• Why is having a product adoption strategy so important?
• What makes for a successful product adoption strategy?
• What role feedback and data can play in developing your strategy
• Some proven real-world examples of successful product adoption strategies
• Current and future trends in product adoption

Why having a product adoption strategy matters

Let’s dive into what product adoption really means. Now you’ve developed a product you think people will love, the big question is: How do you get people not just to try it, but to really weave it into the fabric of their daily lives? That’s where the magic of product adoption comes into play. It’s about making your product really ‘sticky’ so it becomes well-embedded with a customer, and therefore very hard to remove. 

Adoption is the bread and butter of your product’s success. If people aren’t picking it over your competitors and using it, no matter how great you think it is, you’re missing the mark. And here’s the kicker: it’s not just about getting your product into users’ hands; it’s about making sure they quickly and clearly see its value, so much so that they’re willing to invest their time, or hey, even their money into it. 

And it’s not just about new customers, because understanding adoption is an important part of both preventing churn and increasing the lifetime value (LTV) of your current customers. You need to keep them engaged and deepen their connection to your product by getting them to use it more and more.

If they’re finding more value in your product, chances are they’ll be willing to spend more on it, be that an upgrade or a longer subscription, or however your particular model works to upsell your users. It’s about embedding your product within their lives, at work or at home, so deeply that removing it would be unthinkable, like cutting off a limb or giving up cheese.

It takes work to get sticky

Crafting a product adoption strategy takes thoughtful planning, a deep understanding of your users, and experimenting with different approaches to see what truly resonates with them. It’s about aligning your efforts with your broader company goals and breaking down the big vision into actionable experiments.

And speaking of understanding your users, that’s a non-negotiable part of the process. You need to think like a detective and gather as many clues as you can about what your users really need, and how your product can make their lives better. I’m a huge fan of the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework because it helps you to think beyond demographics. It’s about getting to the heart of why someone would “hire” your product in the first place.

Of course, feedback and data are our north stars. They guide us in refining our strategy, making sure we’re on the right track, and helping us iterate on our product in ways that truly matter to our users. It’s a mix of listening to what they’re telling us and watching what they’re actually doing with our product.

Understanding product adoption is about much more than just the numbers. It’s about making real connections with your users, solving real problems for them, and constantly evolving the product to meet their needs.

What makes up a successful product adoption strategy?

So, to keep this delicious metaphor rolling, let’s cook up a strategy with the same care, precision, and passion a chef pours into their signature dish. But what are the key ingredients?

Clearly understanding your target users

Understanding your users is the first step in creating an effective product adoption strategy. You wouldn’t serve a steak to a vegetarian, right? You’ve got to go deeper than just basic demographics though – you need to understand the challenges, behaviors, and motivations of your target audience.

This is where JTBD comes in, as it’s a way for you to work out what dietary requirements your potential guests have and what flavors they like. Put plainly, JTBD focuses on understanding the specific ‘jobs’ users are hiring your product to do, be it solving a problem or fulfilling a desire. By aligning what your product does and how you talk about it with these jobs they want to do, you can make your product an indispensable part of their lives.

Detailed user segmentation

Picture this as organizing your dinner menu into categories. Some people might be hungry for a zesty appetizer, others for a rich, hearty main, and some for a light, sweet dessert. Segmenting your users allows you to tailor the experience you’re offering, ensuring each interaction is as satisfying as finding your favorite dish, cooked perfectly.

Effective segmentation lets you target and personalize your marketing and onboarding strategies, ensuring that each user gets the most relevant and engaging experience you can give them. This makes it a lot more likely that they’ll adopt your product because they get to directly see the value your product offers, and how it addresses their specific needs.

Strategic experimentation

Here’s where you get to play about a bit in the kitchen. It’s all about trying different cooking techniques, adjusting the seasoning, or even combining unexpected flavors to create something extraordinary. 

Each test and tweak in your approach to onboarding, engagement, and retention is like adjusting the heat, adding a pinch of salt, or a dash of oregano, all to find the perfect balance that will make your dish – and your product – stand out.

So, make sure that you are experimenting in a systematic way, clearly outlining the target outcomes for each change, improvement, or new initiative you are going to try. Then ensure you monitor those target metrics and measure whether what you’ve done has made an impact on adoption or not. 

If it has, what learning can you take from that? Can you apply those principles in another area and increase the impact even further? If the change or addition did not improve adoption, why not? Did you disprove any assumptions you had about what your users value? Can you use that learning to increase the chances of success for the next experiment? 

Knowing your “wow” moments

This sits alongside understanding your target users and segmentation, but it delves deeper into the specific value your product delivers for said user. And, even more specifically, the exact moments in the user journey where your users suddenly get it.

The point in their interaction with your product where they understand the true value the product will bring for them – the moment they go “Oh wow, this is really useful/delightful/fun!”. Knowing what and where these moments are is crucial in building an effective product adoption strategy. 

