Contextual

Category: podcast

  • How OKRs work (and don’t work) for Product Teams

    How OKRs work (and don’t work) for Product Teams

    In a recent discussion with Patrick Collins from Zip Money, he revealed they replaced roadmapping with OKRs. At Contextual we’ve had several false starts with OKRs – so this deep-dive video is with OKR expert Sten Pittet of Tability.

    Sten asserts that one of the main things people get wrong is making objectives to quantitative and making results a proxy for projects.

    He said that Patrick nailed it by saying its OK to abandon a project during the 90-day period if it seems it will fail the Key Results you are seeking.

    The diagram below explains the hygiene that Sten recommends. By adding the “Projects” ring, it reduces the usual confusion about key results. (He acknowledges he stole this and enhanced from Simon Sinek’s Begin with Why).

    Specifically here the fixed-ness of Objectives and friction in changing Key Results. These are the stable business-centric goals that should NOT be schizophrenically changing after the last customer meeting or if the CEO has some genius new strategic lightbulb moment.

    Sten does a great job framing these 3 levels, starting with these statements:

    Related to impact you have on your customers.

    and

    Teams can double-down on projects that work

    Objectives

    The way you phrase the top-level objective has the potential to kill or inspire teams to launch projects to meet that objective – afterall people/teams naturally obsess over such a concise directive.

    Bad example: “integrate with Stripe” – only related to dev team – can’t help Sales/Marketing get on with their work. The Key Result is also very binary: “Ship or Not Ship”.

    Better Objective: Get Paid Customers. This empowers each team to flush out their own Projects:

    Product: find a way to charge them (that might still be Stripe but it is in concert with other possibilities and team Projects)

    Sales: what markets can I tackle?

    Marketing: what initiatives will drive growth?

    Support: how can we reduce churn or convert trial to paid?

    Moving down to Key Results –  these “really focuses the attention of people on what is important”. A sensible selection is not the binary Stripe result but Revenue. Suddenly things are quantitative and not binary – its more trackable.

    In the bad example: The Product team say “we really need to ship that integration”.

    In the good example:  Marketing can get great progress by surveying customers on purchase intent.  The big contrast here is that waiting 2 months for the Stripe integration won’t move the needle if there is NO purchase intent.

    So the Stripe integration is downgraded to a Project. If that project looks like it will fail or run over the 90 period – the better OKR helps teams ask: “how can we charge people today?”, “can we do it manually” etc.

    Bad OKRs can derail a company. Good OKRs align teams in achieving one big thing for the business.

    The evolution of teams getting used to using OKRs and becoming more “outcome driven” looks like the picture below.

    Projects then should change a lot, they are just “bets” on getting a better Key Result. He was impressed with Patrick’s comments:

    Teams are autonomous and they can double-down on what’s working – if a specific project doesn’t lead us to a better Key Result, then we just kill it.

    Sten thought this was a sign of a top team.

  • Product Managers: Data-driven experiments are an excuse not to be brave

    Product Managers: Data-driven experiments are an excuse not to be brave

    Being “data-driven” is “virtual signalling for Product Managers” and not the best method for some product decisions and roles.

    This snippet from a longer conversation with Patrick Collins of Zip.co digs into the suprising insight of different traits in PMs.

    Patrick quipped about his experience: “I’ve only been doing this product thing for 10 or 15 years”. 

    So it’s clear he has a wealth of experience and carries a lot of lessons and scars from both web and mobile products.

    Patrick’s advice to aspiring and existing Product Managers is to know which type you are:

    1. Analytical
    2. Intuitive and/or creative.
    3. Technical

    In recent years he’s seen migration from Project Management and Business Analyst roles into Product Management. Also there is often a progression from developers into the PM track. But perhaps these new PMs are more analytical and don’t carry a sense of what a great user experience is like.

    The concern is that:

    “experimentation and being data driven,
    can be a cheap out for being brave”. 

    In other words a Product Manager who has the courage to make big bets based on solid user experience background is invaluable in creating a “generational leap” in product quality.

    Patrick notes that this trait is not based on seniority, its really that many PMs are risk adverse. They get into a process of “polishing the turd”.

    It’s an interesting conundrum, in other posts we’ve noted the time expense of A/B tests to get statistical significance, the challenge of PMs wearing many hats and personality traits.

