Infatuation Interval in Products

Human beings are emotional creatures. As Product Managers (specifically in Startups), we often forget this aspect of Product Development.

A lot of our Metrics are around D1 retention, LTVs, and Recurring usage. We work endlessly (!) to optimize these and often hit upper caps. What next?

Let’s dig a little deeper. When you see something insanely cool What do you feel? You get stunned by its shock and awe and get blown away with its possible insane benefits. For a while, you are ignorant of its shortcomings. This is the Infatuation period and hence an important metric is born — The infatuation interval.

This is true for any new product. (Remember the first iPod? :) ).

Then comes a period where the User starts expecting a bit more. The infatuation starts waning off and the endless requests for features, improvements start coming in. And if you do not ship a few quickly, customers could start churning. This is obviously an important phase, but not the only one you should focus on.

It is extremely important for Products to not get in this trap and also keep thinking about novel experiences to keep the users infatuated from time to time. This gives you a chance to grow the product and have stickiness despite maybe a few shortcomings that you can fix over time.

These novel experiences could be a slick redesign, some insane romantic value in the app, or a unique small feature.

The key is to keep delivering experiences that periodically deliver infatuation value

Now obviously you would not just go about add any random feature in your product. One secret here is to work with Power Users. Users who stick around from your Infatuation period and keep using the product 30 days back to back for example. These are die-hard fans of your product. Generally, a small core set initially. It is imperative to have your user research teams connect with them and form a key community.

Work with Power users and talk about key things they love and would love to see more of. This often is the secret between Products that scale and ones that do not.