The problem with a lot of the content around A/B testing on the web is that it only covers landing pages and e-commerce websites. I want to be able to run A/B tests on the words inside the product experience. Tools that test landing pages, like Google Optimize, VWO and Optimizely are client-side tools. They work by placing a cookie in ...

The only way I know how to understand how different users think about your product is to speak to them. You don’t need to speak to lots of people, nor do you need to speak to them all at once. Two or three people a week is all you need. Recent customer success wins are always a good place to start. You don’t need a complicated reason t...

When I begin working with a product my primary focus is understanding how the core value proposition translates to specific actions in the product. Then I map out all the steps that lead to people become habitual users. Once this initial phase of work is complete the next step is to figure out who the super users are. Superusers are th...

If someone successfully uses your product once that doesn’t automatically turn them into a long term user. Behavioural data lets you reverse engineer how often people need to use your app to become long term users. You’ll need two things to do this: behavioural data and long term users. The definition of a long term user is fluid but 6...

Thinking of your onboarding experience as a funnel and using analytics to measure the biggest drop-offs is a useful way to find opportunities for improvement. Building a funnel means going through your onboarding experience and identifying every touchpoint that you need to track. The first thing that happens when you do this is you rea...

In 2018 Basecamp came out with a new kind of to-do list called a hill chart. This is what they look like. Things on the left are being figured out, anything on the right means it's being done. Stuff on the far left is vague and need lots of figuring out while the far right is almost finished. Every time you do some work, you manually m...

The reason I like retention curves is because they pack an incredible amount of information into one image. They tell you if a product has found fit straight out of the gate. When a retention curve draws to zero you have a leaky bucket. When your curve flattens out then you know your users have developed enough of a habit around your p...

A landing page helps people understand what your product does and why someone should care about it. People on the internet have been building landing pages for a while now and they have established a pattern that works. Don't deviate from this pattern unless you have a good reason to. Save the fancy stuff for the rest of your marketing...

Good data helps you make better decisions. You’re too close to your product to see things accurately. You need a clear way to see how people use things without relying on how you expect them to use things. Metrics are also useful for important conversations. Hard data is one way to escape a your-opinion-vs-theirs discussion. Product me...

I used to focus on solutions. "We're going to add a bookmarking feature”. Solutions get messy. The moment you show your solution to the team, it all begins to devolve. Why don't we add X? I don't think you should have Y. Do we really need Z? I’ve learned that the only reason I'm ever making something is to solve a problem. If the probl...

Revenue retention is down to people paying for your product. User retention is about them using it. Revenue is too chunky a measure to do anything useful with. If you have monthly subscriptions, you’ll get one data point a month. Yearly contracts only make this worse. If people don’t use your product, they might still pay you. But only...

A friend of mine is starting a business around personalised yoga instruction on Zoom. He called me up and asked if retention is something they should be thinking about this early in the game. My answer was YES. On the one hand, working on retention makes more sense when you have at least a year of behavioural data. Without data, it's h...

Most teams wait till people stop using their app before asking them why they left. This makes sense. You can always improve your chances of getting responses if you speak to people before they leave. You just have to ask them why they’re using your product less. This involves investing in analytics that helps you understand how often p...

When measuring Churn, it’s important to understand if people are leaving because they couldn’t use your product, if they didn’t like it, or if you’re just dealing with happy churn. Happy churn is when someone reaches the end of the rainbow. They no longer need your product because they’ve dealt with their problem. Happy cows will say l...

The best way I've found to measure retention is to plot a retention curve. A curve shows you the average number of people that come back and use your product over time. Before you can build a curve you have to define what “using your app” means. If you do rideshare it's probably booking a cab, if you deliver food then it's likely order...

Retention matters because it's deeply connected to every aspect of a business. Working on retention affects how much money you make, how many people sign up, how happy they are, how long they stick around, what they say about you and how many people they tell. No other aspect of product work connects as many important dots. If users st...

Your core action is the thing people do in your product to deal with the problem they signed up to solve. A clear understanding of your problem comes from listening to your users and understanding how they think about it. Find the right level of abstraction. You've found the sweet spot when you can explain the problem using the words y...

List out all of the actions people can do that indicate they're addressing their core motivation for signing up. There are a finite number of things people can do in your app and common sense is your friend here. If you do rideshare then it's booking a cab, if you deliver food then it's ordering dinner, if you offer courses then it's d...

Just because someone's using your product doesn't mean you're solving their problem. They might be using it more than usual precisely because it's not solving the problem the way they need it to. A clear understanding of your problem comes from listening to how your users think and talk about it. Finding the right level of abstraction ...

"Here's our cool new audio tagging AI thingy. It identifies and labels sounds in real-time without an internet connection." "Wow, cool, neat!" ...then they proceed to never use it. Telling me when to use something is a growth hack. It helps shape a future situation into an organic reminder. "Here's our cool new audio thingy. Use it whe...

On one end you have video games. Games get played every day. On the other end you apps that help you file your taxes. You only need to file your taxes once a year. How often you're meant to use a product comes down to the natural occurrence of the problem your product solves. The natural frequency of the problem you solve acts as an in...

Your product was designed to solve a problem. Understanding when this problem occurs is important because it lays the foundation for how often people are expected to use your product. Airbnb helps you find a great place to stay when you go on vacation. People go on holiday once, maybe twice a year. If Airbnb looks at how many people bo...

Your product can be a mediocre solution to lots of vague, undefined use cases. Vague use cases make things hard to use and difficult to remember. A clear understanding of your primary use case helps you set the right goals and prioritise the right features. The problem with thinking about products in terms of a primary use case is that...

If it's a problem worth solving then there are people out there trying to solve it right now. When someone goes to solve the problem your product was designed to solve, that's your use case. That's when they should be thinking about you and reaching for your thing. Wait, so what problem is Facebook solving then? Well, it's solving lots...

Your use case defines the problem your product was designed to solve. A use case draws a boundary around the natural behaviour that you're trying to tap into, it highlights where things break down and how you fit in. It is important that you understand them because they are the foundation that you use to prioritise things. If you don't...

Rather than asking if we've released the feature, we should be asking if we are getting closer to the outcome. This means starting the conversation with an outcome, to begin with. How're we supposed to build something that drives an outcome if we don’t know what the outcome is? How're we measuring it? How will we know when we're done? ...

People don't care about your product. They care about what it can do for them. Talking to the people who use your product on a regular basis helps you remember this. Listening to your users might sound simple but it’s not. Setting up interviews and speaking to customers is a delicate process. If you come off as a robotic questionnaire ...