, users choose between individual or team plans. If they select team, Canva explains the benefits of team collaboration and shared workflows.
This shifts users’ mindset from solo to team use, also checking the “Trial intent”.
✅ How to apply this:
Offer users a choice between individual and team plans or trials.
Clearly communicate the benefits of team collaboration if users show the Team Trial intent.
Use trial renewals and other touchpoints to encourage switching to team plans, building more trust and stickiness to the product over time.
7. Work on the Team expansion.
Once a user is part of a small team (e.g., in Notion), the next step is to grow that team from 2 to 10+ members.
To foster that expansion, you can facilitate invitations via popular channels like Slack and Google to make adding teammates easy. Notion’s integrations support this well.
And one more interesting example I just found. Miro is suggesting some invitees right away, making it extra easy to invite them in one click.
✅ How to apply this:
Enable invitations through external tools and channels (e.g. Google / Slack / MS Teams).
Show contextual suggestions with people you could invite (like Miro).
8. Leverage referrals.
When basic growth strategies are in place, add referral programs with incentives—discounts, cash rewards, free features, etc. Loom and Miro use these to accelerate B2B team acquisition effectively. Cello is a fantastic product to add a referral program for users and affiliates to any SaaS product in hours.
✅ How to apply this:
Launch referral campaigns with clear, attractive rewards (money/free value/discount).
Study and adapt proven B2B referral examples.
For a deeper dive into how to design referral programs that truly accelerate B2B growth, check out our comprehensive guide on 7 Psychological Drivers of Referral Behavior that we co-created with
. It features best practices from companies like Airtable, Canva, and Asana with incentive types, reward structures, and communication strategies.⭐️ Summary: Apply these strategies to unlock Team activation
To successfully activate teams within your collaborative product, focus on these 8 key strategies designed to shift users’ mindset from individual to team collaboration and to encourage engagement at every touchpoint:
Make collaboration obvious → (Position product as team-focused everywhere);
Segment users early → (Ask personal vs team intent during onboarding);
Add “Invite” step in onboarding → (Low-risk, catches team-ready users);
Keep invite flow simple & consistent → (Easy, repeatable invitations with clear permissions);
Explain roles & permissions clearly → (Contextual tips to motivate upgrades);
Convert individuals to teams → (Offer team plans & highlight collaboration benefits);
Facilitate team expansion → (Integrate invites with Slack, Google, etc.);
Use referrals to boost growth → (Launch rewards-based referral programs)
Clear messaging + early intent capture + frictionless invites + contextual education + conversion focus + team expansion + referral incentives = strong team activation and lasting engagement.
📕 Resources
The Evolution of Miro Onboarding — How Miro approached the activation metric by
and ;7 Psychological Drivers of Referral Behavior to Accelerate B2B Growth by
and ;25 best growth Flows for 2025 roadmap — a collection of interactive experiences that I collected for you (it’s free 😉);
I bet you are doing product activation all wrong by
;What is a good activation rate by
;From Old to New Ways: 6 Methods to Drive Activation and Adoption by
and James Evans;How to Measure Onboarding: Advanced Topics in Activation Metrics by
and .
This is all for today, dear readers 💜 If you found this helpful, share it with a teammate, a founder, or a curious builder. My mission is to help you build and grow meaningful products that delight your users. Here are some ways I can be useful:
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