BEYOND THE BUILD
Hacking Growth Essentials — Part 2: Discovering Products That Customers Must Have
Discovering a product that customers feel that they truly must have is the foundation for sustainable business growth. However, this is easier said than done! Many companies and aspiring founders struggle to deeply understand their customers, identify the core value of their offerings, and deliver an experience that customers love. This article explores the key steps to unlocking the path to building a ‘must-have’ product that drives rapid and lasting growth covering topics like measuring customer sentiment, the power of retention and product-market fit, and leveraging immersive customer research and efficient experimentation to uncover unexpected insights and pivot to success. The goal is to provide a comprehensive, customer-centric framework for innovating and iterating on products that customers can’t live without.
Table of Contents
The Importance of Building a Must-Have Product for Sustainable Growth
Measuring Customer Love [Sentiment]
The Power of Retention: Unlocking Growth and Product-Market Fit
Unlocking the Path to Building a ‘Must-Have’
Unlocking Growth Through Immersive Customer Research
Unlocking Growth Through Community Insights and Efficient Experimentation
The Power of Experimentation: Unlocking Growth Through A/B Testing
Driving to the Aha Moment: Uncovering Unexpected Insights and Pivoting to Success
Other reads related to this series on Growth Hacking
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The Importance of Building a Must-Have Product for Sustainable Growth
Fast-growth companies share a common trait: they create products that people love.
It’s not just about innovation or features;
It’s about understanding what customers need and delivering it.
Building a must-have product is the baseline requirement for rapid and sustainable growth.
Without it, you’re pouring resources into a product that may never gain traction.
Avoiding the Temptation to Push for Growth Too Soon
The pressure to start pushing for growth can be intense.
The belief that growth can be forced through marketing and advertising is a dangerous misconception.
No amount of marketing can make people love a substandard product. The opportunity costs of pushing for growth too soon are significant:
You’ll spend precious resources on the wrong efforts and turn early customers into disillusioned critics.
Misconceptions about Growth Hacking
Growth hacking is not just about building virality; it’s about understanding your product’s core value.
Growth hacking tactics should only be deployed after you’ve determined your product is a must-have.
Don’t fall for the trap of relying on virality to drive growth;
It’s a short-term fix that won’t sustain your business.
The Role of Growth Teams
Growth teams need to adopt rigorous methods to discover the core value of their product or service.
Identifying core values requires understanding user behavior and may involve connecting with the right core market, which may differ from the originally envisioned one.
Growth teams must recognize that identifying core values is crucial and may require a deep dive into customer needs.
Don’t assume you know your target market; instead, listen to your customers and adapt your product accordingly.
The Power of Aha Moments
Many products have struggled to achieve sustainable growth.
One crucial factor that sets successful products apart is the presence of an “aha moment” — that instant when the product’s utility and value click for users.
The Aha Moment: Turning Users into Power Users and Evangelists
The aha moment is a crucial experience that can make or break a product’s success.
It’s the instant when users suddenly realize the core value and benefits of a product, turning them into loyal power users and passionate evangelists.
Examples of Aha Moments: Successful companies have identified and leveraged their aha moments to drive sustainable growth and user engagement:
- For Yelp, it was the realization that user-generated reviews could be a valuable resource for finding local businesses.
- eBay’s aha moment was the thrill of the hunt and the potential to uncover hidden treasures.
- Facebook’s aha moment was connecting with friends.
- Dropbox’s aha moment was the seamless syncing of files across devices.
- Uber’s aha moment was seeing where your car is at the touch of a button.
The aha moment is crucial for turning early adopters into power users and evangelists, leading to sustainable growth.
When users know what the aha moment of a product is, they are committed.
They understand that the product has meaningful value for them, making the entire selling process easier.
Identifying and Optimizing the Aha Moment
To unlock the power of the aha moment, growth teams must focus on two key areas: identifying the aha moment and optimizing for it.
A) Identifying the Aha Moment: Uncovering a product’s aha moment requires a deep dive into user data and feedback. By analyzing patterns and similarities in how users engage with the product, companies can pinpoint the exact moment when the utility of the product clicks for users.
Key metrics to analyze include:
- User engagement: How do users interact with the product, and which features do they gravitate towards?
- Retention rates: Which users are sticking around, and what are they doing differently from those who churn?
- Conversion data: What actions are leading to successful conversions, and how can we encourage more users to take those actions?
Talking to active users is also crucial for identifying the aha moment. By understanding their motivations, pain points, and “aha” experiences, companies can gain valuable insights into what truly resonates with their target audience.
B) Optimizing for the Aha Moment: Once the aha moment is identified, product development and marketing efforts can be optimized to enhance and promote the core value of the product. This may involve guiding users more effectively to the aha moment or developing the product to deliver an even more compelling experience. Key strategies for optimizing the aha moment include:
- Streamlining the onboarding process to quickly guide users to their aha moment
- Highlighting the key features and benefits that lead to the aha moment in marketing and messaging
- Continuously iterating on the product based on user feedback to make the aha moment even more impactful
Pivoting or Rebuilding for the Aha Moment
In some cases, identifying the aha moment may require a more substantial product pivot or even a complete rebuild.
If the current product is not effectively delivering the core value that leads to the aha moment, a more radical change may be necessary.
Examples of companies that have pivoted or rebuilt their products to better align with the aha moment include:
- Slack, which pivoted from a gaming company to a business communication platform
- Instagram, which rebuilt its product to focus on photo sharing and filters
The aha moment should be the North Star guiding all product development efforts, ensuring that the user experience is optimized for delivering that “wow” factor that turns casual users into passionate advocates.
Measuring Customer Love [Sentiment]
One of the most critical early steps in building a successful product is determining whether it has achieved must-have status in the eyes of your customers. This is where the Must-Have Survey comes into play — a simple yet remarkably reliable tool for measuring customer love.
