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.
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.
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.
“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:
recruit customers,
refer customers or
the product automatically draws other customers in
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.
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