Product Management Weekly - Issue #7
This week we focus on insights on end-user interactions, UX writing, Racecar Growth framework, The Spotify Model, Product Analytical tooling, self-reflection and much more.
Benchmark Report: End-user interactions which drive product success
Article: link
tl;dr;
Kirsty shares insights from their analytics tool - Mixpanel. The report focuses on three verticals, draws on insights after analyzing over 214 million end-user interactions.
Key highlights:
For product tours, after one step tours, 3 step product tours have the most success rate(with a 66% completion rate), and completion rate(and user engagement) drops below 50% after 5 steps
Average microsurvey has a completion rate of 60%. Even option micro surveys (in comparision to odd options microsurveys) get higher responses - four-option Microsurvey has a 92% completion rate
Launchers enable users to finish on-boarding tasks at their own pace. 76% of users learn more using launchers.
6 mistakes in UX writing that ruin customer experience
Article: link
tl;dr;
Marques writes about common mistakes to avoid while building web products, as these may hurt your retention and growth metrics.
Key Stats
52% of users leave websites without an intention to come back due to its bad aesthetics
Small Biz Genius reported that 88% of customers won’t return to a website with a poor UX design
70% of businesses fail due to their poor website usability
6 mistakes mentioned in the article
Avoid having a robotic tone of voice
Avoid too much use of passive voice
Avoid SEO word stuffing as it will hurt your customer retention long term
Avoid confusing designs or user navigation flow
Avoid complex wording and use to field-specific wording to make it familiar for users
Avoid any grammar and spelling mistakes as these may affect your brand reputation and retention
Good user experience design can efficiently help you propel your product or service, and ensure a better public perception of your business. Poor UX design, in contrast, will lead to user distrust towards your brand and company.
CPO Mastery Conference 2021
Article: link
tl;dr;
Great summarization of key talks from CPO conference.
Storming Reddit’s Moat
Article: link
tl;dr;
Reddit has a lot of communities (aka subreddits), and similar to what we have seen happening with craigslist(refer to image below) we might see startups being build off subreddits( ref: example) in future. Mayank describes in the article why just migrating communities off reddit might not be the best way to unbundle reddit:
Reddit content has a good SEO, and hard to compete with
Reddit has strong inter-community network effects
Reddit has a huge reader community
Reddit has a product differentiator for large-scale communities
It is usually hard to acquire users from Reddit
At the community level, then, Reddit presents an array of structural barriers to unbundling. Trying to compete with Reddit community-for-community will likely lead you down the wrong path.
The Racecar Growth Framework
Article: link
tl;dr;
This article by Reforge focuses on how to grow the business and compares business to a high performance race car which has four specific components:
The (Growth) Engine: Drives majority of the business growth
Companies grow primarily through four possible Growth Engines: Performance marketing: FB, AdWords, TV, etc. Virality: Word-of-mouth, referrals, inviting friends, etc. Content: SEO, shareable videos, or newsletters, etc. Sales: Outbound (and inbound) salespeople
Turbo Boosts: Accelerates the growth only for a short duration of time
In the Reforge Growth Series and Advanced Growth Strategy programs they are referred to as “Linear” efforts.
Lubricants: These don’t directly drive growth, but instead optimize processes
Examples include: conversion, retention and activation
Fuel: These help enable growth to happen ( ex. capital, users, content)
Paid marketing and sales engines primarily need capital, Content engines unsurprisingly need more content, which can be used to attract users. Viral engines require only more users, who in turn refer additional users.
The articles going into details regarding 6 common pitfalls of growth. A great read in general for PMs.
Spotify doesn’t use “the Spotify model” and neither should you.
Article: link
tl;dr;
Jeremiah writes about the Spotify model and learnings from it. The article mentions why the earlier structure didnt work well - the reasons included
Matrix management solved the wrong problem
Was fixated on team autonomy
Collaboration was an assumed competency
Mythology became difficult to change
Recommendations by the author:
If organization size > 200 people => try the Scaled agile framework
If organization size < 200 people => try Shape Up by Basecamp
Top 10 Product Analytics tools for Product Managers
Article: link
tl;dr;
Duru writes on Product Collective
and shares 10 tools which can help PMs to assess the performance of their digital products so as to be able get deeper insights on what their user needs. These tools include
Why You Should Make Time for Self-Reflection
Article: link
tl;dr;
This HBR article talks about the power of self-reflection and suggests ways on how we can start practicing self-reflection in our lives.
Curious why do most leaders still don’t use self-reflection even though it increases productivity?
Some don’t understand the process
Some don’t like the process
Some don’t like the results
Some have a bias towards action
Some cannot see an ROI
Research by Giada Di Stefano, Francesca Gino, Gary Pisano, and Bradley Staats in call centers demonstrated that employees who spent 15 minutes at the end of the day reflecting about lessons learned performed 23% better after 10 days than those who did not reflect.
Five high-value points in the SaaS customer journey when you should ask for feedback
Article: link
tl;dr;
Savio writes about five important points where collecting user feedback is critical for your application
Ask for feedback when customers signed up to ensure app is aligned to solve customer’s problem.
Ask to feedback to check with customers as to why they didnt convert
Ask customers why they did convert
Ask active customers for feedback using normal feedback mechanism like CSAT, NPS etc
Ask churned customer for feedback
Learn how you can be proactive using the experiences of your customer, so that the causes that led him to cancel will be minimized for future customers - Hiten Shah + Steli Efti, Startup Chat
The 2021 Virtual SaaS Conferences List
Article: link
tl;dr;
Ava shares a list of SaaS conferences in 2021 on Meetric Blog
Product-Led Summit - January 26-28, 2021
ProductCon - February 18th, 2021
SaaStock Remote - February 23-25, 2021
SXSW Online - March 16-20, 2021
UX Conference - March 1-2, 2021
Adobe Summit - April 13-15, 2021
Content Marketing Annual Conference - April 27-29, 2021
IBM Think 2021 - May 2021
Dublin Tech Summit - June 17th, 2021
MozCon - July 11-14, 2021
Inbound - September 7-10, 2021
TechCrunch Disrupt - September 21-23, 2021
SaaStr Annual 2021 - September 28-29, 2021
Websummit - November 1-4, 2021