Measuring Customer Love
The key question in the Must-Have Survey is straightforward:
“How disappointed would you be if this product no longer existed tomorrow?”
The responses to this question can provide invaluable insights into the core value of your product and whether it has truly resonated with your target audience.
- If 40% or more of your respondents answer “very disappointed,” then congratulations — your product has achieved must-have status. This means you have a solid foundation to start gunning for growth, as your customers have demonstrated a deep attachment to your offering.
- However, if the “very disappointed” responses fall between 25–40%, your product likely needs some tweaks, either to the features or the way you communicate its value.
- If less than 25% of respondents are “very disappointed,” it may be time to take a step back and reevaluate your target audience or invest in more substantial product development.
Digging Deeper with Additional Questions
But the Must-Have Survey doesn’t stop there.
By asking a few additional questions, you can uncover even more valuable insights to inform your product roadmap and marketing strategy:
- What would you use as an alternative if this product was unavailable? This can help you identify your key competition and features to add or improve.
- What is the primary benefit you have received from this product? This can reveal the core value proposition you should be highlighting.
- Have you recommended this product to anyone? This gauges your product’s word-of-mouth potential and the language users employ to describe it.
- What type of person would benefit most from this product? This can help you focus your targeting on the right customer niche.
- How can we improve this product to better meet your needs? This can surface glaring issues or opportunities for enhancement.
Surveying the Right Users for Reliable Insights
When it comes to conducting the Must-Have Survey, the key is to focus on the right user group to ensure you’re gathering the most valuable and reliable insights.
- Targeting Active Users: It’s crucial to target your active users rather than those who have gone dormant when conducting the Must-Have Survey. Active users will be more familiar with the product and can provide more specific and detailed responses. They have a deeper understanding of the product’s core value and can offer meaningful feedback on their level of attachment to it.
- Avoiding Dormant Users: Surveying users who have stopped engaging with your product is unlikely to yield the same level of insightful feedback. Dormant users may not have a clear recollection of the product’s value or may have moved on to alternatives, skewing the results of the Must-Have Survey.
- Ensuring Reliability Through Sample Size: To ensure the reliability of your Must-Have Survey results, it’s important to aim for at least a few hundred responses. This larger sample size will give you a more accurate representation of how your active user base feels about the product and its must-have status. A smaller sample may not provide a clear enough picture, leading to potentially misleading conclusions.
- Structuring the Survey Outreach: When reaching out to your active user base to participate in the Must-Have Survey, consider segmenting your audience and targeting specific user groups. This can help you gather more nuanced feedback and identify any differences in perception or usage patterns among different customer segments.
- Leveraging User Feedback Tools: To streamline the survey process and ensure you’re collecting the most relevant data, consider using specialized user feedback tools. These platforms can help you trigger surveys to the right user segments, analyze the results, and uncover valuable insights to inform your product strategy.
By focusing on your active user base and aiming for a reliable sample size, you can gather the most accurate and actionable insights from the Must-Have Survey.
This will set the stage for making informed decisions to drive sustainable growth for your product.
Knowing When to Move On!
The Must-Have Survey is a powerful tool, but it’s important to understand when to move beyond this simple diagnostic approach and implement more advanced customer experience assessments.
- The Early Stages of Product Development: The Must-Have Survey is best utilized in the early stages of determining a product’s core value proposition. It can provide invaluable insights into whether your offering has truly resonated with your target audience and achieved must-have status.
- Transitioning to Quantitative Assessments: However, as your product’s growth takes off, you’ll want to move beyond the Must-Have Survey and implement more refined, quantitative assessments of the customer experience. This could include: detailed user satisfaction surveys, measuring customer effort and ease of use, tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) related to engagement, retention, and advocacy
It’s also important to use the Must-Have Survey judiciously, as suggesting to your users that the product might be discontinued can backfire. This type of question should be reserved for the early stages of product development and not used as a regular check-in with your established customer base.
By leveraging the Must-Have Survey and the additional insights it can provide, you can uncover the true must-have status of your product and make informed decisions to drive sustainable growth.
However, as your product matures, it’s crucial to evolve your customer experience assessments to maintain a deep understanding of your users’ needs and preferences.
Remember that building a product that customers love is the foundation for long-term success.
By continuously refining your approach to customer feedback and experience measurement, you can ensure that your product remains aligned with the needs of your target audience and poised for ongoing growth and success.
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Share your insights and feedback in the comments below and let’s continue this discussion.
The Power of Retention: Unlocking Growth and Product-Market Fit
Retention rate is the percentage of users who continue to use or pay for your product over time.
Tracking this metric helps you identify how well your product is resonating with users and detect early warning signs of defections.
Frequent monitoring (weekly or monthly) provides valuable insights into user behavior and helps teams work on sustaining retention.
Benchmarking Retention Across Industries
Of course, different types of businesses and products will naturally have varying retention rates.
- Mobile apps tend to have relatively low retention, with the average app retaining just 10% of its users after the first month.
- The best-performing apps, however, can retain over 60% of their users after 30 days.
- On the other hand, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies often enjoy much higher annual retention rates, north of 90%.
- In the fast-food industry, month-over-month retention can range from 50% to 80%. Understanding the benchmarks for your particular industry is crucial for evaluating your own product’s performance.
Retention Curves: Visualizing User Loyalty Over Time
As a product growth leader, one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal for understanding and improving user retention is the retention curve. These visual representations plot the percentage of users retained over time, providing invaluable insights into the stickiness of your product and the loyalty of your customer base.
- The Power of Visualization: Retention curves go beyond just the raw numbers and percentages, allowing you to identify patterns and trends that may not be immediately apparent from the data alone. By visualizing user retention over time, you can quickly spot areas of concern, such as high churn rates in the early stages of the user lifecycle, as well as pockets of strength where your product is truly resonating with customers.
