The Commonwealth Bank of Australia is* the 71st most powerful company and 43rd largest bank in the world.
Their mobile app has won many design prizes and they have huge resources to pour into it. This post looks at some excellent Feature Discovery, Feature Onboarding they use in parts of the App.
If you’ve read other posts, you know we are skeptical of having a carousel at the start of the App. Simply put it is a barrier to the user’s Job-to-be-done.
However, we’ve always thought its an excellent way to explain concepts and key points about a subset of the Apps features. Commbank does a great job here.
Cardless Cash Example
Using the App, a bank customer can walk up to an ATM machine with a special one-time PIN and get cash out, the use-cases for this are:
convenience
not getting mugged at the ATM of your wallet
you can send the code to a family member or friend and they can access that
you’ve lost your card etc.
When banks started rolling out this capability millions were spent on implementation and then they found nobody was using it.
This is an extreme case of what many Product Manager experience:
the team works hard on a feature
they release it into the product
crickets and tumbleweeds.
So next the Product Manager walks over to marketing and asks for an email to be sent out announcing this fabulous new feature. So they wait a week or two and the email is sent. Crickets and tumbleweeds.
Here is how Commbank get users familiar with Cardless Cash.
So the interesting thing here is that Commbank:
doesn’t show this when I open the app, only when I go to that part of the App for the first time.
They tell me about the benefits and the journey to get the cash. They don’t tell me how to use the UI.
They may still later use tips to help me with using this part of the App but they don’t overwhelm me now.
It’s a clean introduction that helps people over the barrier of doing something new and different.
Portfolio example
Portfolio is a cool tool that allows a bank customer to record other assets. Clearly Commbank wants people to use that feature and the Portfolio tab is BIG and Obvious. The curious user can’t help but touch that tab.
The first time on Portfolio, the user sees this 3 step carousel that explains the top-level-benefits.
It is weird the design is different to the Cardless Cash carousel – even the CTA button is different. But the design is sophisticated and resonates well for a user that has more assets.
In summary, these deep features are not thrown in the user’s face first-time, when they become curious they are given a very human introduction – I think its quite nice and is a “just-in-time” approach.
Your company may not be the 71st most powerful organization in the world, but you can achieve these types of carousels and target to specific personas, users or first time a user enters a part of your application – you can do this with Contextual and once the SDKs are integrated you don’t need to bug your developers to implement – these carousels are code-free!
** with current COVID-19 creating havoc on financial markets, their rank may be up or down!
Are you looking to get more users to love your mobile and web apps? Click on the buttons below to get your 14 day free trial or contact us for a demo!
You’ve already been flooded with many company statements about the current pandemic conditions – so we’ll keep this simple.
First and foremost, we wish everyone, their teams and their families the best possible outcome. We are quickly learning that no precaution is too conservative – so take care!
During this crisis our commitment to you is to help you onboard and guide users without gouging your pockets – we remain significantly more affordable than others.
Yes we are prudent with our expenditure – we all must be:
1. we are not burning big cash to market (shout about) ourselves.
2. we won’t irresponsibly grow our team without sustainable revenues from customers.
3. we see plenty of opportunities to improve our product features and quality.
Sorry – no fancy promotions – just a solid team with a solid product – here to help you and your users.
In another snippet from the interview with Matt from Bonjoro we discuss why “Jobs to be done” (JTBD) is so important to them.
Bonjoro have a large inbound funnel of different triallers types – because their platform is horizontally applicable. However, they are optimizing for SaaS customers in Sales and Customer Service use-cases – they are high value and high conversion probability. He discusses the conundrum here.
It seems brutal but if Bonjoro try to craft onboarding for all users they will lose their valuable SaaS customers by diluting the flow.
JTBD works, Personas don’t
Conversely Bonjoro don’t find “personas” as terribly useful. A persona is great in marketing because you can speak to their needs – higher up the funnel.
When it comes to Onboarding and Activation however, the user’s goals or “Jobs to be done” need to be displayed and aligned with the product goals.
The perfect example of this is Bonjoro have a playbook of “recipes” for customers – this is effectively a cookbook of “Jobs to be done” for different customers. Just like Monday, these recipes are then baked into the product – they allow a user to get a Job Done quickly because they already learned about it in the marketing. “Show me, don’t tell me”.
