3 Strategies for Creating an Unparalleled, Transformative Product
Moving beyond user experience and lean methods alone
There are over 171,000 new tech companies that file their businesses and start up each year (1). Of course, not all of these go on to be thriving businesses but this shows the magnitude of ambition to create the next big tech product.
There are way too many variables to list for why some products are clear winners and others never hit the headlines or move beyond their early adopter markets. Having worked at a few of the fastest-growing startups in Arizona’s “Silicon Desert”, most of my responsibility has been to distill simple, powerful strategies in these complex environments in order to keep the main thing the main thing for our customers’ growth while driving sales. Anyone who has worked for more than a few days at a young startup knows that determining the most impactful way to execute the company’s vision is a delicate dance across department heads, product, engineering, and marketing
This is not a breakdown of project management strategies, marketing tactics, or leadership decision-making. Rather, these are three macro strategies to guide efforts across all teams to achieve the two most important goals 1) deliver the customer transformation that your vision likely promises and 2) increase the customer lifetime value (LTV), along with the number of customers.
Transformation-First Strategy
This is one of the most simple yet monumental shifts in strategy that your business can make. This doesn’t negate any lean methods of customer development, but rather gives them the depth to connect with your customer at the most valuable and engaging level.
Ultimately, customers expect great service and great experiences with products now. They will appreciate you when you can help them do something better, faster, prettier and they will have lots of great feedback to provide along the way. However, the one variable missing above is the customer’s transformation from engaging with your product.
Imagine how much more engaged your customers would be if you not only solve their problems of getting something better, faster, etc. but you actually empower them to become a better, faster customer altogether. This is the difference between a food delivery app that just gets you your meal asap vs the food app that helps you sort through options, incorporates dietary goals and past preferences, and keeps you in the know with your frequented restaurants. “Hey, Travis. We just added a brulee bread pudding to the menu, interested?” Yes, I am. Take my money.
The problem with leaning too heaving on customer development alone is found in the old Henry Ford quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” A transformation-first focus ensures that you balance customer demands within the context of the transformational vision of your company, revealing your true core features that will add the greatest LTV and direct your development roadmap.
E.P.I.C. Engagement
This is a simple acronym that I use religiously to generate new ideas on how create impactful moments of engagement. In “The Power of Moments” the authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath devise four ways to formulate powerful, E.P.I.C. strategies:
Elevation — Moments of elevation “rise above the routine”. These moments can be unexpected, excite our senses, or make us feel good in some way.
Pride — Fairly straightforward, these moments boost our self esteem and ego. They provide a sense of accomplishment and recognition.
Insight — Learning and growth comprise moments of insight. These provide a clear realization of a truth or even a new potential need that the customer didn’t realize prior to your product.
Connection — Collaboration, struggle, and working towards a common objective within a community are indicative of a connective moments.
Great products should take all four of these ingredients into consideration. While some may be more prominent, there is usually a clear, concerted effort to engage on each end. We now see many of the CRM companies following in the footsteps $142B Salesforce, to create powerful customer engagement. Salesforce continues to drive and lead innovation in this space. They develop core features and integration to elevate their customer groups, they have several industry-recognized certifications for the pride of their customers, they offer training and reporting for valuable insight and utility of their product, and lastly they offer a marketplace of collaboration for users and annual conferences like Dreamforce. Of course, a company like Salesforce operates on a large, global scale, but for those companies that can create E.P.I.C. moments for specific user groups and execute transformation-first, they can achieve massive success in this space as well.
Gamification
Finally, gamification — encompassing much more than a marketing funnel, this is a powerful mechanism used to deliver your transformation-first strategy in a guided sequence that influences your customer’s growth journey.
Although the word “gamification” hit the mainstream in 2009, thanks to British programmer, Nick Pelling (who actually coined it back in 2002), “gamification” is still a bit of an enigma to many.
Simply put, it means turning your product experience into somewhat of a game. Leveraging elements of gameplay, like leveling up, scoring points, gaining status, or completing milestones you can engage with your customers in a way that makes them want to continue their journey with your product. This is a powerful distinction, making THEM want to continue the journey vs YOU controlling the journey. Gamification shouldn’t be a series of cumbersome hurdles for your customers to engage with you, quite the opposite. If done right you will empower your customers to want to continue on their own, because with a transformation-first focus they are more concerned with becoming better vs the gameplay itself.
I’m sure we could all think of moments where we’ve felt “understood” or “sucked in” by a product that made us want to continue diving deeper into the app (hopefully more in an exciting way and less of an “ I waste 6 hrs of my life” way). However, not all products will have the same level of gamification, nor be an exciting “game”. Take something as vanilla as customer survey data collection through online questions. These might be gamified through offering a “percentage complete” or dynamically pathing their questions based on responses. Perhaps moments of insight and pride in the form help identify this customer as a perfect fit for an upsell that resonates perfectly with them, and the questions leading up to that point make these offers seem like no-brainers. It might not have been an exciting form, but your customers leave thinking “that was really more helpful than painful — looking forward to the next steps.”
There numerous of examples of companies that nail this step to create powerful engagement and increased customer ROI, but to make the point blatantly clear here — people just really seem to love playing games.
The Wrap Up
These three strategies above have proved to be a common ground in the scaling, thriving business that I’ve observed. The important thing to remember here is that every market and every business culture is unique. This means that how these steps are actually executed will be unique to your product. As a macro framework, you need to understand what transformation really looks like for your customer groups. What opportunities do you have to create E.P.I.C. moments when you engage with your customers? And how can you add gamified elements to your customer journey to generate some self-motivation? Answers to these questions might only be small, quick changes, others might be monumental projects. Nonetheless, your customers and bottom line will thank you for it in the long run.
I would love to hear your feedback. What other common strategies have you observed that led to outstanding product success?