- Uncovering Insights: These retention curves can reveal a wealth of insights about your product and your users. For example, you may notice that while your overall retention rate is stable, there are seasonal fluctuations or dips that correspond to specific product updates or marketing campaigns. Analyzing these patterns can help you understand what factors are driving user engagement and loyalty.
- Identifying Areas for Improvement: Perhaps most importantly, retention curves empower you to pinpoint the areas of your product that need the most attention. If you notice a steep drop-off in retention after the first few months, it may indicate that your onboarding experience is not effectively guiding users to the “aha” moment or delivering the core value they expect. By focusing your efforts on these pain points, you can make targeted improvements to boost long-term user engagement.
Ultimately, the insights gleaned from retention curves are essential for driving sustainable growth.
By understanding the factors that influence user loyalty and addressing the root causes of churn, you can build products that truly resonate with customers and foster long-term engagement and advocacy.
Achieving Stable Retention: The Holy Grail of Product-Market Fit
When it comes to assessing the success and long-term viability of a product, one of the most critical metrics to focus on is the retention rate.
Achieving a stable retention rate is a clear indicator that you have found true product-market fit — a set of users who see your offering as an integral, must-have part of their lives.
- The Importance of Stable Retention: A stable retention rate suggests that your customers are not only using your product regularly but that they have come to rely on it and view it as worthy of continuous use. This level of engagement and loyalty is the holy grail for any product team, as it lays the foundation for sustainable, long-term growth.
- Continuous Work to Sustain Retention: However, reaching a stable retention rate is just the first step. To truly supercharge your growth, you must continuously work to improve and maintain those retention metrics over time. This requires a deep understanding of your users, their needs, and the factors driving their loyalty and engagement.
- Retention as a Growth Driver: Retention is one of the most effective means of driving growth for your product. By keeping your existing customers engaged and satisfied, you not only secure a reliable revenue stream but also create a pool of passionate advocates who can help attract new users through word-of-mouth and referrals.
- Prioritizing Retention: Given the outsized impact that retention can have on a product’s success, teams must prioritize it accordingly. This may involve dedicating resources to user research, iterating on the product experience, and continuously monitoring and optimizing retention metrics.
By focusing on this critical metric, you can lay the foundation for long-term, sustainable growth and position your product for enduring success.
Frequent Monitoring: Detecting Defections and Sustaining Retention
Regularly tracking user churn, whether on a weekly or monthly basis, is essential for detecting early warning signs of retention issues. Without this frequent monitoring, defections can easily be masked by new user acquisition, leaving you unaware of underlying problems that may be eroding your customer base.
- Uncovering Hidden Churn: By closely monitoring your retention metrics, you can uncover patterns and trends that may not be immediately apparent from the data alone. For example, you may notice that while your overall retention rate appears stable, there are seasonal fluctuations or dips that correspond to specific product updates or marketing campaigns. Identifying these hidden sources of churn allows you to address them proactively.
- Proactive Retention Management: Frequent monitoring of user churn provides the insights needed to take swift, targeted action to sustain and improve retention. Armed with this data, you can quickly identify the root causes of customer defections and implement strategies to address them, whether that involves enhancing the user experience, optimizing onboarding, or strengthening customer engagement.
- Driving Sustainable Growth: By maintaining a constant pulse on user retention, you can ensure that your product remains aligned with the evolving needs and preferences of your target audience. This, in turn, lays the foundation for sustainable, long-term growth, as you’re able to continuously refine and improve the customer experience.
Ultimately, the insights gained from frequent retention monitoring fuel a virtuous cycle of growth.
By identifying and addressing the factors that drive customer loyalty and engagement, you can not only retain your existing user base but also attract new customers through word-of-mouth and referrals — further strengthening your position in the market.
As a product leader, your mission is to build offerings that customers can’t imagine living without. By prioritizing the frequent monitoring of user retention, you can unlock the insights needed to create truly must-have products that drive sustainable, long-term success.
The Problem with Annual Retention Figures
Many growth leaders make the mistake of focusing solely on annual retention figures, such as month-12 retention. While these metrics can provide a high-level snapshot, they often mask the underlying dynamics that are truly driving (or hindering) a business’s growth.
After all, a company could have a seemingly respectable 70% annual retention rate, yet be hemorrhaging users at an alarming pace in the early months.
The Slope of the Retention Curve: This is where the slope of the retention curve becomes a far more insightful metric. By analyzing the rate at which users are retained over time, we can gain a much deeper understanding of the health and sustainability of a product or service.
- Is the curve flattening out, indicating strong product-market fit and efficient growth?
- Or is it steep and declining, signaling a lack of stickiness and an uphill battle to retain customers?
To better understand these dynamics, we can categorize retention curves into four distinct quadrants:
- Flat(tish) Initial Slope, Flat Long-Term Slope: This is the holy grail — a product with strong product-market fit and efficient growth.
- Steep Initial Slope, Flat Long-Term Slope: The product is engaging users initially, but struggles to retain them over the long haul.
- Flat(tish) Initial Slope, Steep Long-Term Slope: The product may be doing okay in the short term, but is facing an uphill battle to retain users.
- Steep Initial Slope, Steep Long-Term Slope: This is the worst-case scenario — a product that fails to retain users at any stage of the lifecycle.
Each of these quadrants has its unique characteristics and implications for growth.
- The top-right quadrant, for example, represents a product with true must-have status, where users are not only signing up in droves but sticking around for the long haul.
- The bottom-left quadrant, on the other hand, signals a fundamental lack of product-market fit, making growth nearly impossible.
Understanding these retention curve dynamics is crucial for making informed decisions about growth strategies and resource allocation.
Do you double down on user acquisition, or focus on improving the user experience and driving deeper engagement?
The answers lie in the shape of your retention curve.
But the benefits of flattening your retention curve go beyond just growth.
By improving user retention, you can also unlock 1) higher lifetime value per member, 2) better payback dynamics, and 3) more efficient marginal growth — all of which contribute to a healthier, more sustainable business.
