Category posts
Product
Oleg Ya

For a thoughtful approach to product growth and development, it’s critical to know the tasks and contexts that create the jobs-to-be-done (JTBDs) handled by your product.
(more…)Editorial

We began this series with how product habits get made and why the neurotransmitter dopamine is so important for this process. Then we looked at the Hook Model, which Nir Eyal created to explain habit formation. Here in our concluding article, we will look at which products by definition cannot be habit-forming, what user habits can be confused with, and alternative ways to encourage users to interact with a product more often.
(more…)Oleg Ya

Activation refers to more than just onboarding and the initial in-product experience. For most products, activation starts long before. It’s important to prime potential users in advance, especially for products with extended time to value or a long sales cycle.
(more…)Editorial

Regular use of a product can become a habit. In the previous article we zoomed in on dopamine’s role in this process. This time we will look at a way of thinking about habit formation called the Hook Model, proposed by Nir Eyal.
(more…)Oleg Ya

Teams usually design onboarding from the start of the funnel: acquisition channels, followed by a landing page, main features, and then the paid version. But this can lead to a clumsy and ineffective activation flow. Users get lost, conversions stay low, and the unit economics fail to turn positive.
In this article, Ilia Krasinskii and Oleg Ya will share the story of a real product that had this problem, which was solved by designing activation in reverse: by starting with added value and only then moving toward acquisition channels.
(more…)Editorial

User habits can have a big impact on a product’s long-term success. We will kick off our discussion of habits with how people develop them and the ways in which popular products nudge users to keep coming back.
(more…)Oleg Ya

Making smart activation decisions is much easier when you have a map of the customer journey from first encounter to the “aha moment”.
Because most teams don’t have this kind of Customer Journey Map, they have a limited understanding of how their product’s value is felt. Therefore, they lose the ability to shape this process in a thoughtful way.
This article will teach you to build a Customer Journey Map from first encounter to an “aha moment” reflecting the product’s value, and show why CJMs give a better way to think about the activation process.
(more…)Oleg Ya

Session analysis is a powerful method for improving the activation process. It allows looking at the product from the perspective of a specific user and observing their journey inside it, from the moment they open it for the first time to when they recognize the product’s value and convert.
Here we will discuss how to use session analysis for designing activation and examine several case studies involving real products.
(more…)Oleg Ya

In the preceding article we considered the main building blocks for activating users at the product level. But for complex products with a long time to value, working on activation only at the product level probably won’t be enough. Many users will need help overcoming obstacles before they can experience value.
One solution to these activation obstacles is people. We’ll be discussing why, when, and how adding people can help to enable “aha moments” and get better activation rates.
(more…)Oleg Ya

Once a product team has identified an “aha moment” and the conditions necessary for it, it’s time to think about the user’s journey to value. In this article we zero in on the building blocks that are available on the product level to teams as they design the activation process.
(more…)
Other content series
that you might find useful
- Addressing user pain points vs solving user problems better
- Product manager skills: evolution of a PM role and its transformation
- Product metrics, growth metrics, and added value metrics
- Customer retention levers: task frequency and added value
- How to measure the added value of a product
- Should a product be 10 times better to achieve product/market fit?
- Product/market fit can be weak or strong and can change over time
- Two types of product work: creating value and delivering value
- What is the difference between growth product manager, marketing manager, and core PM
- When user activation matters and you should focus on it
- User activation is one of the key levers for product growth
- The dos and don’ts of measuring user activation
- How “aha moment” and the path to it change depending on the use case
- How to find “aha moment”: a qualitative plus quantitative approach
- How to determine the conditions necessary for the “aha moment”
- Time to value: an important lever for user activation growth
- How time to value and product complexity shape user activation
- Product-level building blocks for designing activation
- When and why to add people to the user activation process
- Session analysis: an important tool for designing activation
- CJM: from first encounter to the “aha moment”
- Designing activation in reverse: value first, acquisition channels last
- User activation starts long before sign-up
- Value windows: finding when users are ready to benefit from your product
- Why objective vs. perceived product value matters for activation
- Testing user activation fit for diverse use cases
- When to invest in optimizing user onboarding and activation
- Optimize user activation by reducing friction and strengthening motivation
- Reducing friction, strengthening user motivation: onboarding scenarios and solutions
- How to improve user activation by obtaining and leveraging additional user data
- Tax/benefit framework for analyzing user activation
- How well do you articulate value during user activation? Check with the value communication framework
- How product teams get the “aha moment” wrong
- Slack vs Teams vs Workplace: the intriguing dynamics of the work messenger market
- How the “Slack vs Microsoft Teams” race evolves as the world switches to remote work
- How Revolut Trading was built. The importance of industry expertise and the balance of conservative and new approaches
- The values and principles of Wise. Key ideas from the Breakout Growth Podcast by Sean Ellis
- How to calculate customer Lifetime Value. The do’s and don’ts of LTV calculation
- How to calculate unit economics for your business
- Guide to ARPU: formula, calculation example, LTV vs ARPU
- Experiments where you make your product worse – the most underrated product manager tool
- Why your A/B tests take longer than they should
- Peeking problem – the fatal mistake in A/B testing and experimentation
- Mistakes in A/B testing: guide to failing the right way
- Designing product experiments: template and examples
- To reduce your product’s churn rate, first find out why users stay
- What is product/market fit and how to measure PMF
- How engagement metrics can be misleading
- How to forecast key product metrics through cohort analysis
- Cohort analysis. Product metrics vs growth metrics
- Correlation and causation: how to tell the difference and why it matters for products
- How product habits are formed and what dopamine has to do with it
- Hook Model: encouraging a product habit to improve retention
- Not every product is habit-forming, but all products can have loyal users
- How to design and run JTBD research interviews: guide and templates
- How to move from marketing to product management?
- Key data skills for product managers: experienced PMs sharing their thoughts
- Data mistakes to know and avoid as a product manager
- Data cherry-picking to support your hypothesis. What is it? Why is it bad?
- How can PMs encourage more teammates to use data?
- Metrics to focus on before and after product/market fit. How to better understand your product at different stages?
- How to establish effective collaboration between product managers and data analysts
- How to move from engineering to product management?
- Losing sight of real users and their needs behind the metrics. How can product teams avoid this?
- Quantitative vs qualitative data: what is the difference and when should you use one instead of the other
- Pros and cons of a data-driven culture
- Data-driven, data-informed, and data-inspired product decisions. What are the differences and when should you use each one?
- Using data to understand competitive and market dynamics
- Moving from a startup to an enterprise as a product manager
- The downsides of a data-driven culture
- Using data for strategic decisions
- How to increase the effectiveness of your product analysts
- Why every team member should know the key product metrics
- How to move from marketing to product management?
- Key data skills for product managers: experienced PMs sharing their thoughts
- Product manager skills: evolution of a PM role and its transformation
- What is the difference between growth product manager, marketing manager, and core PM
- How to move from engineering to product management?
- Product growth, reinvented: what growth hacking is (and isn’t)
- Moving from a startup to an enterprise as a product manager
- Product manager interview: real questions plus guide for employers and candidates
- Rolling retention, Day N retention, and the many facets of the retention metric
- Long-term retention—the foundation of sustainable product growth
- Errors in calculating ROI and unit economics. Impact of attribution models and incrementality on the ROI calculation of marketing channels
- Traffic attribution models. Why attribution models need to change along with growth channels, product, business objective and external environment