Category posts
Product

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.