Product Teardown - Duolingo Onboarding
Today we run through DuoLingo's onboarding Flow. We highlight a few key choices that really impact user friction and suggest how to get around. Also you get to see me try and understand French...
Product Teardown - Tesco ClubCard
Ever got frustrated with the Tesco App? Maybe you got to checkout and you couldn’t find your ClubCard? Today we take apart the Tesco App and work out how we can make it better!
5 Quick Product Tips if You Haven’t Found Market Fit Yet
This is the first in a series of blogs on something I'm super passionate about which is early-stage product management or how to manage products when you hunt for Market fit. If you’re a founder or involved in an early-stage company this is probably for you. You may have had a good idea but it’s all in Powerpoint or you've started to build but really it’s untested and you can’t get anyone to use it. In both instances you’re kind of wondering how do I get this off the ground.
The reason for this series is that there isn't actually that much content out there on this. There's a lot of stuff at Scale-Up stage around measurements and frameworks and all the rest of it but a lot of that stuff doesn't actually translate down when you haven't even got your first customer yet or you've got five users and they all do completely different things! I thought I'd throw together these quick tips just as a taster. If video is more your thing you can check it out here :)
What Even is Product Management In an Early Stage Company?
The first question really is what do we mean by product management without product market fit? Well if you haven’t found market fit you probably don’t have a well-defined offering. This means that your product likely isn’t cookie cutter. You may have no users. You may have users that all use it completely differently and all want different things. You may find it kind of works for some things but doesn't for others. The job of a product owner and product management and this stage is to listen and observe and find the common thread that will drive the product towards market fit. By listening to market signals and translating this into features that solve your users problem you will guide and shepherd the company down the route that will turn you into hopefully a unicorn but at least a profitable company with users who tell the world how great your product is!
1. Don’t Build in a Vacuum
This first tip is super important, the biggest mistake that I see most people making, and probably why most early stage companies fail - don’t build without feedback! Often new companies start like this. You have a good idea, you've worked in a job or you've seen an opportunity, and you start building. You go away and build that thing and you go into dark mode for three months or a year or three years and then you come out and show it to the world. Unfortunately, often no one cares. There's a reason for this and the reason is you haven't talked to anyone along that journey! The best thing you can do is talk to and show what you're doing to as many people as possible. Bonus points if they’re actually potential users. Show a presentation, mock-up designs in Figma, wireframe it all! You can take everyone from prospective users to your mum through it so the you feedback that you can fold back in. If you then have a prototype get that prototype out and used as quickly as possible. Jump on calls alongside your customer support or your sales team. As a product owner you are never going to get better insight into what you should be building what you should be roadmapping than if you actually talk to users!
2. Don’t Rely on Measurement
Strongly coupled to Tip 1 is don't rely on measurement over actually talking to users. You may think “"Okay I don't have to talk to people, I can measure. We've got MixPanel and AppCues and doing NPS. Aren't we great!” Unfortunately, measurement doesn't really work at this stage and the reason it doesn't work is because measurement requires the law of large numbers. Success at early-stage is largely stochastic. You make one big sale or lose one client and it dramatically changes the health of the basis. If you've got five users who are doing slightly different things there may be trends but they may not be representative of anything at all and they certainly won't be representative of the market that you're trying to get to. You need to talk to your users and lay that against your understanding of the wider market. You definitely need to talk to people. Sorry…
3. Set Achievable Goals
How I like measurement at really early stage companies is just to set achievable goals. What that means is taking down what you see as big a big overall strategic result that the company wants to achieve and breaking it down into achievable steps. Say we need to get to two Million ARR to raise a Series A (ikr…). To get to two million ARR we need 200 users. Sounds great! Well we currently have zero paid users and five trials and no one's coming back to the site. So how am I going to get to that Series A? We break it down! My first goal is to get to one user. My second goal is to get someone to pay. My third is to get someone to renew. Just like that we have a series of stepping stones that get’s us towards where we want to be. It also gives you a series of milestones to celebrate which is great for company health in general!
4. Velocity is Everything
If you're not from a technology background this may not be super obvious but velocity (and really what I mean by this is development and product velocity) is everything at this stage. It defines how quickly you can get changes into your product. It lets you pivot. It lets you get customer feedback rapidly into the system which in turn builds engagement and builds trust. Really it just makes everything in life easier and if like me you don't really come from a hard development background you're probably massively underestimate the importance. So if you haven’t already go and talk to your developers about ops hygiene, release cycles and pipelines. Learn how easy it is for developers to switch in and out of projects and how hard it is to change legacy code. Part of your job as a product owner at this stage really should just be to focus on holding your Tech Team to account. You need to hold them to account on how they're writing code and how easily that code can be updated and changed. It’s really really important that you can iterate quickly because otherwise you just can't get the feedback you need into the system quickly enough. If you can’t you're going to be burning through runway and may run out of fuel before you can get to that next round!
5. Don’t Build Toys
At early stage companies the only thing that really matters is how well the product solves a problem for your ideal customer. Everything else is superfluous and likely a distraction. When prioritising work it’s super important to keep this in mind. Are you building something because it’s useful or because you think it’s cool? Does the new feature improve a users experience? If not you’re likely building a toy. Unfortunately, at this stage of business resources are zero sum and any effort spent takes away from somewhere else. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t build cool things. Just that you should build cool things your users care about! Honestly, there isn’t really anything cooler than people using your product.