    “But the idea that we can just test our way out of every problem is dangerous because it can really hold a product back.”

    Like most human skills, its part-art and part science. Patrick says:  “I still haven’t quite cracked the formula for what kinds of PM is able to know when to stop polishing and know when to go for a generational leap.”

    “some being more creative, some being more analytical and some being more technical and knowing who you are”

    ref: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/types-product-managers-animal-kingdom-gaurav-rajan/

    The standard 3-legged stool for PMs is to balance UX, Tech, Business – you may have seen the Venn Diagram in other posts on this blog.

    But the image above illustrated the best fit for PM’s who are pre-disposed to traits of “Technologist”, “Generalist” and “Business-oriented” – the Focus field is a clue as to the persons strengths and weaknesses and ultimately what would be the right product-component for them to work on.

    Digging deeper into the downside of being too analytical, the obvious A/B problem arises:

    “The experimentation culture, I think is damaging in some ways, because it comes across as this kind of analytical thing that that you can test your way out of anything. But it’s like, well, what the hell are you going to test? And how are you coming up with that?”

    If you want to hear more from Patrick on a broad range of topics and experience, join me for our WFH Fireside chat this coming thursday. If you can’t make it, sign up to the blog and it will be in the upcoming posts.

    A note about the cover cartoon

    I was wondering about what picture to put up the top of the post. Perhaps “fork-in-the-road” to reflect product management career choices. Perhaps an “all-in-bet” pic from a casino etc.

    But I actually found a post on Basecamp’s site under their ShapeUp series that captures part of what Patrick was covering. 

    Basecamp are often controvesial, always counter-trend and very, very authentic. This series says:

    Shapeup is Shape Up is for product development teams who struggle to ship. Full of eye-opening insights, Shape Up will help you break free of “best practices” that aren’t working, think deeper about the right problems, and start shipping meaningful projects.

    and that sounds pretty bloody good to me – I’m adding it to my reading list.

    The image came from:  https://basecamp.com/shapeup/2.1-chapter-07

    Transcript

    Patrick Collins 0:03
    Learning of the different kinds of product managers, some being more creative, some being more analytical and some being more technical and knowing who you are. And therefore what if you know i’d imagine the audience is probably going to be aspiring PMs, some of them anyway. knowing who you are as a PM really will help.

    Patrick Collins 0:27
    And you don’t want to be a creative PM, running the platform services team, or tech or a technical PM running the onboarding project for the app, right?

    David Jones 0:40
    Why was it specifically what did you learn that specifically at Moveweb?

    Patrick Collins 0:44
    I guess I’ve learned over both of these past roles, that those different PMs can actually fail in one role and succeed and I don’t mean outright fail, like crashing and burn. I mean succeed in other ones. And so when I look for PMS, I look carefully at their background. And I look at what skills they have. And that will lean me slightly towards where I think they’re probably going to succeed as PM. Creative requires you to take some bold steps. And I think the experimentation culture, I think is damaging in some ways, because it comes across as this kind of analytical thing that that you can test your way out of anything. But it’s like, What the hell are you going to test and how are you coming up with that? Which part and you know, I think I’m on consumer app in particular, it requires a lot of bravery and a lot of courage to translate what you’re hearing from customers into a point of view, and then go test that and having that having that courage to translate data analytics and and customer interview data into into a point of view: not many PMS have that.

    Patrick Collins 2:03
    And it’s actually not a seniority thing I’ve noticed it’s a, it’s a risk taking trait that some PMs just will never get.

    David Jones 2:12
    So just to, just to play that back to you, if I’m a really good data centric type product manager, there was a Stanford saw talk I saw which was called “gut, data, gut”, which was that you’ve got to start with an intuition first, then you can go and get the data to support it or actually run and experiment for that data, then you actually have a new iteration. Are you saying that an analytic type product manager really just misses that sort of “gut” type thing and testing many different sorts of things?

    Patrick Collins 2:44
    CAN. Yeah, I think the concept of experimentation and being data driven, can be a cheap out for being brave and not taking not making courageous leaps on the product and maybe polishing a turd, so to speak. And so sure, I think there’s a really difficult line to walk between knowing when to polish and knowing when to try to “go for it”, like a generational leap. And it’s still kind of I’ve only been doing this product thing for 10 or 15 years now, I still haven’t quite cracked the formula for what kinds of PM is able to know when to stop polishing and know when to go for a generational leap. That’s that’s a really challenging, challenging problem for most PMs. But the idea that we can just test our way out of every problem is dangerous because it can really hold a product back.

