Build Better Products. Laura Klein
But only 5% of those people get beyond that stage. Then, of the people who do learn a bit about the product, the product is losing another 20%. And so on, losing more people at each step.
FIGURE 1.3 People fall out of the User Lifecycle Funnel at every step.
At the end of it, this product has nine real, retained customers. Now, sure those are going to be your best customers ever, but you’re still paying to get your message in front of 1,000 people and only ending up with nine of them, so unless you’re selling something really expensive, you’re going to want to increase the number of people who make it through the funnel.
Some of you who are paying attention are probably saying to yourself, “But I have different types of users! And they interact with my product very differently.” It’s an excellent point, and I’m glad you brought it up.
If you have more than one type of user, your product will have more than one User Lifecycle Funnel. We’ll discuss how to determine exactly who your users are in later chapters, but many of you will have products that have, for example, a customer who buys the product and users who use it. Those may not be the same person.
Enterprise products almost always have this issue—the customers are company CIOs or VPs who write checks while the users might be individual contributors or managers. Marketplaces have both buyers and sellers, each of whom interacts with the product very differently and has a different User Lifecycle Funnel.
When you create a Facebook account to stay in touch with your friends, you have a different User Lifecycle Funnel than you would if you were a business using Facebook to run ads. You’ll eventually want to identify all the different types of users of your product and create measurable User Lifecycle Funnels for each of them. That can come later.
The reason that you need to create at least one of them is to understand where your biggest business problems exist. You see, I call this model a User Lifecycle Funnel, but in reality it’s more of a sieve. With funnels, everything you pour in the top comes out the bottom. That’s what funnels do. It’s their job. This is a terrible funnel. Your job is to visualize your funnel so that you can make it less sieve-like.
EXERCISE
Defining Your User Lifecycle Funnel
Every product has a User Lifecycle Funnel whether it’s being measured or not. There are stages that people have to go through. You just need to understand what they are so that you can measure them effectively.
This is a short exercise, and running it with everybody on the team—designers, product managers, engineers, marketers, finance, whoever is a stakeholder—can help you make sure that everybody understands where your product is losing users.
RUN THE EXERCISE: USER LIFECYCLE FUNNEL
TIME TO RUN
1 hour
MATERIALS NEEDED
Sticky notes, Sharpies, paper, whiteboard, list of questions
PEOPLE INVOLVED
Product managers, designers, researchers, engineers, stakeholders
EXERCISE GOAL
Understand the stages a user encounters while going from visitor to lifelong customer.
Tell your team which user they will be creating the User Lifecycle Funnel for. If you need help choosing, there’s more information about understanding who your users are in the next few chapters. For now, you need to pick one single user for everybody to work on. Maybe it’s an end user. Maybe it’s the buyer. If you have a simple mobile app that only really has one type of user, then it will be easy. If you work at someplace like Salesforce, you’ve got a choice to make.
Give everybody a stack of sticky notes and something to write with. You’re going to ask each person several questions and show them some sample answers for a product that isn’t your own. When you ask a question, you’re going to give them three minutes to write as many answers to that question as they possibly can. Each answer should go on its own sticky note.
Each sticky note should be labeled in the bottom-right corner with the question number it answers (see Figure 1.4).
FIGURE 1.4 Label the answers with the appropriate question number.
Participants should not talk to one another during the writing time. Talking comes later.
STEP 1: Ask the Questions
You will notice that all of the questions are in the future tense. That does not mean you get a pass on this exercise if you already have a product. You can easily do this exercise with a real product with millions of users. Just change the wording to the present tense: “How do you” rather than “How will you.”
If you’re planning on releasing a big new feature or a new version of your product, you can also run this exercise on individual features, rather than on entire products.
QUESTION 1: How will you get people to hear about your product or service?
This first question is something that a lot of people struggle with, but they shouldn’t. What you’re asking here is, “Where do people who use my product spend time at the moment in their lives when they might be interested in learning about a new product like this?”
Companies tend to default to easy things like advertising on Google or Facebook, but this is worth thinking about a bit, since different types of products get recommended or discovered in very different places.
Facebook might be a great place to advertise certain products, but is it right for you if you’re selling a new medical implant to surgeons? Or if you’re selling a Software as a Service product to Chief Marketing Officers? Probably not.
Typical answers to this question could be:
• Specific blogs or forums where people talk about the problems your product solves
• Physical spaces like gyms or doctors’ offices
• Conferences where professionals in your space gather
• Specialty publications for people in a particular industry
QUESTION 2: How will you help people learn enough about your product and service to know they want to purchase or use it?
When you think about this question, you’re really asking yourself how hard your value proposition is to understand. Some products are harder to get than others.
If you’re not making toothpaste or video games or something in a pretty clear category, you might need a different sort of messaging and outreach in order for people to understand what you’re selling. If you’re solving a problem people didn’t know they had, you’re going to have to do more education than if you’re solving a well-understood problem.
Typical