The product delivers the value. People carry the revenue.
Product-Passive Growth is when revenue keeps climbing, but almost all of it is started by people. The product delivers the value. It rarely starts the next revenue event. Every stage of the motion waits for someone to notice and act.
Early on, people carrying the revenue is the right call. Founders sell, CS saves accounts, reps catch expansion. It works, so it never gets redesigned. The company scales the labor model instead of shifting work to the product. The habit hardens into headcount.
This is the umbrella pattern behind the others. Revenue per employee is where it lands. If every point of growth needs more people to hold it, the business gets bigger. It does not get stronger. Growth stays real. It also gets more expensive and more fragile.
The product starts to carry the work it is best placed to carry. That spans acquisition, conversion, expansion, and retention. People stay in the motion where judgment, context, and trust matter. They stop being the trigger for everything. Revenue per employee is the number that moves when the shift is real.
No. PLG is about acquiring and activating users. Product-Passive Growth is the whole revenue motion, including conversion, expansion, and retention. A company can run PLG at the front and stay product-passive everywhere else.
Usually with the failure mode costing the most right now. The Quick Test gives you a fast read on which pattern is heaviest.
Seven questions. Five minutes. A pattern read on the spot, no call to see it.