  • “Recipes” and “Jobs to be done” (JTBD)

    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-cares-for-customers
    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.

  • Onboarding only the users you want

    Onboarding only the users you want

    Two extremely exciting companies in B2B SaaS Video are Loom and Bonjoro – they both let users reach out to prospects and customers with short-form videos that may help with sales, onboarding or customer support.

    In this podcast video interview I talk with Matt Barnett from Bonjoro – their onboarding deliberately self-selects for SaaS companies and excludes consumers and other long-tail applications.

    To illustrate what Bonjoro do, take a look at this simple email I received after signing up.

    Tools like Intercom, Hubspot, Marketo, Autopilot, Sendgrid all blast pseudo personalized email templates at you when you sign up. Bonjoro solves SaaS personalization at scale.

    Frickin’ genius.

    Everything about this rings true as an authentic personalized email and nothing is more authentic than ME talking to YOU.

    “This video contains important information recorded personally for you by Grant Dewar”.

    “Hey David, saw you signed up and wanted to say hi from sunny Sydney! Check out your video & let me know how you want to use Bonjoro – I’ve helped a bunch of our SaaS users get going.”

    Using these subtle clues, email recipients feel this is a legit, personal communication.

    It works.

    Open rates are off-the-charts and the relevance for SaaS is the differentiation of personalization – but also at scale.

    Here is some discussion snippets on the onboarding flow.

    Matt says “they suffer from having such a broad range of users at signup”. So they have to be brutal about the target users they want to focus on – otherwise they would dilute their focus and not be valuable to any one sector.

    Also – you will notice that Bonjoro solves this via “Jobs to be done” for the user – get them to name the problem they want to solve:

    • onboarding someone
    • try to get more demos
    • increase retention
    • stop churn

    To view or listen to the whole interview – Matt shares his whole journey and other valuable topics such as:

    • importance of adding team members during onboarding. Not for the usual viral reasons but so people get familiar with video and the human response it invokes.
    • people are not confident with video – they are still educating the market.
    • remote/distributed teams
    • cookbooks of examples for specific “Jobs to be done”
    • design-led as a key part of even B2B SaaS products.
    • why they integrate with tools like Intercom, Mailchimp, Convertkit etc.
    • Which integrations convert better
    • Team size, MAUs, break-even-or-not?

    Its a great ride and you can see on video or subscribe on Soundcloud or iTunes.

    https://vimeo.com/395116750

    Conversation Transcript

    David Jones 0:00
    I guess it looks like you are trying to target enterprise. So business customers and possibly even enterprise customers because they are a higher LTV (lifetime value) type customer for you. And you can support $1,000 LTV customer just as well as you can a zero dollar customer and so you’ve got a major focus in that space. So you know, you never got to go for sort of a massive land grab approach.

    Matthew from Bonjoro 0:34
    So we don’t we don’t do enterprise. I think there’s a cultural shift to happen there. I think trusting your thousand employees to get on video and, and hop on board with clients – there are a lot of enterprises who arn’t willing to make that jump – just yet. It’s going to happen.

    Matthew from Bonjoro 0:48
    We tend to focus on SaaS and then SMEs. And SMEs in the sense of up to 200 person teams. That’s where we work, we’re mostly used by Customer Success teams. So posts sign up in that lead conversion activation funnel. And then and then post payment like customer care. So really, teams like who will have a customer success team, and those now probably in e-Commerce and they probably in non-SaaS SMEs as well. That tells you where we. At the end of the day, it’s how you message your client. If its going to convert more and it takes 30 seconds. And you have, juniors on your onboarding team. And that client is worth $50. Maybe that 30 seconds is worth the LTV.

    Matthew from Bonjoro 1:36
    It is (the value of the effort) to work it out for the company, but we do have customers using it with pretty substantial funnels, but they they’ll either filter and then they’ll and then they’ll spread the load across a group of team members.

    Matthew from Bonjoro 1:58
    Yeah, like I’m actually a Product Designer as well, its more than graphic design so actually its UX for the real world, its kind of the the ultimate goal so yes look good engineering work and then come able to use. I mean, I’m not the guy who now who does the the end design work like we have we have also UX person. I work pretty heavily with them then engineering. But yeah, design first. I’m hugely biased, but I think it’s the way to go.