Retention is the true north star for any product-led business. But to truly harness its power, we must move beyond simplistic annual figures and dive deep into the shape of the retention curve.
It’s a long-term game, to be sure, but one that is essential for achieving efficient growth and scaling a business that can stand the test of time.
Unlocking the Path to Building a ‘Must-Have’
There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing your product resonate with customers and achieve must-have status.
But what happens when your product hasn’t quite hit the mark?
Shifting Gears for High-Tempo Experimentation
Once your product has passed the rigorous tests to determine if a significant number of customers have experienced the elusive “aha moment” — that pivotal realization of your product’s core value — it’s time to shift gears and move into a phase of high-tempo experimentation for growth.
- Confidence in Your Foundation: At this point, you can confidently double down on your efforts, knowing that you’ve built something truly remarkable — a product that has resonated deeply with your target audience. This solid foundation gives you the green light to accelerate your growth initiatives.
- The Power of Rapid Testing: High-tempo experimentation is all about moving through the growth process at a rapid pace. The philosophy behind it is simple — the more tests you run, the more you’ll learn about how to effectively grow your business. By embracing a culture of rapid testing and iteration, you can uncover insights and make improvements at a breakneck pace.
- Unlocking Sustainable Growth: This high-velocity approach to experimentation is a key driver of sustainable, long-term growth. By constantly testing new ideas, optimizing the user experience, and refining your marketing strategies, you can continually expand your customer base and deepen their engagement with your product.
- Challenges and Considerations: Of course, putting high-tempo experimentation into practice is easier said than done. Factors like limited budgets, resource constraints, and the complexity of running multiple tests simultaneously can all present obstacles. But by establishing the right processes, aligning your team, and maintaining a relentless focus on learning and improvement, you can overcome these challenges and unlock the power of rapid growth.
The transition to high-tempo experimentation marks a pivotal moment in the life of a successful product.
It’s the point where you can confidently double down, knowing that you’ve built something truly remarkable — and the sky’s the limit in terms of future growth and success.
Avoiding the Guesswork Trap: The Perils of Relying on Intuition
It’s all too easy for product teams to fall into the trap of guessing at improvements, convinced that their intuition and experience will lead them to the right solution.
After all, we’re the experts, the ones who know our product and our customers best, right?
However, this approach is inherently risky.
Basing critical decisions on gut feelings rather than data-driven insights can lead to costly false starts and a product that never quite hits the mark.
Customers’ needs and preferences are often complex and nuanced, and our assumptions can blind us to the true drivers of their behavior.
Instead, we must resist the temptation to guess and instead focus on truly understanding our users.
By engaging in deeper customer research, interviews, and on-the-ground market analysis, we can uncover the real pain points, needs, and desires that our product must address.
Achieving must-have status is not easy, but by avoiding the guesswork trap and grounding our decisions in customer insights, we can set our products on a course for long-term success.
It requires discipline, a customer-centric mindset, and a willingness to challenge our assumptions.
The Perils of Feature Creep: When More Becomes Less
Product teams are often tempted to believe that adding more features to our offerings will make them more appealing and valuable to customers.
However, the reality is that this approach, known as “feature creep,” can quickly turn a product into a cumbersome, confusing mess, obscuring the core value that initially drew customers in.
- The Allure of Feature Creep: It’s an instinct to want to continuously expand and enhance our products, driven by a fear of missing out on the latest trends or falling behind the competition. We convince ourselves that packing in more functionality will give us an edge and satisfy a wider range of user needs.
- The Consequences of Complexity: But the truth is, this strategy often backfires. As we layer on feature after feature, the product becomes increasingly complex and difficult to navigate. Users become overwhelmed, struggling to find the core capabilities they need, and the overall user experience suffers.
- Stripping Away the Unnecessary: Sometimes, the path to true improvement lies not in what we add, but in what we remove. By ruthlessly prioritizing the features that truly deliver value and stripping away the unnecessary complexity, we can create products that are laser-focused on meeting the needs of our target audience.
- Maintaining Clarity of Purpose: The key is to maintain a clear, unwavering focus on the core value proposition that initially attracted customers to our product. Every new feature should be evaluated through the lens of whether it enhances or detracts from that fundamental purpose. If it doesn’t directly support the user’s primary needs, it may be time to let it go.
An Analytical Approach to Unlocking the Aha Moment
When a product fails to achieve the coveted “aha moment” with customers, it’s crucial to take an analytical, data-driven approach to uncover the underlying reasons. To get to the heart of the matter you need to do the following:
- Additional Customer Surveying: Dive deeper into the minds of your users through a comprehensive customer research program. This should include in-depth interviews, focus groups, and on-the-ground market research to truly understand their pain points, needs, and perceptions of your product.
- Efficient Experimental Testing: Rapidly test product changes and messaging variations to gauge their impact on key metrics like customer engagement and retention. This iterative approach allows you to quickly identify what resonates with your target audience and what falls flat.
- Deep Data Analysis: Leverage the expertise of your data analysts to uncover insights that go beyond the surface-level metrics. By digging into user behavior patterns, conversion funnels, and other data-driven indicators, you can gain a more holistic understanding of where your product is falling short.
- Aligning the Growth Team: To execute this analytical discovery process effectively, you must bring together the specialized talents of your growth team. The marketing and product design experts can lead the customer research efforts, the engineers can implement the experimental tests, and the data analysts can provide deep, actionable insights.
By taking this comprehensive, data-driven approach, you can uncover the root causes behind the elusive aha moment and develop a clear roadmap for addressing them.
It’s a process that requires patience, persistence, and a relentless focus on understanding your customers, but the payoff can be transformative for your product’s long-term success.
Unlocking Growth Through Immersive Customer Research
The key to building successful, enduring products lies not in the confines of our offices, but out in the real world, where our customers live and breathe. Time and time again, the power of getting out of the building and immersing ourselves in the lives and experiences of the people we aim to serve will prove the only effective method for developing must-have products.