Bonjoro is about customer care – at scale
Product-led or Brand-led?
I quizzed Matt on Product-led and his response was surprisingly insightful – for him its more about “Brand”.
“Brand-led” is more his focus rather than Product-led because Bonjoro’s strong Design and UX DNA means they do “Product-led” things by default.
I was shocked to hear him assert that the Bonjoro brand is of equivalent value to the actual functionality of the product. Matt says that “Brand” is more important than startups realize.
His view seems to be working, they hold a leadership positon in the “Personalization at scale” space? Their NPS is a fabulous 71.
They are well respected, this is a very Product-led outcome but also their Brand is very, very fun, caring and recognizable.
Stop “growth-hacking”
Another cracker quote from the conversation was Matt’s plea to Stop “growth hacking”.
He thinks most people arn’t skilled enough to do it, so ultimately get distracted by it.
Bonjoro instead have a clear mission of personalizing and caring for customer. Matt says: “This has been lost, and it always used to be a way to compete and it’s got harder to compete “
Take a listen to this and other posts with Matt, its informative and enjoyable.
Conversation Transcript
Matthew from Bonjoro 0:02 longer form content. And so like, kind of white papers, but ones that you can take and “implant”.
Matthew from Bonjoro 0:09 So we’ve done this whole piece on our “Video files playbook” where we say: “use video, if you’re e-commerce or fashion, do this”, you know, “if you’re if you’re this, do this”. Yeah.
Matthew from Bonjoro 0:20 That has worked extremely well for us. And this goes back to a bit of the part around educating the market as well as trying to sell to it. Education has really worked well for us, and it has to be how we play out…..It’s still early days.
David Jones 0:36 Does that does that really worked because it’s a recipe based approach for those different sectors? Did you give them recipes?
Matthew from Bonjoro 0:43 Yeah, recipes are awesome.
David Jones 0:45 And the recipes are reflected in the product as well, too.
Matthew from Bonjoro 0:48 Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
David Jones 0:54 Has “Jobs to be done” been a recurring thing for you. It’s something that we refer to all the time internally. So, you know, is that a mainstay of how you view things?
Matthew from Bonjoro 1:07 Yeah, I think one of the hardest things is trying to get the whole team across (JTBD), the deep understanding of what “jobs to be done” is. It’s obviously way, way easier. It’s a way easier to categorize customers, by channel by industry by job title.
David Jones 1:21 Persona. The HubSpot kind of way: “this is, this is Mary, she’s 28. She’s a grad, she’s got a mortgage”. And, she wants to she wants to get somebody over the line because her KPIs are based around signups or “conversion to pay”. Do you still use that already? Or do you focus more on the job rather than the persona?
Matthew from Bonjoro 1:47 So the answer is we have to focus on “jobs to be done”, because the persona doesn’t work for us. So I think again, given the broad range where we operate, you know, and SaaS are one of our best customer bases but it’s still 20% of 100%. We have kind of like a lot of users who are not in that area. So but interestingly, you see more and more SMEs, poaching things from the SaaS mindset.
Matthew from Bonjoro 2:17 You see more e-commerce approach things from a SaaS mindset. So the mindset is more important than the company and the industry and potentially their business model. Everyone’s got leads coming in, are they approaching and going, what how many do we convert? What’s the lifetime value? What’s ARPU? What’s the CAC? This attitude is what works for us. So “what are the jobs that fulfill those points”?
Matthew from Bonjoro 2:39 Personas, we struggle with, and, you know, I just don’t do them anymore.
David Jones 2:48 Right, so you really are pinning it to the JTBD.
David Jones 2:53 What about product-led? In the last couple of posts I’ve talked about product-led type stuff. Have you glommed on to that particular bandwagon or do you see it as too high-level or common sense? What’s your thoughts?
Matthew from Bonjoro 3:09 Yeah, so I’d say it’s probably more common sense. Again: design first product first. It’s bit how we think anyway.
Matthew from Bonjoro 3:22 However, I think we’re building two things here. We’re building a product and we’re building a brand. And if you were to take the dollar value of those two things, I would say they’re probably about equal.