    David Jones 2:30
    It makes a lot of sense to me after being in this space for a while, you know, my two previous startups are in security and the design requirements are completely different.

    Matthew from Bonjoro 2:41
    I think anyone enjoys, like enjoy the experience. Yeah, like again, like yeah, journey versus the end. Yes. You enjoy the journey. Yeah, given numbers, a high percentage of people will stick with it and see it through. And then like little things, if it hit bugs, they hit issues and they hit UX flaws, which are gonna have, they are more likely to keep going. So the way I see it is it just, it just makes. Yep. Like it removes barriers. And our onboarding is, is pretty heavy in terms of my setup, I’d say. So, hopefully people enjoy it more.

    David Jones 3:15
    Yeah. So let’s, let’s have a look at that. So what I’ve got what I’ve got on the screen here is the first step after putting in username and password. So I should have taken a screenshot of that, but it was super easy. You didn’t ask me any questions. You know, the thing I did a fireside with deputy last week, and they talked a lot about product lead growth and talked a lot about, you know, the drop off rates with adding additional fields, so you were pretty clean about that. Have you had debates about that? Whether you I think you asked the question, either here. You know, you just sort of pushed it pushed it off to the registration page. Did you ever have questions up front that were causing drop-offs?

    Matthew from Bonjoro 3:59
    Not up Front. Interestingly we actually found like so one we implemented was GDPR Terms of Service, which actually made zero impact so everyone’s completely cool with that. But our form start here, this is classed as early onboarding, most of this is for the user. Like this screen is interesting. So we asked people to basically create a campaign for why they’re doing these messages and we’re trying to there’s a few things going on here. What is we’re trying to get people to start to think in our way so you know,

    David Jones 4:33
    My first impression was: “these guys are serious about business”. It wasn’t kind of like the casual the casual signup you know, oh, I’m gonna do a video. I’m gonna do a video for somebody It was like, your first campaign it’s like, “oh, wow, this is this is really tied into a process” and but I didn’t actually understand at this stage why I was so sort of important.

    Matthew from Bonjoro 4:56
    Yes, as they start thinking, Okay, campaigns, this is not just a one off thing. Nothing is this is great data for us. So, we’ve always struggled with having such a broad range of users that sign up – and the only way we can bucket them is by “Jobs to be done” so campaigns an awesome way. People just tell us what job they want to do: are they onboarding someone, or they do retention, or are they trying to get more demos – like they “name the thing”. And we look at that report every week and we’re like: “this is our primary use cases here”.

    David Jones 5:30
    That’s interesting. I did a tear down of Monday, the productivity tool too, and they actually give you those use cases right up front. So you got this menu to pick from and like it lets you actually get to that “aha” experience around my specific needs – this feels similar in that sense.

    Matthew from Bonjoro 5:56
    This is our latest onboarding. This is kind of a failsafe for us. So it’ll be more explained on the next screen. But this is this is kind of like so we make sure that everyone always has somebody else to send messages to

    David Jones 6:09
    Ah, yes.

    Matthew from Bonjoro 6:10
    The point to understand is that, we looked into what our product qualified lead is. So what are the leading indicators that someone’s going to become a customer. And there’s two things, basically, one is the software integration, which I mentioned that in a minute. The second one is what actually gets sent to the customer is they get a response to a video where someone (the potential customer) goes “this is amazing”. Like, “thank you so much”, and that person to put the credit card in and then they’re on the train. Now to get to that you work backwards. People need to send somewhere between five to about 12 videos. So one of the things we do is we have integrations to help drive this but we also try to add in team members because we found that pretty much anyone who comes back and says “this is great”, “this was unexpected”, is a huge plus in terms of getting that user to ultimately convert over.

    David Jones 7:03
    Right? Yeah, there’s a real there’s a real kind of like safety, use nothing to fall back on. But it was a real safety net for me to be able to try it out with a colleague.

    Matthew from Bonjoro 7:15
    Yeah. Because videos, you know, not not everyone’s done videos before. So people are nervous when they first start.

