I’ve been thinking since long to start writing on whatever I’ve learned in my 9 years of professional journey as a user experience designer. I’ve been debating with friends on topics related to hiring, culture, leadership, products and many more. Our recent wild topic was relating mythology with product life cycles, thanks to Devdutt Patnaik (you would have guessed it already). But I’m definitely not touching such a vague topic to represent my journey of SaaS. As I wish to show a complete product journey in this post, I’ll try to keep all episodes concise.
Sequencing of these episodes in the post is the most tricky part. I’ll rest the argument by saying it will depend on product volume, team’s strength and product’s maturity (lifecycle).
1. Starting with MVP
Let me start by quoting my most favourite author and mentor, Jason Fried, “Planning is guessing.” Absolutely true. The key issue with extra long term planning is that it starts even before you begin with anything tangible. And starting with MVP (Minimal Viable Product) gives you that breather to learn, validate and improvise quickly for the bigger picture. Decisions are time bound and so should be the planning. As we start getting clients and building teams around it, our goals also keep getting evolved. It’s the vision of leadership which binds the product to a theme. Everything must be around ‘the reason’ for which our users use our platform or services.
The key threat for MVP is its scope, especially with growing clients. This leads to frequent improvisation on planning and roadmaps which eventually faces friction from the bottom pyramid because of lack of clarity and communication among top, mid and bottom hierarchies. Growing and scaling are never simple! It’s the firm vision of leadership which keeps the product away from short term and juicy distractions which could turn costly. Confidence of leadership should eventually get translated into clarity on short term goals by every team.
Also, before we kick off a product, ask that famous question to yourself, “is your product a vitamin or painkiller?” Vitamins are just nice to have kind of product while painkillers are the must have kind. With ‘painkiller’ approach, it’s easier to scale and generate revenue.
2. Setup Screens, Controlling & Scaling
The toughest part of growing is to manage it across all pieces of product and then to visualise its impact on product experience and its engineering. It gets even more scarier if the volume (scope) of product is vast. More personas, modules and screens mean more setups. Setups which enable admins to simplify their real user’s journey. Like, setting screens for user management, reports, defining dropdown values etc.
Always good to give control to users, but it should be monitored with growth (lifecycle) and scaling of product. Otherwise it gets tougher to create a seamless design experience for users. It eventually makes harder to onboard a client, which any sales and customer satisfaction team will hate. Sometimes, when products are complex and you can’t do much to make it simpler, they might have to migrate tons of data to kick start the required services. In such scenarios, try to build the most scenic route (experience), describing every detail of their (onboarding’s) accomplishment. This strategy might help users in forgiving you for lengthy onboardings.
3. Onboarding, an art of storytelling
We must have a crystal clear picture of our customer’s intent of buying our services and also understand their business and psychological motivations which drive them away from their situation. Ask your sales team what exactly stops or worries our customers before signing up. What are the frequently asked question? How long does it take to get the customer through the sales pipeline? Before we onboard a client, we must learn to empathise with the ‘customer’s progress’. If there is any gap between our definition of progress from that of a user, then the retention rate and average CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) will be always low. People sign up for products because they’re frustrated with their current situation. These frustrations are the ‘early motivators’, try to bank on them.
The hardest lesson I learnt on ‘Onboarding’ process from my past experience, was to focus only on user’s success rather than completing product’s work flow. Plan their first win (aha moment!), and then don’t come between it. Meaning, find out what are their immediate success points and then address them immediately. Remember, product onboarding is your user’s first step towards change of their behaviour.
Quoting from my notes, which I took from some pdf long back, “Onboarding, when working well, is less like an instruction manual for weight benches and more like a personal trainer. They don’t stop once they’ve shown you how the equipment is used; they rather make sure you attain your fitness goals.”