David Jones 3:37 right.
Matthew from Bonjoro 3:39 What I mean is given the stage of the company, our brand has a very good position in the marketplace and where we operate is very well known. We have like NPS rating is I think is 72. We’re really well respected and we’re building more of a name for ourselves as one of the leaders in this area of “personalization at scale”. And that gives you a lot of power to start to educate and to be a front runner.
Matthew from Bonjoro 4:07 It’s really important and I think brand…..we are quite “brand-led” and the fact that you’re doing a good thing here, we’re like, “Look, spend more time with customers”. It’s a good thing.
Matthew from Bonjoro 4:20 “Stop trying growth hack”, this kind of stuff works. It’s really nice positioning as well: people are kind of bouncing back to this (personalization), but more so it’s quite good timing. I think your product-led for sure. I think “brand” is a lot more important than maybe a lot of startups think what brand is.
David Jones 4:36 Thats funny, which was “stop trying to growth-hack”. And it goes back to that statement earlier that you had about: “automate processes, not people or not customers”, and that seemed to be tied into this kind of Northstar of making customer relationships personal but not getting bogged down in the weeds or crippling your scale. When you do that.
Matthew from Bonjoro 4:59 This is probably where a lot of people get crippled by the “growth hack” thing. Where everyone’s trying to hack their way and do these things. And a lot of people (to be honest) don’t have the experience to kind of do them or pull them off or what works for one company will not work for you.
Matthew from Bonjoro 5:15 So I think this idea of also having the recipes…the stuff you use in your business, the “plug and play” and they work.
Matthew from Bonjoro 5:22 You look back was always like “build a marketing list”, you know, and it wasn’t that hard to do. And so if you can find out what these pieces are, people can essentially step in, “plug and play”. And when you when you rely on the team, the culture of relationships, nothing greater than that way. Like everyone could do that. Well, every (company/team) culture around that base can do that. You know, you will still get stars, you know. “Everyone can do Twitter, not everyone’s good on Twitter” and “not everyone should be allowed to Twitter”.
Matthew from Bonjoro 5:51 I think we’ll see a same thing here – even if everyone started using this (personalisation at scale), you still have people who “stand above” and they “stand above” because the team, relationship show that “they do care”.
Matthew from Bonjoro 6:00 So how do you give them easy ways to show that online?
Matthew from Bonjoro 6:04 This has been lost, and it always used to be a way to compete and it’s got harder to compete – face to face. So how do you bring that back and how do you tell you when do and how you again, make it simple, I think I think that’s kind of the key.
I’m sitting in an airport departure lounge to head home – SaaStr 2020 was cancelled on strong recommendation of Santa Clara county. Others in SF have also been cancelled. There is a guy a few rows behind me coughing and sneezing – not into his sleeve, not covering his mouth.
Apparently oblivious to Covid-19 and oblivious that others are doing their best to minimize risk to themselves and other. He likely to be on my flight – oh….the…joy.
Meanwhile “Zoom” Video Communications Inc (“ZM”) is up 33.44% last 30 days and Slack Technologies Inc (“WORK”) is up 22.68%.
Clearly investors comprehend that technologies that help reduce travel, reduce the potential for infection are a great bet on the future.
Its now the norm that Product teams to be more distributed instead of centralized. Some companies like Gitlab are born remote.
With COVID-19, many companies are implementing work-from-home as a preventative measure and also self-quarantine.
“GitLab is the world’s largest all-remote company with team members located in more than 65 countries around the world.”
Even large product companies like Atlassian have embraced remote work as a priority. “We think that by doing remote we can tap into a whole new workforce that our competitors aren’t tapping into,” Atlassian Co-CEO Scott Farquhar.
Great remote tools are emerging such as whiteboard tools Miro and teams going beyond Slack to use the voice “hoot-and-holler” of Twitch.
But the big deal is changing the culture. Engineers are notoriously introverted and I’ve spent 15+ years trying to get engineers to talk to each other even when they sit a few feet apart!
I asked Bonjoro’s CEO Matt Barnett about his team structure and how they handle the remote culture.
