Better Product Managers, and Product Management

Most sites, regardless of what they sell or who their customers are, have very similar-looking conversion funnels:

SaaS/Subscription: Viewed Homepage -> Viewed Signup -> Signed Up

E-commerce: Product Search -> Viewed Individual Product -> Added to Cart -> Completed Purchase

Lead generation: Viewed Offer -> Entered Contact Information

Daily Deal: Viewed Homepage -> Subscribed

They can all be summarized as:

Unknown visitor, no value -> Known customer worth $

But none of these funnels measure what is most important to your customer: the moment in which they get value from you.

This isn’t a single moment, either.  For most sites, this is a series of events and each one builds upon the last until you have crossed an invisible threshold from “hmm, I’m not sure this is going to be worth my time” to “wow! I was actually able to ____!”

Some of these moments may happen before the visitor actually becomes a customer.

Example: When I broke my wrist last year, I grumbled that I could no longer put my hair in a ponytail with one hand.  Then I thought, “…or can I?” and did a quick google search.  There is, in fact, a small online store that sells one-handed ponytail threaders.  I was so pleased that such a thing actually existed, that I was happy even before I completed my purchase.

The promise of being able to do something that you could not previously do, itself, can be the first time you give value to your customers.

Many of these moments happen afterwards.

Example: Jana signs up for her local daily deal site, but she’s not a “spa person”.  Unfortunately, her first ten offers are for pedicures and facials. 

10 days in, Jana has not actually gotten any value yet.   In fact, she’s getting a bit of negative value because her inbox is filling up but she hasn’t saved any money yet.  It’s not until she sees an offer for that restaurant she’s been meaning to try that she gets a little surge of excitement: It’s paying off!  This is worthwhile!

Sometimes these moments are delayed because your customers need to do some work before you can provide value to them.

Example: Pei signs up for a personal finance site which will help him categorize his expenses and set a budget.  But he signed up from his phone, and doesn’t feel like keying in a bunch of passwords and account numbers.  So he doesn’t connect his bank account or credit card account.

Without that data source, the site can’t give him any value. It’s not until he connects some accounts that he can see a pie chart of his expenditures and tips on how to save more: wow!  I never realized I spent so much on eating out!

Sometimes customers get some value immediately, but not enough to put them firmly over the threshold of ‘can’t live without it’.   In my opinion, this is the trickiest thing for companies to figure out.  What is that tipping point, and how do people get to it?  How can we encourage them to get there faster?

Example: Nina helps her dad sign up for a Facebook account and adds their family members as friends.  Nina’s dad likes seeing the photos they’ve uploaded, but clearly still doesn’t get ‘what the big deal is’.  But then his best friend from high school, whom he lost touch with 20 years ago, adds him as a friend.  Now he realizes: this is amazing! I can find people that I never would’ve found before!

You could express this in a generic funnel as:

Hope -> Immediate Gratification -> Value -> “Can’t Live without it” Value

Popularity: 10% [?]

This is the sad story of a little company who is killing off their evangelist users.  (Well, at least this one.)

I’ve provided a timeline so that you, too, can squander the goodwill of the people who would otherwise brag about you, blog about you, and buy a bunch of your products for their friends.

September 2008:

Launch with the TechCrunch 50.  Provide a concise, compelling description of your features and some tantalizing screenshots.  Allow your excited future evangelist users to pre-order.

(more…)

Popularity: 1% [?]

By now we’ve all seen the numbers showing that 90% of Twitter’s content is contributed by 10% of their users.

• First thought: why is this a surprise?
• Second thought: why is no one talking about how to change these numbers?

What we should be asking is:

How can we break the 90-10 “rule”?

It can be done.  Un-scientific research of my Facebook friends shows that over 30% of them update their status at least weekly.  (My Facebook friends include a large number of early mainstream/late mainstream technology adopters, so I suspect that’s a fairly representative number.)  Lithium, who powers enterprise online communities, says that their audience participation rate is also around 30%.

What is it about Facebook and well-run online communities that converts three times as many users from passive participants into active contributors?

1. Sponsors. Most people join Facebook at the urging of friends, who provide some context as to “what is this, and what do you do here”. You listen to them because you trust them.
2. Unofficial Mentors. Thriving online communities have naturally-emerging leaders – people who’ve been around, know some history, and take pride in helping new arrivals find information and understand the “unwritten rules” of the community.  Lithium actively encourages development of these “super-members”.
3. Context. People join Facebook to stay involved with friends.  People join online communities because of a desire to learn or participate in a shared interest.
4. Don’t-Make-Me-Think Contribution. Moving the community norm towards shorter, more frequent updates encourages spontaneity – people don’t feel the pressure to compose, re-read, and make sure they sound “smart enough”
5. Critical Mass. Immediately seeing people you know, or an activity indicator like “418 posts in the past 24 hours” signals users that it’s worth their time investment to contribute.
6. Immediate Perceived Value. The shorter the time between arriving and finding content that is informative, rare, useful, or about you, the more likely people are to stick around.

Twitter obviously has the #4 (140 character limit, no editing) and #5 (3700% growth last month) covered.

But if Twitter wants to keep competing with Facebook to be the platform for expression, they’ve got to incorporate more of #1, 2, 3, and 6.

Sponsors: Allow people to invite friends using the Facebook (and LinkedIn) social graphs.  Encourage them to add at least one “tag” about each friend and include “suggested people to follow” based on that tag with the invitation.

Mentors: I have no doubt that there are thousands of Twitter-ers who would volunteer to “mentor” a new Twitter joiner, especially if there was some cursory demographic matching.  (I would happily spend an hour or so with a new-to-Twitter product manager, for example.)

Context: Oh, I know the whole point is that Twitter is “whatever you want it to be!”  Yeah, sometimes the serendipity needs to be toned down – too many choices are paralyzing.

Allow new users to choose a “flavor” of how they think they want to use Twitter and show them suggested people to follow who use it that way.  This could be powered off a completely user-populated database – little work for Twitter themselves.

Immediate Perceived Value: Finding people outside your social web but inside your “interests web” is incredibly valuable.  Twitter should buy one of those user-populated directories already and MrTweet and make it an official part of the service.

Popularity: 2% [?]

My husband just unwrapped his brand-new IBM ThinkPad.  As he was turning it over, marveling at how light it is, he noticed one small feature: a hole.

The underside of the keyboard has a hole in it, so that if you spill liquid on the keyboard — and lots of us have done it, we know it happens — it will drain out easily.

Adding a hole was not a feat of technical engineering.  It didn’t require special materials or sophisticated machinery.  It was just a case of someone thinking about what it’s like to knock over your glass of water and curse and turn your laptop upside down banging on the bottom and hoping that the water will leak back out and wondering if a hairdryer will make things worse – and saying, “We know this will happen.  How can we minimize the damage when it does?”

This isn’t the kind of feature that’s going to win you points up front.  But someone is going to be saved by it, and that person is going to be a ThinkPad evangelist for life (or at least the next couple of years, which is pretty equivalent to “life” in the high-tech world).

Popularity: 1% [?]