4. Packaging & Scaling Product
Most of the companies start with strategic step by step pilot launches of various features with their targeted audiences. Later, with course of time, it becomes essential for us to complete the first draft of a platform to start with packaging of features. This packaging (segregation) might impact few work flows and hence engineering, to sell its as a pack. Packaging also includes branding and correct grouping of features or solutions. These packagings are based on customer sizing and the business needs. As you start branding all your packs with design and sales team, its crucial for engineering team also to think of scaling and connecting the dots of every pack. At times, it gets messier for teams (product, engineering & sales) to adapt with evolving business needs and priorities, especially in a young organisation. Scaling should be aligned with right priorities and strengths of your product. Of course backend and data architecture starts with all possible use-cases for smoother scaling, but product and design should be limited with all available use cases, to keep it simple.
5. Quarter Planning & Improvisation
There are things that you want to do, things you could do and then there are things that you have to do. Start from the things that you have to do, always. Once simplicity is set as part of our team culture, we can make improvements with the course of time. Sometimes, we as a team, get obsessed with logics and juicy data, but ‘the perception’ of our roadmap and product is far more important than that. Not just among clients, but within the company as well. Never get obsessed with just one plan or an idea. Remember, sometimes it’s easier to start over again than to to try to modify what exists.
It’s also very behavioural when leadership gets obsessed with detailing as we reach closer to releases. But sometimes getting stuck with details in an early state leads to disagreement and hence longer unproductive meetings, which results in delays. Somewhere, they do damage the culture as well. Getting too involved on something which is just ‘nice to have’ must be avoided in an early stage, as they aren’t worth putting everything else on hold.
Customer satisfaction shouldn’t be a role but may be a KRA of every team member involved in the product. Every contributor should be aware of regular client’s feedback with sales analytics. This inspires and helps team members to reason what are they doing and why are they doing it.
Customers and product growth shouldn’t be the only parameters to build quarter plans, but also our employee strengths and limitations. Keeping a regular check on sprints is a must. Don’t just resolve problems but try to get to the root, if it’s a pattern. Make learnings from every sprint and quarter to improvise on next plan. Most of the startups if not all, try and test lots of processes in their early days to run their daily operations. These processes are to fill the delta between the vision and roadmaps. Invest on these processes seriously as these acts only build cultures, and not just an email or note from leadership.
6. Hiring & Culture
Culture is action, not words. Never blindly try to copy the process of any successful company including your previous organisation. Because values and missions are unique. Make sure you have platform for everyone to talk, every person on top of the pyramid should be available and aware about the bottom. Mid management is the crucial link between vision of leadership and its implementation by real heroes at ground level. Acceptance and flexibility are the things which keep everyone together. Make sure your reach and awareness is across teams. Transparency and honesty always help you to build a nice relationship across your teams and clients. As I mentioned, culture is about ‘perception’ and not any fancy success metrics; So, try to build a right mood across all your teams. Rewarding right people at right time is the key to promote a culture and loyalty amongst employees.
Leadership is all about series of one on ones. Casual communications and events to discuss other interests and topics, breaks the monotony and stress. Investing time and money on core values to build a right culture, employee’s development to nurture new leaders and on customers to build your brand, is a simple strategy for a healthy growth and environment.
If your team involves third parties (vendors), then we must have a simple process to measure their progress - a clear expectation of output in a given tenure. This must be checked regularly with a clear roadmap. Do not plan for anything with vendors which is yet to be documented (clarity).
While hiring, it’s very crucial to have a good clarity on weakness and strength of your current team and also your company’s vision. We must evolve our hiring process and requirements around it. The most crucial part of hiring is culture fitness, which sometimes gets shadowed by (short term) urgency (usually a distraction) of hiring or sometime by comparing it with some glittery skilled profiles. But we must restrain from such unnecessary hirings and contracts, as this might distract company from its main goal.