The Power of Unbiased Observation
As product leaders, one of our most critical responsibilities is to deeply understand the needs and pain points of our target customers. And according to renowned innovator Steve Blank, the key to unlocking these insights lies in:
Stepping away from our assumptions and preconceptions, and instead adopting an unbiased, observational approach.
It’s all too easy to get caught up in our ideas and beliefs about what our customers want and need.
After all, we’re the experts!!!
The ones who have poured our hearts and souls into building these products.
But this very familiarity can also blind us to the realities of the customer experience.
- Listening and Observing: Rather than relying on our intuitions, Steve Blank emphasizes the importance of truly listening to our customers and observing their behaviors in an unbiased manner. By stepping out of the confines of our offices and immersing ourselves in their world, we can gain invaluable, first-hand insights that would otherwise remain hidden.
- Guiding Us Towards Resonance: The feedback we gather through this unbiased lens is what will truly guide us toward solutions that deeply resonate with our customers. Rather than building products based on our assumptions, we can let the genuine needs and pain points of our target audience shape the direction of our efforts.
- The Transformative Power of Observation: Adopting this customer-centric, observational mindset is a transformative shift that can unlock game-changing insights and innovations. By shedding our biases and preconceptions, we open ourselves up to a world of possibilities that we may have never considered before.
As product leaders, our mission is to create offerings that truly improve the lives of our customers.
To achieve this, we must be willing to continuously challenge our assumptions, step out of our comfort zones, and immerse ourselves in the realities of our experiences.
It’s a never-ending pursuit of understanding, but one that is essential for building products that stand the test of time.
Taking Your Product into the Real World
As product and growth leaders, we often rely heavily on customer interviews and surveys to gather insights about our target audience. However, there’s a critical step that takes this process to the next level
Taking our products and prototypes out into the real world and observing how prospective users interact with them.
- The Limitations of Interviews and Surveys: While customer interviews and surveys can provide valuable qualitative data, they are inherently limited by the artificial nature of the research setting. Customers may not always be able to accurately articulate their true needs and pain points, or anticipate how they would use a product in their daily lives.
- The Power of Observational Research: By taking our offerings out into the “wild” and observing how people engage with them in real-world scenarios, we can uncover a wealth of unexpected insights. This hands-on approach allows us to see firsthand how customers navigate the product, what features they gravitate towards, and what pain points or frustrations they encounter.
- Uncovering the Unexpected: Often, the issues or areas for improvement that we discover through this observational research are things we would have never considered from the confines of our offices. Customers may use the product in ways we never anticipated, or identify needs that we hadn’t even considered addressing.
- Iterating and Refining: Armed with these invaluable insights, we can then iterate on our product designs, refine the user experience, and make targeted improvements that truly resonate with our target audience. This process of continuous learning and adaptation is essential for building products that stand the test of time.
Ultimately, taking our products out into the real world and observing customer interactions fosters a deeply customer-centric mindset within our teams. It reminds us that our assumptions and preconceptions can often be flawed and that the true path to success lies in truly understanding and empathizing with the people we serve.
Unlocking Growth by Immersing Ourselves in the Customer Experience
The success stories of trailblazing innovators like Tinder or Uber demonstrate the profound impact of this customer-centric approach. By stepping away from their desks and observing their target users in real-world settings, these teams were able to unlock growth opportunities that would have remained hidden behind the walls of their offices.
Armed with these first-hand customer insights, we can then begin to co-create [with customers] solutions that truly resonate.
By involving our users in the development process, we can ensure that our products address their most pressing needs and deliver genuine value.
Ultimately, this relentless focus on understanding and empathizing with our customers is the key to building offerings that thrive in the long term. It’s a path that requires patience, persistence, and a willingness to step out of our comfort zones, but the rewards are immense — products that delight users, businesses that scale, and passionate advocates who become the driving force behind our growth.
As product leaders, our mission is to create products that customers can’t imagine living without.
But to achieve this, we must be willing to leave the confines of our offices and immerse ourselves in the lives and experiences of the people we serve.
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Share your insights and feedback in the comments below and let’s continue this discussion.
Unlocking Growth Through Community Insights and Efficient Experimentation
As product growth leaders, one of our most critical responsibilities is to deeply understand the needs and behaviors of our target customers. And one of the most powerful ways to achieve this is by identifying and engaging with the right communities — those that are already deeply invested in the problems we’re trying to solve.
Finding the Right Community — Tapping into Existing Networks
Whether it’s the eBay sellers who were early adopters of PayPal or the college students who fueled Tinder’s meteoric rise, these preexisting communities represent a treasure trove of invaluable insights.
By observing how these users interact with our products and services, we can gain a nuanced understanding of their pain points, needs, and the “aha moments” that truly resonate.
- Uncovering Unexpected Insights: By immersing ourselves in these communities, we often uncover insights that would have been impossible to glean from traditional market research or customer interviews alone. These users are already deeply engaged with the problem space, and their firsthand experiences can reveal unexpected use cases, feature requests, and areas for improvement that we may have never considered.
- Fostering Deeper Relationships: Moreover, engaging directly with these communities doesn’t just provide us with data — it also helps us build deeper, more meaningful relationships with our most passionate users. By involving them in the product development process and demonstrating that we value their input, we can foster a sense of ownership and loyalty that translates into powerful word-of-mouth marketing and advocacy.
- The Path to Product-Market Fit: Ultimately, identifying and tapping into the right communities is a crucial step in the journey toward achieving true product-market fit. By understanding the needs and behaviors of our most engaged users, we can ensure that we’re building solutions that truly resonate and deliver the “aha moments” that drive long-term loyalty and growth.
