The JEUE PLG Funnel (Join, Evaluate, Upgrade, Expand)
Four stages that map the PLG customer lifecycle and, loosely, your growth org
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 93%
Isford's default scaffolding for any product-led business: customers Join, Evaluate, Upgrade, and Expand — and expansion loops referrals back to Join. The deliberate word choice is 'Evaluate' rather than 'onboard' or 'activate', because the stage is about what the user needs to see to believe they'll get value, not about what the company wants them to complete. The framework is intentionally too abstract to be four KPIs; its job is shared language for where opportunity lives.
Origin
Lauryn Isford's own framework, used both when running growth at Airtable and when advising other PLG businesses.
Core principles
- 01Join: entering the account — via discovery (found you on Twitter) or invitation (a colleague added you).
- 02Evaluate: the user decides whether the product delivers the value they want and builds a habit around it. Framed from the user's side, not the company's.
- 03Upgrade: the user has progressed beginner → intermediate → advanced, sees premium value, and raises their hand — self-serve or to sales.
- 04Expand: more people in the organization adopt, driving net dollar retention, brand awareness, renewals, and referrals that loop back to Join.
- 05Upgrade and Expand bake retention in — you cannot upgrade or expand a user who churned.
- 06The framework is a communication tool, not a KPI tree or an org chart.
How to run it
- 1
Map your business onto the four stages
Draw the funnel and place your existing surfaces, mechanics and metrics onto Join, Evaluate, Upgrade and Expand — for any product with a self-serve or freemium element, the scaffolding maps regardless of business.
Pro tip Keep the word 'Evaluate' — the substitution of 'onboard' or 'activate' quietly re-centres the company's goals over the user's.
- 2
Use it as a communication layer, not a metric set
Ground the team in the mechanics of the machine so anyone can say 'this landing-page strategy drives Joins in new organizations' versus 'this onboarding work helps Evaluate', making investment trade-offs legible.
Watch out Do not force four KPIs or four teams out of it — the framework is too abstract to be operationalized that literally.
- 3
Derive the opportunity list
From the mapped funnel, name the specific pockets of the product where opportunity is concentrated and use the stage language to argue for investment in one over another.
Pro tip Literally draw the funnel on a whiteboard, brainstorm together, and do the supporting analysis on the side.
- 4
Shape teams loosely around the stages
Airtable ran an acquisition team (Join), an activation team (Evaluate), and a monetization/pricing team (Upgrade, also covering churn prevention, downgrades and billing). The mapping is thematic, not exact.
Pro tip Activation mapped to Evaluate only for the self-serve business — helping an enterprise customer evaluate the right offering was a different job entirely.
- 5
Revisit the funnel for emergent stages
Periodically gut-check whether the stages you're investing in are still where the opportunity is, and be willing to stand up a team for a stage you deliberately skipped earlier.
Pro tip Expand is the stage most companies under-resource first and discover later.
In the wild
Airtable's growth org was structured around acquisition (Join), activation (Evaluate) and monetization (Upgrade), with no team dedicated to Expand at the outset. As the team noticed that larger companies were adopting the product, the opportunity to drive expansion and grow the footprint inside those accounts became far bigger than it had been.
→ Expand emerged as a distinct area of investment later, which Isford cites as a case of revisiting your priors and staying agile in org structure rather than freezing the org around the funnel you drew on day one.
Common mistakes
Turning the funnel into four KPIs
The framework is deliberately abstract. Forcing a single metric per stage produces false precision and hides the fact that real teams straddle stages.
Calling the second stage 'onboard' or 'activate'
Those words describe what the company is doing to the user. 'Evaluate' describes what the user is doing — deciding whether they'll get the value they came for. The word choice changes what you build.
Freezing the org around the funnel
Airtable had no Expand team because at first there was no expansion opportunity. Not revisiting the map as the customer base moved upmarket would have left the largest opportunity unstaffed.
Is it for you?
Best for
Growth leaders structuring a PLG growth org or trying to give a cross-functional team shared language for where to invest
Not ideal for
Pure sales-led enterprise businesses with no self-serve motion, or teams wanting a ready-made KPI tree
From the transcript
“the first step is join the second is evaluate the third is upgrade and the fourth is expand”
“then importantly you evaluate if it's right for you”
“I think this framework is a too abstract to represent exactly how you should structure your teams or to be represented with four metrics or…”
“we had one team working on acquisition and they were really responsible for the join so they mapped actually really well to this funnel”
From the episode
Mastering onboarding
Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable)