Last night I had the opportunity to attend the St. Louis Product Management Group meetup and participate in a session lead by Hannah Davison on the topic of Psychology Principles Behind Creating Effective Products. One of the examples that Hannah brought up was free trials of software or services. You know the ones, "Try it free for 7/14/21 days and then we'll start charging you, and here are a bunch of options to choose from and we think you should pick this one. Don't worry about the price, if you don't like it you can just cancel before the trial period is over."

The conversation wound its way around to a discussion of that last bit, cancelling, and how some services have a free trial that, instead of continuing unless you end it, end unless you continue it. It was at this point that I jotted down in my notebook, "Over and in, don't go for the winner."

If you play, or follow, tennis, chances are you know what that means. Go for the high percentage shot, keep the ball in play. In context, I was thinking, "Put the offer where they want it, where they can easily accept it."  While driving today, I was thinking about how I could turn that quick note into a blog post or something. 

"Over and in" makes sense from a tennis perspective, but many people may not get it. What other analogy might be useful? Since my mind was already on sports, a golf analogy came to mind. "Fairways and greens," my brother told me one day on the golf course. "Just fairways and greens and you'll do fine." Ha, so easy to say, but oh so hard to put into practice. But the same basic idea. Keep the ball in play, play it safe, be consistent. 

Which brought to mind a scene from the film "Tin Cup", where Roy and David have a conversation that goes something like this:

In the end, although Roy's final shot was indeed "immortal", pars all day long end up winning the tournament. Which brought my mind around to the company 37signals, one of those companies that use the "free trial ends unless you continue it." In fact, I'm writing and publishing this in one of their products. Their general business approach is, to me anyway, to "keep the ball in play", make it easy for the customer to keep the game going.

At the same time, though, they don't care what other people think. Except for their customers, of course. In a world of companies that view competition as a finite game, where there are winners and losers, 37signals (and other companies like them) treat competition as part of an infinite game, where the point is to keep the game going.

And that's where this particular tale ends. No coherent blog post this, just a description of how thoughts trigger thoughts and how ideas bounce around inside my head on the way, perhaps, to something of use. I was inspired to share this by Mike Rhode's post on LinkedIn earlier today encouraging us to "Protect your creative process from the AI robots."