Have you made your product New Year’s resolutions or not yet? It´s first of March, but it´s never late to take a step back and think about them. You might have been caught in the infinite work loops, refining your product roadmap, managing stakeholders, product communication, new features which have been on the backburner for so long and much more.
Here is my challenge for you: just take a step back (if you have been a PM for this product for some time) and do a realistic assessment to find out where your opportunity lies. Taking a step back may mean something making 2 ahead!
If you´ve just joined a new team and growing a new baby (I’m sure you´re excited about the bright future of your new product), don´t rush all in, say ´no´ to some obsolete initial meetings and get your time back to get to know your product and the situation in the company.
FOCUS matters a lot. Don’t underestimate and defend it! Before you do anything else, do a reality check and propose what your product focus for GROWTH should be in 2021. If you make it only for Q1, it still fits the bill.
I´m just going to throw some ideas your way and feel free to pick any you find relevant or ping me to expand the list. I hope these ideas provide some food for thought to change your way of work a bit, challenge other people who think that the product development team is a ´features factory´ and focus on what makes your product delightful, useful for your target audience and results in a product growth.
Acquisition
- It’s time check-in whether you are getting enough leads for a free trial and what the funnel looks like.
- What’s the first thing they see in your application?
- Is it time to review the user flow to help them get to the product value faster (AHA moment)?
In-app triggers for conversions
Do you have any UX elements and a clear mechanism which is triggered once the user hits their allowed credits OR they have reached a functionality which is only for Premium users?
Believe it or not, this is big and can help you upsell existing clients to a better $ subscription. I remember when we released a functionality only for Premium users in one of my products and once the user hit the screen, they could get a feeling of the benefit they will get (view their position vs competition, better benchmarking through data visualization and historic data comparison). We just decided to show one part of the screen, blurred the functionality behind the scenes and put a welcoming message for the user to contact their Account Manager for a quote. This experiment went really well as the user could contact their AM after experiencing a flavor of the functionality, realize the benefit and ignite some curiosity instead of being ´sold´a new functionality in the traditional sales approach.
Don’t underestimate the power of good UX, creativity and good UX writing for a better conversion.
Short and simple make a huge difference.
Short message is better, explain the benefit (what am I getting out of this) instead of the functionality, clear call-to-action, short and sweet message.
Identify new growth opportunities
When was the last time when you look at any customer interviews, reviewed quantitative and qualitative data about your users?
If you´ve not talked to customers yet and have no evidence of their problems to build your product hypotheses, you gotta leave your room right now and immerse yourself in customers´ problems. You can start with some exploratory interviews or consider a short product survey to get some insights.
Level up the game with clean UX
If you´ve identified any UX deficiencies and enhancements that you want to do, I´d recommend you to finally sit down and order them by priority. A product which is usable and clear for customers is sometimes worth much more than a new feature (no matter how your internal stakeholders insist on it on behalf of the users).
Segmentation and funnel
- How does your funnel look like?
- Do you have Freemium users?
- Do you need to convert Free trials to new subscriptions?
- What type of clients do you have (small, medium, big)?
- What types of subscriptions?
This information will serve as a refresher to base off your product decisions of solid segmentation. Are you building the wrong features, because you don’t target your most important groups? Are you sure you help the product conversions?
It’s a no brainer, but if you are struggling with obtaining new clients, make sure your product supports the conversion of free to paid customers through banners, in-app engagement triggers and a proper user onboarding.
Product Experimentation
- Have you worked on any product experimentation?
- Is it worth it to roll out one change at a time or plan a project for a bigger release?
- Do you have the setup to perform any A/B testing?
Consider your case and jot down some key existing product features you can optimize through experimentation vs rushing into building something from scratch.
Spring cleaning
I´m a big fan of minimalism : ) and every day improvement, if we improve 1% every day, it´s still a step towards becoming our better self.
Related to that I can tell you that I also fell into the trap of building, creating and running after the next release. However, less is more and the more you clean up your website or application, the better results you will reap.
Visitors don’t visit all the pages you’ve expected in their customer journey, your CX is suffering or the feature in your SaaS application gets only a small traction. Don’t suffer too much, but rather focus on resolving these problems.
If you have not been involved in the CX of the website or this feature development in your SaaS application, just get to the origin, understand the context, review, assess, collect any data, product stats, build your hypothesis before judging and decide whether to merge, purge or improve!
User research
Are you stuck with your ecommerce product roadmap? Evaluate the current state of the customer experience, the shopping cart, CMS, any ecommerce tools to work on the technology part of your roadmap. Don´t forget that conducting user research to develop and refine the product roadmap would be a gold mine!
Redesign
- Is it the right time to redesign a feature?
- Does your dashboard application have consistent charts across reports with a similar purpose?
Put consistency high on your list!
- Does your analytical dashboard provide data which speaks for itself or is it crammed with data that creates too much noise?
- Is there any report which doesn´t bring extra value due to the lack of aggregated data which shows the current performance (e.g. average ad spend for the month, total hotel bookings)?
- Does your application miss some important charts which help business decisions? Users like comparing data to draw their conclusions or viewing trends over time. If you have no charts or poor data visualization, now it´s the right time to turn your user feedback and detective observations into actions!
- Do a heuristic website analysis and find out which pages on your ecommerce website need a heavy update! Do you show consistent shipping information across the website? Is it clear what your unique value proposition as a brand is? Do you tell a story and connect with the audience? If your product needs application, do you properly explain the application step by step to avoid any user´s doubts?
- What about testimonials and user´s reviews on product pages?
You see there are certain elements which you can completely redesign, tweak or add!
Time to craft and send some product surveys
Surveys are a quick way to collect feedback from many users. Don´t miss sending surveys to your churning customers.
As a golden rule, focus on 3-5 questions and collect some basic profile data (user´s role, company, for how long they used the application).
Keep it short, sweet and simple, don’t annoy your users, try to understand their problems, which alternatives they´d consider and why (pricing, features gap, quality etc.)
Behavioral analysis
If your website or application has any tracking which allows you to perform analysis of how your users scroll down the page, the features they visit, the depth of clicks on your website, then no excuse not to use it. Now it’s the time to refine the CX, propose UX enhancements and interpret the data to simplify the user´s flow in your website or application.
- Is your key product subscription page clicks away from the homepage?
- Do users bounce quickly due to inconsistent messaging?
- Are some features too buried and not accessible from your application?
This usually happens when you have too many features which were released too quickly.
- What type of data and insights can you use to change the mindset of retention and engagement?
- Are customers active to understand user behavior and collect feedback? If not, what can you do to activate them?
As the HOTJAR guys state it, the biggest enemy is inertia. I recommend you to review this article.