Two-Sided Prioritization
I have always been a fan of “save for later” or “bookmarking” apps. Functionally, they help us get some things done whenever we get some time and have the intent to do something specific. Emotionally, they enable us to have a peace of mind by helping us eliminate the urge to stop what we are doing and address whatever gets thrown at us.
I am a very evangelical, power user of Pocket. It’s one of what I call “plain vanilla” apps. It just works. It started out as a basic app that lets you save links. A pure utility.
Back in June last year, Nate Weiner, the CEO of Pocket, wrote —
“We want to create a platform that enables people to save and consume the content they care about most. And by doing so, we hope to make it easier to spend time with more high-quality content, no matter how noisy it gets.”
Those lines are so reflective of the ruthless prioritization his team has built the product with from the very beginning.
The keywords/phrases in those two lines are platform, save, consume, high-quality content and noisy.
Let’s unbundle these keywords —
- Bookmarking is often seen as a feature of an app. NYT all has its own bookmarking feature. Safari has its own reading list. While I use both of those services daily, I never use their native bookmarking tools. As a user, I don’t want to remember what article was saved to which app or browser. I just want to read when I sit down to read. Pocket does just that. Whether I am scrolling on Twitter, browsing on Safari on my Mac or using Nuzzel, I just want to save and know that I can go back to one centralized place later for consumption. Pocket is a platform available across operating systems, browsers and apps.
- Last year, it introduced personal and social recommendations. With these two features, there’s both algorithmic and human curation of high-quality content based on what I read, share and recommend. It’s quite magical how Pocket has gone from a bookmarking tool to a refined discovery utility for me.
- Pocket provides me a very distraction-free reading experience. No noise. No banner ads. I even use it to bypass NYT’s paywall. I have been told not to be too vocal about that :)
So, currently, Pocket has four major things — User profile, a search functionality, a reading list and the recommended section. Ever since Pocket started introducing social components to its app, it’s quite natural to think why wouldn’t they let us search for specific user profiles. They do let us look through lists of people based off of our graphs of address book, Twitter and Facebook to follow people. So, while I know people like M.G. Siegler, Nikki Will, and Hunter Walk are power users, I can’t go to the search bar and look them up. Yes, there are ways of visiting their profile through a couple taps. But, that’s a a process full of friction and even counterintuitive for new users. There is no easy way of finding out whether your particular friend is using Pocket or not by just looking their name up.
Instinctively, one might think that’s a stupid thing to do. What app with a social component won’t let you look people up? Wouldn’t making it simpler to search for people help widen a user’s social graph?
After thinking about this for quite some time, I concluded that the lack of search functionality for the social graph is a feature. It’s by design. The search button within the app is a gateway to Pocket’s very powerful feature. Pocket let’s it’s users search for articles. The search has three distinct filters — my unread articles list, my archive and Pocket’s entire database. It is insanely powerful and accurate.
In February this year, Nate Weiner wrote —
In 2016, we’ll be building on this foundation to make Pocket a unique place where you can not only capture, read, and watch the things you care about most, but easily discover and recommend them as well. Pocket will become your home for the best, most interesting stories the Web has to offer.
He mentions how the vision for Pocket evolved into something bigger than just saving and consuming things. “Discovery” became a big part of the vision. The search functionality delivers on that piece of the vision. It helps users discover high quality links on topics they want to learn about. It also helps users rediscover the links they have on their unread list and archived lists.
I have often seen people tap on the search button within the app thinking that’s how they can look people up to follow them. But, they end up stumbling upon a whole new section of Pocket. The search has been designed the way it is to align the product with the vision. They could have prioritized a people search over content search. But, looking people up doesn’t not contribute to the actions and user behaviors that Weiner wants to encourage to realize his vision for Pocket. Pocket is a socialized utility aspiring to become a search engine for the highly quality and most interesting links on the web. Pocket has just the right amount of social features to make it sticky.
Making everything very social is one of the go-to tactics for having viral app growth. It’s very tempting. It’s one of the first things developers think about for developing a network. I’m sure the product managers at Pocket think about this a lot. Aligning the product features with the bigger vision and engaging in ruthless prioritization to create the right habits and behaviors is so crucial. I am sure that enabling people to look up profiles via search is relatively very easy from an engineering standpoint. But, getting users to associate Pocket with a search engine aligns better with the company vision and is a challenging design problem.
Pocket seems to be developing a new kind of search. In my opinion, if you invest enough in Pocket, its search engine is much better than that of Google. It’s rethinking what search means the way companies like GIPHY & Jelly are thinking beyond the concept of google search.
I go to Pocket’s search engine for revisiting a lot of articles I have read in the past. Whenever I sit down to write a blog post, I would go to Pocket to look up some well-defined content on certain topics under the “all items” section on the search page. Guess where I went to find Weiner’s blog posts?
Ever since I discovered the search engine, I have started thinking of Pocket as my digital notebook. I save and archive most of the content I read or come across so that I have a bigger indexable and searchable database. This also enables Pocket to understand more and more topics and sources of writing I’m interested in. I also find myself saving an article that I come across on other platforms or the web to Pocket even though I do have the time to read that piece there and then. 📝📚📖 This, in turn, enhances my recommended feed. And, that, improves the overall experience.
Similar to how product teams prioritize, I think users prioritize as well. Users value different things and prefer the product teams to ship different things depending on what kind of usage they have.
When I was a non-paying user of Pocket, I used to expect Pocket to ship all sorts of new features. My expectations were all random. I wasn't paying them for their service, but I was committed to demanding new things. And, I did not value what they already had enough to start paying. But, earlier this year, I became a paying customer. This decision was mainly driven by the permanent library feature. The moment I started thinking of Pocket as my digital notebook, I started valuing its existing search and archival features a lot more. This made me want to pay them. As a paying customer, I have noticed that I keep my expectations in check. I don’t demand for random, new features. And, this is very counterintuitive at first. Why wouldn't I expect them to do radically new things when I am paying them money?
Intercom recently tweeted out a graphic that helped me understand my own behavior.
As a paying user, you value some aspects of a product a lot. The fact that you value something enough made you want to pay in the first place. So, you want the existing feature set to get better and better. I want the search to become better. I want the recommended feed to get better. I want Pocket to bypass more paywalls (WSJ, for instance). 😉
This is a very important product nuance that I have learned recently. It is fascinating how this behavior is true for most of the products I’m paying for. As a non-paying user, I tend to go for breath of functionalities. As a paying user, I tend to go for the depth of functionalities. I pay upfront for a newsletter. I expect quality and depth of stories in it.
I think there are two very important lessons to learn here —
- First is the art and science of prioritization in product development. I like to think about how each new feature contributes to inculcating a specific user behavior. I work with a lot of teams building conversational products. I am constantly trying to develop the thought-process and skill-set needed to decide what set of features and corresponding user experience should be shipped in the next release to help us get a step closer to our bigger product vision.
- Second is being very mindful of who we are getting feedback from. From both personal experience and research, I have concluded that paying and non-paying users have very different set of expectations, usage patterns and motivations for using a product. It is important to segment the two feedback loops and spend the right amount of resources on each to make a balanced decision for holistic product development. The perception of the value of a product is tied to both whether you are paying for it and how you are paying for it.
P.S — I am trying a new experiment of using both Pocket and Instapaper together.