    David Jones 7:24
    That makes sense. Yeah. You’re kind of educating the market at the same time as getting getting them to use your product. What do think about ugly old blokes like me? Do you find that it actually a skews demographically, the younger people or….

    Matthew from Bonjoro 7:38
    Nope – say our biggest user base is 32 to 48. (laughter) That’s where we sit, we drop off over 60 and we drop off below 25. So I think, probably there’s a couple of things that was one of the reasons this is it’s not the age as-such. It’s the fact that at that age you are in a more senior position, probably, you’re in CS (Customer Success) or you’re in support, you know what you’re doing, or in sales. Secondly, you’re a lot more confident by that point. So I think confidence comes with age, and people don’t care as much about getting on video if it gets the job done.

    David Jones 8:25
    Do you think the bottom end of the range? So below 25 has just to do that they they’re not in the job yet.

    Matthew from Bonjoro 8:33
    I think that is part of it, I think a lot of video messaging been done by youth is between close friends. There maybe this again, maybe this is just because of the age thing. Yeah. It’s hard to know, whether that’s all the same age. I do think confidence comes into it, I think. At the end-of-the-day when you’ve been doing sales or you’ve been doing meetings have you met loads of customers before? This is a less intimidating job than in your first job when you like: “oh, I’ve got to talk to people I’ve never met who are customers”, you know?

    David Jones 9:11
    And I don’t think we’re going to see Tick Tock for enterprise. (small chuckle)

    David Jones 9:18
    Alright, so this was interesting to like boom, straight into integrations, which was really, really interesting. So you’ve got a bunch of integrations, you’ve got a bunch of integrations via Zapier, but certainly things like MailChimp and stuff like that. At this particular stage, I’m still a little bit confused that if I was a CS person, why I need to connect my MailChimp. So I was a bit confused about that. I could certainly, probably make sense out of the intercom connection in that situation. I put in a request for Autopilot. It was interesting, too. I sort of thought I should I put in one for Pipedrive, you know, so I didn’t know what was the best platform am I trying to integrate here, you know: is it the support system?, is it the marketing system?, is it the CRM? I wasn’t quite sure where we were going on that.

    Matthew from Bonjoro 10:15
    yeah we do we do bias towards our better users, so like with my campaigns: Intercom uses “campaigns”, ActiveCampaign (the platform) uses the words “campaigns” within CS. So it’s just “Yes, teams that use that”. And then when you come in here, we again <…>

    Matthew from Bonjoro 10:33
    So, Mailchimp is interesting. We get a lot of Mailchimp signups. They’re not the best customer because they tend to be more marketing side and kind of small business. However, however, like numbers are pretty significant. So take a bit of an internal decision now – who do we double down on because we keep building integrations every day like, we have Pipedrive is #2 requested; Kajabi is another really high one. But I haven’t used. You start to get these (integration requests) coming through.

    Matthew from Bonjoro 11:08
    So I guess the question for us as a company is do we keep going broad and broad and broad? Or do we really start to double-down on the ones we know are extremely active and best users and provide a lot more value to those users and make them a lot stickier.

    David Jones 11:24
    Yeah, you’ve got a menu of options or directions that you could go, you could go really hard down, say the Zendesk intercom route or you could stick in some other some other area.

    Matthew from Bonjoro 11:34
    It’s tough. It’s tough to know which way to go. Because there’s big benefits either side, you kind of have to make call. And it comes down to benefit. Yeah, the strategy of where you’re going as a company.

    David Jones 11:42
    Yeah. That’s a great position to be in. I’ll check in with you in six months. And we’ll we’ll find out what how you iterated to a particular direction. It would be great to see that journey…..All right. So here I was a bit confused about just here on the left hand side, why it was saying “choose your software” but people were being shown to me so I was a bit confused about that.

    Matthew from Bonjoro 12:12
    Good one – it’s good pick up (laughs). I have no idea why

    David Jones 12:17
    I didn’t even I must admit I should have tried clicking on them to see I missed a bit about uploading my profile so I missed one screenshot and I couldn’t get back. This is a bit of a shame. So I was uploading icons I didn’t know whether it was icon profile.

    Matthew from Bonjoro 12:30
    It actually shows the video and shows the message that it sends and how it how it looks when you send someone a video message. Which is more around we found that again, having some input on the kind of final look and feel like colors and stuff. These are ideas that are a small thing. People love having ownership over the product. Like Gmail, “I need customized background”. Sounds stupid, but the people love this stuff.