7. Product Requirements
The PRD (Product Requirement Document) is your first entry gate to build a product culture among your teams. These documentations showcase your clarity and vision on each feature. The document size shouldn’t be too big for 2–3 week’s sprint. If it gets lengthier, then no one refers to it, and if it’s too short, then you’ll end up having more unplanned meetings. Try to avoid using jargons and start with a brief context, what we have built already, what are we doing and why are we doing it now. Do not try to address every information through PRDs, but rather highlight the key problems which you don’t want your team to forget. Try to break documentation in multiple episodes so that later it’s easier to refer. Use highlighters (font styling) and bullet points to help in easy recalling, when someone is referring back. Provide real data so that it gets easier to connect. Try to provide all research data in multiple sets so that it’s easier to refer when the team gets stuck. Provide scenarios for (not routine) error and what if data is not available. Provide what will be the success metric to mark this release as successful.
8. Website & Marketing
To launch a product, we need lot of buzz! Strategise how we can maximise our reach. I recently read a blog which mentioned that 70–80% of your B2B clients come through referrals. So, try to expand your reach as much as possible and try different plans until you have your own recipe. There could be lots of strategies which could help us in getting many clients, but this might vary for every business model. It may be free or fat discounted features, regular seminars, free demos, newsletters (about our new releases, testimonials & client’s case studies) or our website with a clear targeted messaging.
Website shouldn’t be considered as just an extension of marketing team but an equivalent of product. Some companies just treat their websites as a basic (shallow) product explainer with ugly CTAs and focus on just hiring and ‘about us’ page. Some companies also make a mistake of focussing more on featuresrather than explaining their core benefits. Monitor your website traffic and its CTAs, play with its placement to get best out of it. Try which text for your CTAs works better, ‘Get Started’ or ‘Register Now’. Get some data from your competitors’ strategies, what are they selling and how. How clear and attractive are we in our messaging to mark the difference and hit on customer’s immediate needs.
9. Product Engagement & Revenue
Once we get ready with roughly 70% of our product, we must start focusing on our product engagement. As we start getting traffic from sales pipeline, it’s crucial to nurture our retention rate. Every client’s exit after a successful onboarding should be investigated and discussed among teams. All rejections are not bad for your product, but each of them bring more clarity to your product’s vision and roadmap. Discuss your clients with every team member with their real names. Allocate all possible involved team members to different clients. Let them hear the real stories from real people rather than sharing some plain tables or numbers over scheduled (spamming) emails. These acts definitely bring more awareness and product culture across all teams.
To nurture your product engagement, you could start from your monthly active users to weekly and then daily. Gradually plan to turn them into an actioning users, weekly actioning users to daily actioning users. This will also depend on how frequently you really expect your users to engage with the product. Try to find out the trigger points which bring them back to your platform. Research till you don’t conclude: “what habit does your business model require?” Find out your user’s current pain points and why does it need a solution? All these inputs will help us get better engagement.
Never ask your team about what revenue or revenue per account you want to reach. Rather ask them to generate values for your customers. Always get obsessed with the problem and never the solution. Else, you might get stuck with an idea which will pull you far from the real problem and hence your customers. As we get them hooked into our platform, it eventually gets easier to generate revenue.
10. Product Pricing & Client Segmentation
Product pricing is one of the trickiest part to crack. But good news is, no one cracks it at first anyways, so you have to keep trying various pricing options. It’s not wise to talk much about features and their detailed pricing break up. But rather make customers compare it with benefits or values. Also pricing shouldn’t be based on your cost but the value you are giving to your customers. Any platform could have range of services to offer so package them based on their value to each customer type. Meaning, how mature is your targeted market and what size of customers (small, medium or big) are you targeting. In a mature market, its simpler to crack your competitive price range and then build up from there. In a young market, it’s wise to start with humble pricing plans and then grow gradually with your brand size and added values. Sometimes, trying with A/B testings with different mix of client size and product benefits also provides you a good insight for packaging a better set with optimum pricing.
While designing a pricing page, most of the platforms provide 3+ packages. So, it’s easier for customer to fall for one. In this approach, usually the highest pack becomes your anchor pricing point so that the other prices seem more reasonable. It’s also recommended to have clear CTAs, FAQs and taking help of tools like Intercom.
Conclusion: I might be limited with my own experience and readings but the journey is still on. I’ll try to learn more and make my posts more fun next time with some real examples. Thanks for reading such a long post. Cheers! :)