We are involved with Product Managers globally but we’re in a Sydney startup community of a few hundred companies in one building! Its an amazing place of learning and serendipity. Some of these startups are building the future and this short series of posts dives deep on recurring challenges we hear.
This first post is a fireside chat on Product Market Fit I did with Elliot Ng – Director of Product Management, Search at Google and a veteran of 3 startups. It was a great talk and he brought a lot of wisdom to the night.
In this clip we explored challenges of getting early stage product market fit and the role of founders – too often these days there are startups with a solution looking for a problem, Elliot explains the best case:
Here, Elliot covers the scenario where true disruption, or market transition is occurring and even the founders don’t have subject matter expertize.
And here is the ideal founder situation where one member of the team has deep industry experience and this informs the startup’s mission right from the start.
In other words this is called Founder/Market Fit!
As Steve Blank would say – “Get out of the building!”
Here Elliot describes how they rapidly validated their product via pitching and correlating across multiple prospects and existing customers.
And lastly for this post, discusses how focussing on hypotheses that confirm whether you have a business or not is the priority.
In the next post, we’ll look at founders as product managers and the best ways to not get deluded about your product.
I was listening to a podcast recently with the founder of Headspace a popular meditation App. I’d not used the App but many people I know have – what amazed me on the podcast was that it was mentioned their revenues exceed $100M – it appears that the sector is big business!
I downloaded a few apps and discovered there are several use-cases that need to be handled: Relaxation, Commuting, Sleeping, Quick Breaks, Focus etc.
Compare this to something like Uber where you just have one-job-to-be-done (JTBD) and that is get a ride. These meditation Apps have to connect with each user’s main reason for downloading the App and get them started on that – its a disparate set of uses.
Here is 2 examples:
This App (I think it was Calm – I downloaded a bunch!) makes this really simple and targeted on what they want to get users doing. The App points to all the important features to get me focussed on my job. The goal is to get me to the “aha” experience.
Brain.fm have a nice App and they take a carousel approach to introducing the user to the products main features. Their unique value is they use some magic underneath the music (presumably Binaural Beat” or “Isochronic tones”) to increase the impact on the meditator.
I like they way they hit that with “Music designed for your brain”. It would directly create continuity from the:
1. marketing phase, where the user decided to install the App
2. onboarding the phase, where the user decides to keep using the App.
Overall, the first App is more effective. Sure, its less pretty (the Brain.fm carousel looks great). But it has 2 downsides:
a) its not contextual
b) they force the user to signup.
These two factors create a barrier to get to “aha”!
Both Carousels and contextual Tips/Tours are available in the Contextual platform, so its really up to your team to choose which method to use.
Our house is one of those connected places and we chose Google Home as the backbone. Around the house are lightbulbs that turn-on and off with voice commands.
We also have several audio and video Chromecasts that do things like play the current episode of “the innocents” on voice command. All this is done via 4 Google Home minis placed in rooms.
I rarely go into the Google Home app, but I was setting up a new light-bulb and the App had updates. The Product Managers at Google obviously wanted to tell me more about the changed – we call this “Feature Onboarding” – here is what it looked like.
The cool thing about this is that they’ve targeted me on first use of the upgrade and told me about the interface.
The top image is attractive and contains common items for lightbulbs, switches, lamps that you hookup in the App.
The wording is a bit dense for my liking (users are usually in a rush to get to the features) but it hits the major UI and feature points.
The call-to-action is simple, either “DISMISS” or “WATCH NOW” – it was a little confusing to me what “WATCH NOW” meant, often Apps use “LEARN MORE…” but I guess it sets expectation that it would be an easy video to consume.
So I clicked and here is what I got.
Video is a great way to educate users as its a “show me, don’t tell me” solution. You can see here that Google have set the video to 42 seconds, so they want to hit the big points and not waste your time. I think of this as getting the message across and then getting out of the way.
Google have big teams that can do these popups and target them at the right users at the right time.
This is also simple to do with platforms like Contextual and your App can do things from simple tips, to embedding videos – then measure the uplift with analytics.
Its no secret that Google has taken enterprise business from Microsoft in recent years. G-Suite** launched (2006) 5 years before Office 365 (2011) and established a serious foothold for shared spreadsheets, docs, files and mail.
