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Opportunity Solution Trees for Product Teams

Airwallex is a newly-minted unicorn based in Australia operating at the intersection of FX and business expense management.

This snippet is a preview of an upcoming fireside in a few weeks with Richard Jeremiah who is Product Director for the SME Platform.

Airwallex are an interesting play in that they potentially compete with Brex, Transferwise and Stripe. No lack of ambition here ???????? and its bound to be a great discussion – particularly because Richard also held senior Product roles at Seek and Joro.

Richard will be talking about learnings from using Teresa Tores’ Continuous Discovery Method and how that wires together with OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), JTBD (Jobs to be Done) and Opportunity Solution Trees.

I wasn’t familiar with Teresa’s work, so I found this post which covers real-life examples of a company getting started with Opportunity Solution Trees – I look forward to digging more into this with Richard.

The key takeway for me in this preview is that this approach stops a Product Team from focussing too narrowly on ONE solution to the challenge (and racing off and implementing), but gives you a breadth-first perspective of potential solution candidates. The last quote captures the value of Opportunity Solution Trees (etc) as a discipline for Product Teams – its a ripper!

“Shift from being a feature factory to a problem solving product team”

Sign up for the blog on the right if you want to get notified about this session.

September 3, 2020
Atlassian commits on guides

It won’t surprise you that Atlassian is data-driven and the data from their guides is tracked along with other app usage analytics.

A few years back we started to see Atlassian introduce a few tips; the craft and sophistication has increased over time – here is a fresh example.

Recently Confluence got a make-over and they do a nice job of introducing the change.

What’s cool about the use of graphics here is:

1. that they abstract away everything you don’t need to see (other sidebar menu options, body text) so that you don’t get distracted.

2. Super-clear call-to-action. Its clear that the Confluence team want to get most users across onto the new navigation.

3. “Learn more” is present but not the highest priority – they allow your to take the guide if you are unsure as there is an element of unknown for the user.

Whats more controversial is that they don’t show the guide before the prompt – this is also likely a decision that comes from analytics showing than many people WILL jump to the new navigation if you show it upfront.

The “Learn more” is a fairly normal guide in a carousel form. Again the intelligent use of graphics use the main characteristics of the screen as signpost the user can recognise.

Good elements of a carousel:

1. Clear title/description.

2. Back/Next arrow buttons

3. “Next” button is highlighted and strongest as the intention for the product team to get the user through the process.

3. “Dismiss” is important as an escape route. Could also be a “X” button at top right.

4. Progress indicator “…” lets the user understand how much time they’ve invested and how much time left. This type of contextual orientation is essential to avoid abandonment.

5. The cutout on “Recent” is a little inconsistent with the previous “Home” step. However, you can really get the focus with the cutout. At Contextual we love cutouts as it really allows the point to standout and user remains undistracted. The cutout is even more important when you are doing contextual guides pointing at things ACTUALLY on the screen.

In summary, Atlassian have opted for a takeover carousel dominating the whole user experience rather than point at specific screen elements. It would be great to understand why – maybe it just controls the experience more.

So it’s not really a “Guide” but its a great intro to the new navigation in confluence.

The intelligent use of abstracted graphics is beautiful and informative – but it does require you having an artist on staff – not a luxury many teams have. Sure you have a designer but they may not have the skill, tools or time to do with the same quality. So using guides maybe a better approach.

August 4, 2020
New: Guides, FAQs, Digital Adoption
We had big releases this month expanding guidance on Web and Mobile Apps.

Backed by our existing targeting engine and analytics we help you get the right guides to your users at the right-time.

Digital Adoption Platform

Contextual has mostly been used by Product Teams to help onboard new customers and understand the Web and Mobile Apps.

Contextual Digital Adoption lets your colleagues make guide/tips/videos each other on the SaaS you use. e.g Using your CRM in a particular way? Then Onboard new sales with a Guide. Want your engineers to do Jira or Github tasks based on your process? Drop in tooltips that might even show a video.