The Power of Online Platforms for Customer Discovery
In today’s digital landscape, the opportunities to leverage online platforms for customer discovery are virtually endless. From social media networks to specialized forums and communities, these digital spaces offer a wealth of insights that can be invaluable for product leaders looking to build must-have offerings.
- Reaching Early Adopters: By identifying and engaging with the right online communities, we can tap into a pool of early adopters — those passionate users who are eager to provide feedback and help shape the direction of our products. Whether it’s a niche subreddit, a Slack group for industry professionals, or a Facebook community of hobbyists, these targeted platforms allow us to connect directly with the people who are most likely to become our most loyal customers.
- Gathering Direct Feedback: But it’s not just about finding our early adopters — these online communities also provide a direct line of communication to the broader market. By actively participating in discussions, responding to questions, and soliciting feedback, we can gain invaluable insights into whether our products are truly delivering the experiences that our target customers are seeking.
- Uncovering Unmet Needs: Moreover, the conversations and interactions that take place within these online communities can often reveal unmet needs and pain points that we may have never considered. By immersing ourselves in the day-to-day challenges and aspirations of our potential customers, we can uncover opportunities to innovate and differentiate our offerings in meaningful ways.
- Iterating and Refining: Armed with these customer insights, we can then begin to rapidly iterate and refine our products, testing new features and messaging with our engaged community members. This iterative approach not only helps us validate our assumptions but also fosters a sense of ownership and investment among our early adopters, who become powerful advocates for our brand.
The Power of Simple Surveys: Uncovering Crucial Insights
As product growth leaders, we’re often tempted to invest in elaborate, resource-intensive customer research methods like focus groups and lengthy interviews. However, the reality is that crystal-clear insights can often be gained through simple, targeted surveys.
- Consider the example of a product team trying to understand why some users have gone dormant and then returned to the platform. For this, you can build a well-crafted survey with a few questions such as: 1) Can you tell us why you signed up in the first place? 2) What didn’t work for you? Why did you bail? 3) What caused you to come back and try it again? 4) What worked this time?
These seemingly straightforward questions were able to reveal the underlying motivations and behaviors that were crucial for driving growth.
By directly addressing the users’ reasons for signing up, churning, and returning, this survey will deliver invaluable insights that could inform your product and marketing strategies.
- The Benefits of Simplicity: The beauty of this approach lies in its simplicity. Rather than investing significant time and resources into elaborate research methods, you can uncover actionable insights through a concise, targeted survey. This not only saves them time and money but also allows you to move quickly and iterate based on the feedback you receive.
Complementing Deeper Research: Of course, simple surveys shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for deeper, more qualitative research methods. They are best used as a complement to techniques like user interviews and ethnographic studies, providing a broader, more quantifiable foundation of insights.
Embracing Efficient Experimentation
To truly unlock sustainable growth, we must also embrace an efficient, data-driven approach to experimentation.
- The Rise of Low-Cost Tools: Fortunately, the landscape has shifted dramatically in our favor. The rise of low-cost analytics and marketing tools has made it easier than ever to rapidly test product changes and messaging variations, allowing us to vet ideas cost-effectively.
- The Concept of Minimum Viable Tests: At the heart of this efficient experimentation approach is the concept of the Minimum Viable Test (MVT) — the least costly experiment that can be run to adequately vet an idea. By starting with these small-scale tests, we can quickly validate our hypotheses and determine which ideas are worth investing more resources into.
- Maintaining High Velocity: The key is to keep this experimentation process moving at a high velocity. Rather than getting bogged down in lengthy development cycles, we should be running a mix of tests — from the more complex product changes to the easier-to-execute messaging and marketing experiments.
- Informed Decision-Making: This rapid, data-driven approach to experimentation allows us to make informed decisions about where to allocate our limited resources. By quickly identifying what works and what doesn’t, we can double down on the initiatives that drive the most impact, while discarding the ones that fall flat.
- Fostering a Culture of Innovation: Embracing efficient experimentation also has the power to transform our organizational culture. By empowering our teams to test new ideas, learn from failures, and iterate quickly, we can foster an environment of innovation and adaptability — one that is essential for navigating the ever-changing landscape of business.
Ultimately, the combination of tapping into the right communities, conducting targeted customer research, and embracing efficient experimentation is the surest path to building products that achieve must-have status.
The Power of Experimentation: Unlocking Growth Through A/B Testing
As product growth leaders, we’re constantly seeking ways to drive growth and improve our products. A/B testing is a powerful tool in our arsenal, enabling us to scientifically determine which variations of our messaging and design perform better.
By presenting two different versions to randomly selected groups of users, we can uncover impactful insights that inform our decisions.
The Power of A/B Testing and Advanced Experimentation
A/B testing is a simple yet powerful tool for optimizing messaging and user experiences.
By presenting two versions to randomly selected users, we can determine which one performs better.
However, to truly understand the impact of our experiments, we need to go beyond surface-level metrics and track user journeys from initial interaction to sustained usage and retention.
The Simple Power of A/B Testing
As product leaders, we’re constantly seeking ways to optimize the messaging and communication around our offerings. And one of the most powerful tools in our arsenal is A/B testing.
- The Basics of A/B Testing: At its core, A/B testing is a straightforward concept. By presenting two different versions of a message or design to randomly selected groups of users, we can scientifically determine which one performs better. Whether it’s a variation in the headline, the call-to-action, or the overall visual layout, A/B testing allows us to let the data guide our decisions.
- The Beauty of Simplicity: What makes A/B testing so compelling is its simplicity. Unlike complex, resource-intensive research methods, A/B tests can be set up and executed quickly and cost-effectively. Tools like Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer have made it easier than ever for non-technical team members to run these experiments on their own.
- Uncovering Impactful Insights: The insights that can be gleaned from A/B testing are often profound. Sometimes, a seemingly minor tweak — such as a change in the language of a sign-up page — can have a dramatic impact on customer engagement and conversion.