If you’ve used G-Suite, you will be familiar with the tips and popups they use both on Web and Mobile to educate you about features.
Whilst G-Suite is a classy product, they still have used this education layer of tips and tours to help users get up to speed – we’ve reported some G-Suite examples in previous posts.
Consumer Grade UX
G-Suite is an example of Enterprise SaaS its at its best (you can imagine how many millions have been spent on Google docs!), they’ve built a product set that can be used by consumers and has survived the furnace of over a decade of use.
However, Google realized that when it comes to the Enterprise, users still require some help to get onboarded with products their employer wants them to use.
To solve this, G-Suite also has a Chrome plugin specifically designed for companies to onboard and skill-up their employees.
The G-Suite tours provide a comprehensive set of features: tips, walk-throughs, coachmarks and videos and comes from the acquisition of https://www.synergyse.com. This fills a gap between seperate docs and Microsoft’s Clippy (we spoke about here).
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Other Apps that are used in the enterprise often need walk-throughs or tours to explain features to users. Examples that I’ve seen are Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Workday – enterprises are using tips/tours for:
reducing training costs
increasing productivity
educating remote staff
The problem has been (until Contextual) the same can’t be achieved in the Mobile Apps that Enterprise uses….AND…large quantities of staff are now predominantly mobile.
Are “docs” dead?
In the past nobody actually read the manual. Now, we can expect that a mobile-on-the-go workforce or user base will never go hunting around for docs.
The solution is:
have Apps so simple they need no explanation (e.g like a shopping app)
deliver feature-rich Apps but with Consumer-grade UX (as discussed above)
Provide contextual help via tips, tours, tooltips (as shown by G-Suite Training)
Add some videos
The best solution is a blend of (2), (3) and possibly a sprinkling of (4). Some companies use videos or animated-GIFs but we think they should be used sparingly.
Generally load times, delays, resolution makes them sub-optimal. More importantly – looping animated GIFs are funny with cats, but when it shows someone picking from a drop-down list and scrolling around, its plain boring or confusing!
Follow Google’s lead
We’ve previously explained that Google, Facebook, Dropbox and other successful Apps all use tips even though they have huge teams of Product Managers, Data Scientists and Developers. Simply put, Tips and Walk-throughs work for increasing user engagement and understanding.
The G-Suite Training example is great but not all companies can go out and acquire a company like Synergise 🙂 Luckily Onboarding products like Contextual are economical, functional, easy to use and considerably cheaper!
Apple is making concerted efforts to establish a foothold in the enterprise mobility space; they have enlisted help from big delivery (Accenture, Deloitte) players and platforms (Jamf, MobileIron, Epic etc) to position iOS as the preferred platform for enterprise mobility.
With the consumer market reaching saturation (shown by weaker iPhone and iPad sales) Apple can leverage its popularity with employees to impact enterprise deployment decisions. They face challenges in enterprise with the ongoing refresh of Microsoft Surface for Windows laptops/desktops and Android for Windows CE ruggedized devices.
Source: boston-technology.com
One example of Apple’s enterprise push is the healthcare sector and a great deployment is University California San Diego Jacobs Medical Centre, who have deployed iPads and Apple TV in every patients room.
This initiative enables patients to:
Access their medical records
Contact nursing staff
Play games and watch movies
Stay connected through social apps
Doctors and nurses also use Apple devices as work tools, decoupling them from their work desks, enabling them to focus more on caring for the patients. Some of the other benefits of doctors and nurses using mobile devices are:
Doctors can now use iPads to show patients scans results and plans for their procedures.
Real Time access to patient treatment history
Real Time monitoring and alerts for at risk patients
Improve productivity of all health staff
Removes friction from care process
Improve collaboration between doctors
Source: Epic
Apple has delivered a rich set of capabilities but the challenge is to ensure that patients and staff are onboarded and understand their Apps quickly. For patients, while their time at hospital may be short, it is important that it is hassle free.
For employees, applications are often complex but need to be helpful, quicker and more useful than their old paper and desktop based systems. Onboarding software like Contextual enables teams to simplify and accelerate App uptake in the enterprise by adding walkthroughs and tips – this reduces the learning curve in time critical environments.
Source: Epic
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