2-minute Product Marketing Insights: July 2023 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: July 6, 2023 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Elevate your documentation to sell better, build trust with a technical audience, and lead them to their 'aha moment' faster.
Twilio's quick start guides allow developers to ramp up their product familiarity without talking to customer-facing people. Atlassian calls out documentation as a feature to close deals. Similarly, Stripe's world-class documentation is a direct extension of its product quality.
[2] Focus more on the hypothesis than the impact of your A/B test when you're an early-stage company.
The growth team at Codecademy started with zero assumptions while initially setting up their A/B testing program, which led to the team wasting valuable time figuring out how best to measure the impact of a pricing page.
[3] Evolve your product, message, and channels to avoid stagnating in the product-market-fit (PMF) phase and achieve mainstream scale.
Growth usually hits a wall for companies after they saturate their early adopters. Tesla's evolution from Roadster to the Model S, Beyond Meat's messaging switch to taste from sustainability, and Airbnb's push beyond Craiglist for customer acquisition show strategies to blow past the PMF phase.
[4] Link your pricing to the customer outcomes you create while offering the flexibility for every customer to set their spending limits.
Disco enables independent brands to partner with each other to land new shoppers. They used to rely on a CPM basis to price their solution but saw more upside (5-10X) by letting customers pay only when they won shoppers at their set budgets.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] The design of new products boils down to one of these two strategies - (i) find what causes pain and try to eliminate it, or (ii) reinforce what we do with a new object so that it becomes second nature.
[2] The concept of universal design - "...by designing with people with disabilities in mind—designing so that they can have universal access—we can create better products for everyone else."
[3] As gadgets around us get smarter, the next generation of design will focus more on getting those gadgets to better model 'human-to-human relationships' instead of 'human-to-thing interactions.' "When technology gets laced into the fabric of everything, we demand that those technologies hew closer to our social mores and the expectations of polite society."
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] You Are Not an AI Product Manager: A Reality Check and Soul-Search in the AI Frontier
[2] Companies Build “Capabilities” Before They Build “Moats”
[3] Reflexivity in Qualitative Research: Why You’ll Never Be An Objective Observer
[4] The B2C2B osmosis fueling AI's Cambrian moment
[5] From Numbers to Nuggets: How Sacra Transforms Data Into Research Worth Reading
Part 2 Release Date: July 20, 2023 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Get your users, in some fashion, to offer feedback on your AI-powered features to build long-term competitive advantage.
Abridge's AI allows doctors to summarize their conversations with patients and removes clerical work behind coding, billing, and risk assessments. To build a competitive advantage, the consumer version of the product lets patients share feedback on the same summaries, thereby training the company's models better.
[2] Rely on Net Dollar Retention (NDR) as a north star metric to grade your customer outcomes relevant to growth and retention.
Portage uses NDR to direct every team member to think about their inputs - ex: product adoption, account planning, relationship management, etc. - that are key to growth and retention. Stripe chooses NDR since the metric uses both churn and expansion to tell the complete story.
[3] Tie your compensation plans to how well leads convert (for TOFU) and net revenue, i.e., gross minus churn (for BOFU).
ICONIQ's portfolio of companies prioritizes quality over quantity for both SDRs and AEs. For SDRs, comp plans link to lead conversions instead of weekly call and email volumes. Similarly, AEs must also focus on avoiding churn as they rely on net revenue.
[4] Experiment with human-led onboarding to show value to your early users and build brand rapport.
Superhuman would use 30-min in-person or video sessions to ensure its early users saw full value in the product while uncovering bugs and taking new feature requests. As an add-on, the human interaction made getting users to pay for a premium product easy.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“Product-Led Onboarding: How to Turn New Users Into Lifelong Customers” by Ramli John
[1] Think of user onboarding as an interview process. A user is hiring your product to get a specific job done. It helps to really understand the job you’re being interviewed for.
[2] Evaluate every onboarding step on 3 components - (i) necessity: remove steps that delay a user's first productive task, (ii) ease: reorganize steps from easy to hard, (iii) simplicity: wherever possible, show fewer options and shorter steps in the process.
[3] A PQL should capture a new user's engagement within a product, a mix of (i) activation - % items completed on the road to the first productive task and (ii) engagement - frequency of use of the core product features.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Prototyping the path: how Slack builds ‘product’ with customer love (Config 2023)
[2] From LaLa Land to The Matrix: Can AI replace product management?
[3] Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is Betting Everything on AI
[4] ‘I can’t make products just for 41-year-old tech founders’: Airbnb CEO is taking it back to the basics
[5] How to Blow Up a Timeline (Eugene Wei)
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