    David Jones 13:01
    Yeah, make sense to me. I really love this over here as well to that I could actually see how far I did a survey for somebody this morning and they provided me no “Step one, two, three”. I had no clue there could have been 4800 steps. I had no clue. So this is this is a lovely onboarding device to manage patience. Have you found that you’ve got a drop-off at a particular stage. Got any data on that?

    Matthew from Bonjoro 13:30
    Turns out, we are at a more high level, so we can’t we tend to see who gets the first message. I don’t think we’ve quite split out individual jobs on onboarding. It just “did we complete” or not. So we actually have a we have more people who don’t complete now than before we did this. We also increased our conversion rate by 35%. Since doing this, so we’ve kind of got <…> our Onboarding used to be a lot less than this people get in there with actually like, getting things quicker. But again, this idea of focusing down to users that we know….

    Matthew from Bonjoro 14:11
    Their intent is already high 50 to 60% of our traffic is through word of mouth for people who’ve received messages. So I think there’s quite a lot of buyer or signup intent and knowledge already. So we don’t tend to get people coming in cold <…> we tend to get a lot of referral stuff, so I think to that extent if people have quite good intent they will come through this and then way more likely to convert to a customer because they are set up correctly. But at the expenses that we do bounce out people because I think we do have a few….

    Matthew from Bonjoro 14:48
    I would like to do less steps. We may try and drop one or two of these or trying to combine some. It’s kind of hard. Yeah. Like it’s tough.

    David Jones 14:57
    Yeah, it’s really interesting to make a brutal decision to exclude people or to show or basically show something that actually invites the ones that you really want – I think it’s a great design. If you’ve got enough if you’ve got enough volume coming through there. Is there a sense of what channels are really being those are the power channels for you?

  • Product-Led Growth to drive down your CAC

    Product-Led Growth to drive down your CAC

    “Product-Led Growth is about helping your customers experience the ongoing value your product provides…” — Nir Eyal, Author of “Hooked” and “Indistractible”

    A few years ago Wes Bush got started building a community around a way of acquiring customers that was the natural descendent of lean startup.

    He ultimately wrote a book, created an online “Summit” and now has grown to become a physical conference.

    “Product-Led Growth isn’t a tactic or hack. It’s a model that drives teams and companies to deliver the maximum value and experience to their customers directly from the products they build and design. Getting this right means you need a deep understanding of those you serve and how to help each customer become successful. If you can just get these two things right, you’ll increase your odds of building a company with legacy value.” — David Axler, Growth and BD, WaveHQ

    I spoke to the Deputy Growth guys (Francois Bondiguel – Head of Growth and Jordan Lewis – Director of Growth) about their experience bringing the method into a fast growing startup where different stakeholders have different opinions on how to drive leads while driving down cost of acquisition.

    This is one of the main promises of the book: “How to Build a Product That Sells Itself”.

    The point is that advertising is expensive, which means your CAC (Cost-of-Acquisition) is high. The promise is that if you design your product experience, then customers will:

    1. recruit customers,
    2. refer customers or
    3. the product automatically draws other customers in
    4. and the product is so closely aligned to a users “Job-to-be-done” that the churn rate is low and people start to talk as a substitute for advertising.

    The video and transcript are below.

    Conversation Transcript

    David Jones 0:01
    Yeah. So you guys have been been active (or Jordan’s been active) in the product Product-Led movement, I guess you could say. And that seems to be associated with a lot of OpenView Associates, portfolio companies. Do you want to just speak to that about what’s been great about product with and what you think where that sort of fits in the modern way of viewing things is from a product team perspective?

    Jordan Lewis 0:26
    Yeah, I just got back from the Product-Led growth summit in San Francisco that OpenView put on and I could spend in the last three years, it’s gone from 20 people to 80 people in the Boston office to now you know, a conference center in the valley. So it was pretty cool to see.

    Product-Led History

    Jordan Lewis 0:43
    The thing I love about Product-Led is that it really backs the product – it backs the quality of what’s being built to sell itself and it says essentially, if you provide a low barrier to entry, and you get your customers to experience the value you have, if you’ve got a great product that will sell itself. And obviously that that runs out as you get to the higher end of the market and the company like Deputy that has small to enterprise businesses. But we get people organically taking a trial you know that you know thousand plus employees <…> approach we have that really healthy tension with sales like phone numbers a great one, you know, “we should make phone number mandatory” and the Product-Led growth mentality says “no”, and that as part of our CEOs ethos as well, I guess.

