Filling The Bucket

Increasing your retention by focusing on the lowest level items first

When it comes to the development of a product, there are so many things demanding ones attention, from the features needing to be built-out, to the requests from the community of users. It is hard to determine what you need to focus your attention on and what matters most when it comes to overall growth of your product. When it comes to development of Whiteboard, we have taken the approach with a common method of starting with the holes in the bottom of our bucket.

What do we mean by our bucket and the holes we have in it?

Bucket and Holes

Think of your product as being a big bucket and as you add users, ‘water’, what holes are they leaking from? What is causing your churn? Is your bucket holding the water that is getting poured into it? Or is the water leaking out? The users you bring onto the product, are they leaving or are the staying in the ‘bucket’? When it comes to what it is our team is focused, we focus on the holes in the lowest part of the our bucket. We focus on the foundation of Whiteboard and move our way up the ‘bucket’ to items that we consider luxury, such as a certain feature set.

How We Prioritize

We first prioritize the list of items that are needing to be done and the impact they have on the product. Do they address the needs and pain-points of the current user base? Is it a common item that effects everyone or is it more of an edge case / niche? Typically in the early stages of product development, you are looking for product-market fit. Do users see the value in your product? Does it make sense? Does it work as intended? These are the items that we focus on first before we move onto implementing additional features and functionality.

For example, the addition of our calendar feature or templates are pointless if we are missing the mark with on-boarding and the foundation of our product such as the messaging, overall speed, performance and bugs that are critical to the core of the product. If we can’t get the message across of what makes Whiteboard so great or even get you past the steps of creating your first to-do, then adding additional features are worthless because we would have lost the user before they could even benefit from the additional feature that stacks on top of the foundation of our product, the bottom of the bucket. Additional features are holes that are higher up on the bucket. Even if we implemented them, we would still lose the water from the holes at the bottom of the bucket.

Identifying Holes

One of the best ways we identify the holes in our bucket is by listening to our users and collecting feedback from them. We ask the key questions around our product, starting with if our product met their expectations, did they see the value in our product, what we could have done better, what would they have done better, feature requests etc.? Not only listening to our community by what they are saying, but also what they are doing. What is their behavior? What is our retention and churn 1 day after signup? 7 days? 30 days? Where in the process are we loosing them? Your community won’t always know exactly what you could be doing better or where you are losing them. This is when you rely on your data.

Moving Up The Bucket

Address the most common issues and pain-points that you identify that are directly correlated with the core of your product. Once you see a decrease in a particular pain-point / issue, this is when you know you have plugged the hole and you can start moving up higher on the bucket. Another way to identify that you have addressed the issue is seeing an increase in your metrics, when it comes to your retention and a decrease of churn and overall increase in activity.

This has been our strategy since day one and at times it seems that we are moving slowly and feature implementations are not happening as quickly as expected but what we are doing, is ensuring that we are providing our users with an exceptional experience and providing value everyday. If we don’t have a solid core and foundation, then we will end up spending a ton of resources on things that don’t even matter and we waste our efforts of getting eyes on our product when we haven’t addressed the issues that matter most.

So when you start building your product, focus on plugging the holes at the bottom of your bucket as quickly as possible. Don’t be in such a race to build a feature set by plugging those holes higher up on your bucket that you will not see a benefit from, especially if you are still leaking users from the bottom of your bucket.

Kayvon Olomi | Co-Founder

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(Originally posted on February 14, 2015)