- Iterating Towards Optimization: A/B testing isn’t just a one-time exercise. By continuously testing and iterating, we can hone in on the messaging and designs that truly resonate with our target audience. It’s a powerful cycle of learning and optimization that can drive sustainable growth over time.
- The Importance of Statistical Rigor: Of course, for A/B testing to be truly effective, we need to ensure that we’re applying the appropriate statistical rigor. Factors like sample size, significance level, and statistical power are crucial for drawing valid conclusions from our experiments.
The Limitations of Basic A/B Testing
While A/B testing tools are easy to use, they often provide limited data that focuses on short-term gains rather than long-term customer loyalty and engagement.
To uncover deeper insights, we need to take a more holistic, user-centric approach to data analysis.
This entails looking beyond surface-level metrics, analyzing complete user journeys, understanding user context, integrating qualitative and quantitative data, and focusing on user outcomes over feature development.
The Value of Engineering Expertise
Our engineering counterparts can provide invaluable insights into the types of tests we should be running, such as multivariate experiments and “multi-armed bandit” approaches.
By partnering with engineers, we can identify the most impactful testing opportunities and ensure they’re executed with rigor and sophistication.
This collaborative approach fosters a culture of innovation and continuous improvement, empowering cross-functional teams to push the boundaries of what’s possible.
Mastering A/B Testing and Experimentation
To unlock the full potential of A/B testing, we must master the five essential steps:
- Define the problem: Clearly articulate the issue you’re trying to solve. This involves identifying a specific pain point or opportunity for improvement.
- Develop a hypothesis: Formulate an educated guess about which variation will perform better. This should be based on data analysis, customer feedback, and market research.
- Design the experiment: Determine the elements to test and the metrics to measure. This involves selecting the right audience, defining the test groups, and choosing the right metrics to track.
- Run the experiment: Execute the test and collect data. This involves implementing the test, collecting data, and ensuring the integrity of the experiment.
- Analyze and iterate: Draw conclusions and refine your approach based on the results. This involves analyzing the data, identifying winners and losers, and using those insights to inform future experiments.
The Importance of Statistical Rigor
To ensure the effectiveness of A/B testing, we must apply appropriate statistical rigor. This includes:
- Sample size: Ensuring the test groups are large enough to produce statistically significant results.
- Significance level: Setting a threshold for determining whether the results are statistically significant.
- Statistical power: Ensuring the test has enough power to detect meaningful differences between variations.
Beyond A/B Testing: In-Product Experimentation
In-product experimentation allows us to test physical features, user experiences, and radical innovations. By prototyping and testing new features, we can:
- Observe user reactions: See how users interact with new features and identify areas for improvement.
- Uncover unexpected use cases: Discover new ways users are using our products and identify growth opportunities.
- Identify areas for improvement: Pinpoint pain points and areas where users are struggling.
Balancing Incremental and Radical Change
To drive both short-term optimization and long-term transformation, we must balance incremental changes with more ambitious, radical innovations. This involves:
- Incremental changes: Making small, iterative improvements to existing features and experiences.
- Radical innovations: Introducing new, groundbreaking features and experiences that disrupt the status quo.
The Power of Granular, Interconnected Data
Collecting data from various sources and stitching it together provides a holistic view of the customer experience. This enables us to:
- Identify patterns: See how users are behaving and identify areas for improvement.
- Pinpoint pain points: Identify areas where users are struggling and prioritize improvements.
- Optimize the experience: Use data to inform product decisions and optimize the user experience.
Empowering Deeper Analysis
With granular, interconnected data, we can conduct deeper analyses to uncover the specific drivers of loyalty and retention. This involves:
- Segmenting users: Dividing users into distinct groups based on behavior and preferences.
- Analyzing user journeys: Mapping the user experience from start to finish and identifying areas for improvement.
- Using data to inform product decisions: Using insights to prioritize features and experiences that drive growth and retention.
Unlocking Growth Through Event Tracking
Event tracking allows us to meticulously map key actions and behaviors that differentiate our most engaged customers. By identifying crucial user actions, we can:
- Reverse-engineer the product experience: Identify the specific features and experiences that drive growth and retention.
- Optimize the entire journey: Use data to inform product decisions and optimize the user experience from start to finish.
By embracing experimentation and data-driven decision-making, we can build a culture of continuous learning, adaptation, and innovation. This empowers us to take calculated risks, challenge assumptions, and relentlessly optimize the experiences we deliver to our customers.
Ultimately, the combination of hands-on product experimentation and data-driven decision-making is what builds effective growth leaders. It’s a culture of continuous learning, adaptation, and innovation — one that empowers our teams to take calculated risks, challenge assumptions, and relentlessly optimize the experiences we deliver to our customers.
Driving to the Aha Moment: Uncovering Unexpected Insights and Pivoting to Success
One of the most powerful aspects of data analysis is its ability to reveal unexpected user behaviors and preferences that can completely transform our understanding of our products and the markets we serve.
Take the case of Yelp — the team had no prior inkling that their most avid users were drawn to the platform because it allowed them to write reviews. It was only through a deep dive into the data that this crucial insight emerged.
This unexpected discovery was a pivotal moment for Yelp, setting the stage for the company’s meteoric rise. By understanding the true motivations of their core users, Yelp was able to double down on the features and experiences that truly resonated, propelling them to become the dominant player in the reviews space.
This example underscores the transformative power of unexpected insights that can arise from rigorous data analysis.
Rather than relying on assumptions or conventional wisdom, companies that are willing to challenge their preconceptions and explore the data with an open mind can uncover game-changing revelations about their customers and their markets.
Moreover, this mindset of embracing the unexpected is essential for driving continuous innovation and growth. By constantly seeking to uncover new patterns and preferences in the data, companies can stay ahead of the curve, anticipating the evolving needs of their users and adapting their offerings accordingly.
Ultimately, the ability to uncover these distinctive user behaviors and preferences through data analysis is a critical foundation for building must-have products and achieving sustainable success.