The no-surprise summary: “Communication is everything”. But here are a few specific tips.
Key Point 1: Drop a 2 minute zoom call to somebody to resolve an issue that might otherwise take hours or days. Why?
Timezones mean that chat/text messages and emails are unresolved for hours or days.
People misinterpret the tone of chat or emails.
If you must use text, then don’t use capitals (SHOUTing) and choose the best emoji for the purpose.
The huge benefit comes with conflict management.
Key Point 2: Bring the team together once a year. The team has to “break-bread” and spend time together in the same physical space.
Conversation Transcript
Bonjoro Team Locations
David Jones 0:01 What size is the team at the moment?
Matthew from Bonjoro 0:03 So we’re 15 we’re in Sydney. So Australia, Manila, South Africa, London, Colorado and Poland.
David Jones 0:13 So you got you got time zones and language covered.
Matthew from Bonjoro 0:17 That’s our team. I’m trying to look at if it’s a blessing or a curse. (laughs)
Remote Team Lessons
David Jones 0:22 is there anything any lessons you’ve had in terms of working remotely? or working across time zones?
Matthew from Bonjoro 0:29 Communication is everything. 100% and by “communication” I did not mean paragraphs on Slack. Yeah. I think this is a hard one. Like the best thing we’ve learned is is culturally shift to a stage where you can drop a two minute zoom, call somebody to ask one quick question, two minutes, and then you’re back to work as if you were in the office, rather than going into slack debates that go on for hours
Remote team conflict resolution
Matthew from Bonjoro 0:55 Obviously harder in different time zones when people are asleep. But I think the number one thing it resolves, if you can get to a good stage of it is conflict management. When you have conflict, which will definitely have, don’t get sucked into a rabbit hole, because if people are asleep you are awake it like it compound things. This will be read for the worst rather than the best way when they are written
David Jones 1:17 Slack chat and email just tend to sort of amplify the paranoia side if you don’t pick the right emoji 🙂
Matthew from Bonjoro 1:26 (laughs)
Get the right emoji
Don’t use CAPITALS.
If build a remote team, bring them together at least once a year.
If can’t can’t do it all at once, to bring out half a team one time and then take the other half to them maybe another time. Because your team has to break bread together. And when you can do that, again, when it gets back to communication and conflict and daily work. You’ll be better placed you’ll know each other better. You respect each other more and you’ll be able to solve those problems a bit easier.
David Jones 1:56 Yeah. Good stuff. Thank you, sir. Really appreciate it.
Last Thursday 100+ people crammed into a fireside on Growth and Product.**
This blog post covers the conundrum of Statistical significance in A/B experiments:
1. why the size of uplift is important
2. how much data gives me statistical significance?
3. how long you have to run an experiment (you will be shocked)
4. are you better tossing a coin?
5. what you pick may delay experiment cadence.
Lets start with this top-level discussion (** with Jordan from Deputy)
Firstly, here are some links if you are interested in the basics and maths of A/B testing.
Jordan illustrated the point with this chart. The curve shows practically even large startups have volume challenges. Even with 1000 customers/week entering a 50:50 A/B test, if you only are looking for 5% uplift on an existing 25% conversion, then you would need to wait 35 weeks for statistical significance!
Only then can you make a data-driven decision.
Source: Jordan Lewis, Deputy
You have a lot of things to agonise over when you are losing prospects in your funnel (whether it be registration, activation or getting a payment) – which elements do you pick? Which fields do you remove (please refer to my earlier Deputy blog post on trialler incentives). So you need to pick your A/B experiments carefully.
Simply put: Jordan makes the point that you can only run one experiment (on a page/process) until you have a “winner”. Then you can start the second. This means that elapsed time will hamper your productive output (per year) as a Product or Growth team.
Gut-Data-Gut – There is a wonderful talk from Stanford about how you need to optimise with the expertise and prudence of your team. Because of time constraints:
A) you MUST make bets on the biggest upward movers of statistical significance.
B) you MUST make bets on the smallest downward movers of statistical significance if the experiment fails (your failures are NOT glorious).
Monitoring both impacts is critical to ensure you are converging on the best experiments and not doing damage in the process!
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