    What is Product-Led?

    Francois Bondiguel 1:32
    Yeah, absolutely. I agree with your with your definition and why I mean, ultimately, like, you know, I’ve been working in software for almost 11 years now actually studying my career working as an operation manager for a web design company. And then six months later, you know, three people like through your first created our own SaaS, which we’ve done B2C SAS for about three and a half years. And, you know, when you have a software company, you’re a Product company in the same way that if you are manufacturing, anything physical, you’re product is what sell, you know, you need a great product. And ultimately, you know, if you forget that and, you know, you could make great marketing and great sales and get to revenue, but your product is at the core of what you do and your value should always be valuable is the product delivering on the promise, you know, because saying, as Ashik (Deputy CEO) says, our mission is, every shift on Deputy will help businesses around the world, you know, manage their employee better will increase the employee happiness level. And we make sure that, you know, business don’t break the law and pay employee accurately. If you have that mission on paper, but your product doesn’t deliver, then, you know, it’s kind of funny, right? Where you think Product-Led growth is very much like, hey, the product is aligned with the mission. And, you know, that’s what is driving the growth and what we’re here for is more amplifying that. Make sure that everyone in the world that is relevant should know about us.

    David Jones 3:05
    How do you draw a line between? Or how do you explain to that sales person that wants the phone number in there? What Product-Led growth is, you know, like, okay, sure, it’s, it’s easy to say, okay, it’s a barrier. You know, by asking for making the phone number mandatory, it’s a barrier to actually getting that and you’ll get a drop off rate. Do you literally show the salesperson the drop off rates at that particular point? Or do you go back and say, Product-Led is about aligning that with the mission, how do you how do you kind of communicate that product with…

    How to communicate Product-Led inside the company?

    Jordan Lewis 3:38
    So, in one example we had the salesperson come to me and Francois with the costings right. They are, like, “if we had this built we will get X amount more drop off during the onboarding flow, but we should be able to convert X percent more and therefore the revenue uplift is this”. And that’s quite a compelling argument. Right, but what isn’t there is the costings of sales team itself. The scaleability of that business unit. So there’s other factors that play that maybe isn’t part of the day to day concern? Yeah. So it’s really where we just, I don’t get into that argument because they are right. And there may be a short term view and in a long term view. So so you know, for example, in iOS, we put it we put a field and that didn’t exist before to capture phone number. And we did it in such a delightful way that 55% of the <…> and the sales team are really happy with that. So it’s just about finding a balance coming with the numbers and kind of iterating too mandatory if you have to. But one of the games, for example, and gamification, where you can see here, the third one, which is a blue phone, is to essentially give us your phone number and we say “because we’ll send you a link to download the app”.

    David Jones 4:50
    Yep, gotcha.

    Jordan Lewis 4:51
    So we say “cool, I hear you How else can we get to this result in a way that doesn’t cause drop off?”

    Francois Bondiguel 4:57
    This is what I was talking to, you know Wes Bush?

    David Jones 5:01
    Yeah. The guy who wrote the book.

    Francois Bondiguel 5:03
    yeah. Yeah. So I just actually just done an interview podcast with him recently that that is going to be in the Product-Led growth summit, I think in the end of January, which is a big online event.

    David Jones 5:14
    Yeah, yeah, I saw it.

    Francois Bondiguel 5:15
    Yeah. So I think there’s hundred plus speakers. So I got the opportunity to talk to him. But one of the things that I didn’t discuss with him, but I think could be interesting in this forum, is that, you know, Product-Led growth is not a religion. It’s not something where, you know, like, any decision you’re going to take is just Product-Led growth, you know, like, we’re not on a crusade here. We’re here to have a principle, which we really believe that if you continue product innovation, and you solve real problem with real product solution, then you’re going to win in the long term. But it doesn’t mean for example, if we realize that if you talk to someone, with a conversion rate is 63% then of course, we’re going to try to connect you with someone because you know the revenue is there, right? So it’s a principle but it’s not a religion.

    David Jones 6:05 
    Great, excellent. Thank you.