It’s a mindset that empowers us to challenge assumptions, validate hypotheses, and make decisions grounded in empirical evidence rather than gut instinct.
Pivoting to Success: Uncovering the Aha Moment Through Data Analysis
The Instagram Story: Instagram originated as a location-based social network called Burbn. However, founder Kevin Systrom admits that the product was initially too complicated, with “a jumble of features that made it confusing.” But by closely examining user data, Systrom and his co-founder Mike Krieger realized that the one feature users were truly gravitating towards was photo-sharing. Refining the Product
Armed with this crucial insight, Systrom and Krieger made the strategic decision to refine the product, “chopping everything out of Burbn except the photo, comment, and like features.” This laser focus on the core “aha moment” of photo-sharing allowed them to develop an easy-to-use app that quickly gained traction, ultimately leading to Instagram’s meteoric rise and $1 billion acquisition by Facebook.
The Pinterest Pivot: A similar story unfolded at Pinterest, which started as a mobile commerce app called Tote. However, founder Ben Silbermann noticed that users weren’t making purchases as intended, but rather were “stockpiling massive collections of things they coveted on the app.”
With this data-driven revelation, Silbermann pivoted the company to become a discovery and sharing platform, designing a product that made it easy for users to display and curate their valued collections. As Silbermann’s first investor Brian Cohen noted, this pivot was the “direct outgrowth of what he learned from the first business” — a testament to the power of being willing to challenge assumptions and let the data guide the way.
The Groupon Pivot: Groupon originally started as a fundraising site called The Point, where people could fund campaigns that would only unlock when enough people joined in. However, the service was struggling, and founder Andrew Mason was nearly ready to give his investors their money back. However, a close analysis of user behavior revealed that the campaigns that gave a group of users buying power to get a better deal were the most successful. Recognizing this insight, the Groupon team pivoted to focus on daily deals, with Mason coining the phrase “Get Your Groupon.com.” This pivot proved to be a huge success, and the company took off from there.
The YouTube Pivot: YouTube started as a video dating site, but the founders soon realized that users weren’t just uploading video profiles to find dates — they were sharing videos of all types, from their dogs to their vacations. Cofounder Jawed Karim said, “Our users were one step ahead of us. They began using YouTube to share videos of all kinds. Their dogs, vacations, anything. We found this very interesting. We said, ‘Why not let the users define what YouTube is all about?’ By June, they had completely revamped the website, making it more open and general for all video sharing. This pivot proved incredibly successful, and YouTube went on to become the dominant platform for online video.
- The Importance of Flexibility: These examples underscore the critical importance of flexibility and a willingness to pivot in the face of unexpected user behavior. Rather than stubbornly clinging to their original visions, the leaders of Instagram, Pinterest, and other successful companies were able to adapt and refine their offerings based on the insights gleaned from rigorous data analysis.
By being open to these transformative pivots, these companies were able to unlock sustainable growth and build must-have products that truly resonated with their target audiences.
These are powerful lessons in the value of data-driven decision-making and the courage to challenge our assumptions.
One of the key benefits of having a data-driven approach is the ability to avoid wasting precious resources on products or services that simply aren’t resonating with the target audience.
By closely examining customer behavior and preferences before scaling up, companies can ensure they’re focusing their efforts on initiatives that have the potential to become must-have offerings.
The HubSpot Example: The case of HubSpot is particularly illustrative of this data-driven mindset. By rigorously analyzing user data, the company discovered that customers who went through up-front product training were retained much longer than those who didn’t. This insight ran counter to industry norms, but the HubSpot team trusted the data and made paid product training a mandatory part of the new customer experience.
This example underscores what Chamath Palihapitiya refers to as the growth team’s responsibility to “invalidate lore” about products and markets and pursue growth efforts backed by empirical evidence.
Rather than relying on conventional wisdom or industry best practices, HubSpot was able to challenge assumptions and make decisions that ultimately powered the company to a successful IPO.
The Importance of Qualitative and Quantitative Insights: Unlocking these transformative insights requires a comprehensive approach to data collection and analysis. By combining both quantitative metrics and qualitative customer feedback, companies can gain a holistic understanding of not just what their users are doing, but why they’re doing it. This multifaceted perspective is essential for informing product development and growth strategies.
Driving Users to the Aha Moment: The Key to Sustainable Growth
As product leaders, one of our primary objectives should be to identify the core “aha moment” that truly resonates with our customers and then optimize the new user experience to get them there as quickly as possible.
- Identifying the Aha Moment: Through rigorous data analysis, companies like Facebook and Twitter have been able to pinpoint the specific moments that define their core value propositions. For Facebook, it was the thrill of connecting with at least seven friends within the first ten days. For Twitter, it was discovering news and insights from friends and respected individuals.
- Optimizing the New User Experience: Armed with these insights, these companies have then ruthlessly optimized their new user experiences to drive customers towards these “aha moments” as efficiently as possible. Facebook, for example, updated its onboarding process to make finding and connecting with friends the primary focus, stripping away any extraneous information that might distract from that core experience. Twitter, meanwhile, implemented a feature to suggest people follow based on users’ interests, ensuring they could quickly discover the content and connections that would define their “aha” moment.
- Investing in the New User Experience: Recognizing the critical importance of this new user experience, many leading tech companies have gone so far as to treat it as a separate product, with dedicated cross-functional teams working tirelessly to perfect it. At times, even up to one-third of a company’s engineering resources may be devoted to getting this foundational experience just right.
By laser-focusing on driving users to their “aha moments,” companies can build a solid foundation for sustainable growth.
Once this core value proposition has been firmly established and product-market fit achieved, growth teams can then begin systematically constructing the high-powered, data-driven growth machine that will propel their businesses to new heights.
Ultimately, the ability to identify and optimize for the “aha moment” is a crucial step on the journey towards building must-have products and achieving enduring success.
