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Product-Led OnBoarding
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Product-Led Growth (PLG) is becoming an increasingly important part of product management. The crux of PLG is Product-Led Onboarding, so if you pair this book with Wes Bush’s you’ll have a strong foundation of the craft.
Key Highlights
If you’re neglecting the needs of first time users, you’re likely wasting a large portion of the money you’re spending on sales, marketing and product teams.
Onboarding is often under-optimised. It’s left floating between disciplines and teams, without a shared understanding of success.
Onboarding should encompass everything up to the point until you get a clear signal from the user that they are deriving significant value from your product; and they’ll continue using it.
For Slack, that’s when they see a team exchange 2,000 messages.
Minimising the time it takes for new customers to realise value from a product is crucial for user onboarding. In a product-led world, users are easy-come-easy-go, the tolerance for delays and frustrations is small.
Create a cross-functional onboarding team, involving different departments, to capture their knowledge and expertise. Get executive sponsorship, you’ll need the authority to cross departmental boundaries and responsibilities.
Use JTBD Interviews to uncover your product's functional, emotional, and social jobs, along with the progress-making forces. Talk to new users, shoppers, active customers, inactive customers, and churned customers.
Don’t focus on the ‘Aha Moment’ or ‘the first strike’ (the moment when the user achieves their desired outcome, or Customer Job). Instead focus on The Product Adoption Indicator: the moment users start using a product consistently. It’s a better measure of retention.
Find your product adoption indicator by creating and validating a hypothesis using the following format:
If new users perform at least [X] of [Product Action], during the first [SHORT TIME PERIOD], they’re likely to continue using our product for [LONGER TIME PERIOD].
For example… Users that send 3 or more messages on their first day of using WhatsApp are more likely to continue using it after 21 days.
Look for the point at which your retention curve flattens.
Play around with your hypothesis until you’ve maximised the overlap between the users who continue using your product for [LONGER TIME PERIOD] and those the do at least [X] of [Product Action] in [SHORT TIME PERIOD]
You’ll know you’ve got it right when the retention curves of your cohort is significantly higher than that of all users.
Decrease time to value by adopting the ‘Straight-Line Onboarding’ approach.
Evaluate each step in the onboarding process, score each against necessity, ease and simplicity.
Remove or delay any steps that don’t lead to ‘the first strike’.
Simplify those that have to remain, consider using progressive disclosure.
Break complex steps into to multiple pages.
Reorganise the steps from easiest to hardest.
Address the three elements from the BJ Fogg Behaviour Model:
Make it easy. Learn how to use visual cues, helpful empty states, and content templates to make user onboarding easier.
Increase motivation. Discover different ways to increase your users’ motivation inside and outside the product. Refrain from using incentives, instead speak to your users desires, show them progress, welcome them, celebrate wins and use social proof.
Create behaviour-based prompts to nudge users into actions (from within and outside the product).
Use the ‘Triple A Sprint’ process: Analyse, Ask, Act. Iterative improvement beats big launches. Learn by doing. Analyse results, reiterate and implement changes quickly.
Companies that learn the quickest have a competitive advantage.
Split test any onboarding changes. Compare retention rates between different onboarding processes.
Share learnings from and success stories widely across the organisation.
Go beyond the traditional onboarding. Apply EUREKA process to different steps in the user journey, entry points and customer jobs.
Sales in a product led growth model should…
shift from chasing leads to coaching users.
frame the product in different ways to different audiences.
leverage product engagement data in the sales process.
Sales should start using a Product Qualified Leads: a measure that combines activation and engagement signals of new users that’s specific to your product.
Focus sales-assisted onboarding energy on PQLs who fit your ideal customer profile.
Full Book Summary · Purchase on Amazon
Quick Links
Doshi event on Project Thinking vs Product Thinking (Jan 18th) · Tweet
2024 product predictions from Marty Cagan · Article
Intercom double down on AI with a new company vision · Article
Benedict’s annual presentation. ‘AI and Everything Else’ · Presentation · Video
What I Wish Someone Had Told Me - Sam Altman · Article
LLM’s may soon exhaust all available high-quality language data · Article
People pay $0.50-$2.00 for an hour of digital entertainment · Article
Bill Gates on the year ahead · Article
Major Trends in Martech 2024 · Report
Beautiful site of interviews with great designers · Website
User Stories vs Jobs to Be Done · Tweet
Why drugs got harder to develop and what we can do about it · Article
Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023 · Article
Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt · D.Sculley et al · 2014
Machine learning offers a fantastically powerful toolkit for building complex systems quickly. This paper argues that it is dangerous to think of these quick wins as coming for free. Using the framework of technical debt, we note that it is remarkably easy to incur massive ongoing maintenance costs at the system level when applying machine learning.
Machine Learning is eating code - but that doesn’t mean it’s a free lunch.
This paper highlights the challenges and types of technical debt you’re likely to encounter and under-estimate.
Machine Learning has all of the complexities of normal code - but also a larger level system complexity (changing anything changes everything).
View the Paper
Book Highlights
However, just like everybody else, they cannot simply abandon the computer; they need it to do their jobs. They grit their teeth and put up with the abuse inflicted on them by the dancing bearware. They don't know there is a better way for the computer to behave, but they know that every time they use it, they feel a little smaller.
Alan Cooper · The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
When you zoom out and look at many examples of task-specific feedback for a report, what themes emerge?
Julie Zhuo Ries · The Making of a Manager
The idea that coordination, by itself, can be a source of advantage is a very deep principle.
Richard Rumelt · Good Strategy / Bad Strategy
Quotes and Tweets
"A simple filter for managing your time: You're not focused enough unless you're mourning some of the things you're saying no to.”
James Clear· X JamesClear
Jeff Bezos on Managing Stress: Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over. So if I find that some particular thing is causing me to have stress, that’s a warning flag for me; what it means is, there’s something that I haven’t completely identified perhaps in my conscious mind, that is bothering me, and I haven’t yet taken any action on it. I find, as soon as I identify it, and make the first phone call or send the first email message or whatever it is that we’re going to do to start to address the situation, even if it’s not solved, the mere fact that we’re addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it. So stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn’t be ignoring.
Build or Die · X build_or_die
The power-up from working in a top 1% talent environment is incalculable. I was deprogrammed and reprogrammed at age 33 at Stripe, and am eternally grateful. Artists like to live in artist colonies. If you aim to be the best, find the people who inspire and push you.
Kelly Simms · X kellylsims