You don’t need to to write code or ask IT to install, just install our browser extension.

Here is an explainer video:

https://vimeo.com/436316149

Contextual Digital Adoption can work with many popular SaaS Apps like Salesforce, Jira, Workday, even explain Xero to a baffled new accounts-team-member! ????‍♂️

In this example, you can see how easy it is to add a guide over the top of Salesforce to explain what should be entered when adding a new “Opportunity”.

https://vimeo.com/440574118

To find out more, checkout the product page.

FAQ and Lists

We are super-excited to give our customers ability to have a floating widget and popup FAQ List on their App (web or mobile) that allows users to:
- play (or replay Guides or Videos)
- jump out to existing long form help content
- ask for feedback
So now, Apps can have a unique FAQ list per page or a general one site-wide. You can still target different FAQs to different users (job roles or stages of a user’s journey)

Guides and Experiments

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Until now we used the term “Experiments” for any tip, tour, popup, video, feedback.

This was because we could back any element with the analytics of what happened with your users. On some plans we also let you do A/B experiments.

Problem was: most people just want to do tips, tours. So we admitted that a better overall term is “Guides”.

So now is a good time to get started with Guides:
- for your own Apps
- or for the SaaS apps that your team uses.
To try it out, head to our Dashboard or just book a screenshare to learn more.
July 28, 2020
Feature (Re)Discovery – Google Meet example

Amidst so much suffering, angst and business collapse caused by COVID-19 there has been some companies that have grown incredibly. Back in early March, I commented on Zoom’s breakout success.

Looking back now in June, Zoom has leapt from upstart B2B App to massive consumer awareness.

Behemoths like Google and Microsoft needed to respond – Google Meet gets a relaunch. Microsoft Teams loosened usage limits.

We’ve started to see Google aggressively using their other properties (Gmail) to (re)announce Google Meet as a Feature Re-Discovery inside calendar appointment.

These are the kind of announcements that Contextual lets you launch from within your own Apps.

With Contextual, the “Learn more” link could send a user to another step in a guide or launch a video to do a deep-dive.

This popup can be placed in the flow of creating an appointment – a perfect example of “Product-led growth” by the product teams at Google.

Kudos to Google using Tips and Popups to remind the user of a feature they could use rather than default to Zoom!

Update: 26 June 2020

I stumbled across a post from Explodingtopics that shows Google Meet is experiencing sustained attention “by Google Search Volume”.

That may not be entirely unbiased but is interesting to see.

The data shows search volume for both Zoom and Google Meet is exploding.
Which suggests: Google Meet’s search volume has been climbing WAY faster. Zoom’s has plateaued a bit and is even declining at the moment.

Its possible Google’s Feature (Re-) Discovery discussed in this post – by putting overlays in other Apps may be strengthening brand awareness.

June 22, 2020
New Feature: Individual User Sessions and clicks

For some time, Contextual has had the ability to track pages visited and (on some plans) clicks.

We’ve also allowed Product Teams to see a user’s targeting with Tips, Tours, Tooltips and Popups. We’ve taken this one step further and allow you to see a users sessions and what they click on within a specific session – you can also see WHEN they interact with the guide content you’ve targeted for them.

Above you can see the user “William Gibson” in Session 1, visited particular screens and was presented with a Carousel – their engagement was to interact “accepted” rather than dismiss it.

Dashboard user can click into any user and like a CRM can see each individual’s:

a) their device (phone, tablet, iPad, web browser)

b) how many sessions, when they installed, last user.

c) experiments and how the user engaged

d) select from a drop-down of sessions (as seen above)

e) Custom Tags (attributes) to target, personalize, segment or add to an audience. For example, a tag called JobRole could be synced with your App to be able to target “Project Managers” or “Sales Team” for specific guides.

These two examples illustrate how you can drill down to any user and see which guides they’ve seen and how they responded. The first user “Rejected” and “Touch Out”, the second user “Accepted” the guides.

This is a per user version of the Guide Analytics that visible when tracking the performance of any content you have created.

June 17, 2020