Once you’ve identified your wow moments – which you should do through user interviews, session recordings, surveys, and usage data – you then use that intelligence to optimize your onboarding process.

One of the key objectives of your onboarding journey should be how to get every user to the relevant “wow” moment in the quickest time possible. This metric is called time-to-value (TTV), and reducing the TTV is an important metric when measuring the success of any onboarding flow.  

All of which neatly brings us to…

A customized and continuous onboarding process

Onboarding is your whole front-of-house experience – it’s all about making sure each customer is taken to the right table, explaining your menu to them, telling them which member of the waiting staff will be taking care of them, and asking them what they want to start off with as they get settled.

In my opinion, you should always be onboarding! Just because somebody has used your product for 30 days, it doesn’t mean you give up on their onboarding flow. Your onboarding is in the first 30 seconds, the first 30 days, and the first 30 months.

Your goal should be to make sure that they go from a basic user to the most advanced user that they need to be to make use of your product to its full. That way they’re less likely to miss the important things that your product can help them with, and end up churning.

You should experiment with different approaches to delivering the onboarding and training to your users. From in-app product tours to training webinars and in-person sessions, to trying a series of emails, seeing how successful it is when you create a how-to video series, maybe even trying gamification with task rewards…

The point is, experiment and learn until you’ve found what gets the best results. And don’t forget about those user segments you created – find the onboarding approach (or combination of approaches) that gets the best results with each type of user you have. 

Pro-active engagement and support

You need to nurture your ongoing relationship with your users, much like a waiter attentively returning to the table and ensuring the diner’s experience is beyond reproach. It’s the follow-up, going back and ensuring the meal is being enjoyed, checking in to see if they need anything else. 

Keeping your users engaged beyond the initial onboarding phase is one of the biggest challenges of, and keys to, long-term product adoption. This means regular updates, valuable content, excellent support, and transparent communication to keep everyone informed, assisted, and interested. And, of course, taking advantage of user feedback to continually improve your product to keep it relevant and valuable to your users.

This is where, as a Product Manager, you need to work cross-functionality to ensure you have a holistic product adoption strategy. It’s here that you’ll need to work with Customer Success, Account Management, and Customer Support to ensure you have a joined-up view of the whole customer journey and a full understanding of all the touchpoints that contribute to keeping them happy and using the product. 

Measurement and analytics

Just as chefs taste their dishes, adjusting based on flavor, texture, and presentation, you too must measure and analyze how your product is being received. Are your users coming back for seconds, or is the dish not to their liking? This data helps you refine your product adoption strategy for better results.

That’s why it’s crucial to track specific metrics and KPIs related to user engagement, retention, and satisfaction, like your daily or monthly active users. Tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Heap all offer really useful data about how your users are interacting with your product. By gorging yourself on these details, you can determine what’s working and what needs work, helping you make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategy.

Advocacy and referral programs

This is that five-star review in the NYT, and all the Instagram pics influencers take of your new tasty treat. It’s the satisfied diner who raves about their meal to all their friends, drawing them in to experience your delicious dishes for themselves. This is the organic spread of product love, the ultimate compliment to the chef.

Encouraging and incentivizing your users to share their positive experiences can bring in a swathe of new ones, and can help to reinforce the value of your product (especially for things like social media apps that live or die on drawing in networks of people). If someone publicly celebrates your product, effectively lending it their own good name and social cachet, they tend to become even more invested in proving its value and defending its usefulness.

How can feedback and data help you refine your product adoption strategy?

Just like the secret process behind a chef’s signature dish, developing your product adoption strategy is as much a science as it is an art. Every taste test and stir helps to understand what your product needs to be as palatable as possible. Does it need more salt? A simpler sign-in process? A pinch of herbs? A new integration? That’s how the feedback and data you gather can guide you in tweaking your recipe until it’s just right.

Stirring in user feedback

User feedback tells you whether anyone is enjoying what you’re dishing out. Some might want it spicier, some less, while others love it just the way it is.

Listening to your users is crucial because one person’s tasty chicken satay starter is another person’s hospital trip. It’s about finding that balance that pleases most and delights many. You can gather this feedback through direct conversations, surveys, or observing how they interact with your product (either directly or with session tracking tools) – each piece of feedback is a gold nugget that can make your product better if you use it right.

Some approaches that might help include:

• Regularly conducting user interviews – Direct conversations with users can give a deeper look into how they use the product and the challenges they face.
• Implementing feedback loops – Make it easy within the product for users to provide feedback at any point in their journey.
• Analyzing support tickets – Customer support interactions are a goldmine of information on common user issues and areas where the product might be lacking.

Measuring with data analytics

Data analytics gives you precise readings of what’s happening with your product. How many people are coming back for seconds? Which features are, like garlic bread, the most loved?

This data is your reality check, ensuring you’re not just making something to our taste but to our users’ liking. Tools like Google Analytics and the others listed above are like your high-tech kitchen gadgets, helping you measure every aspect of your product’s success, from prep to plate.

Some effective strategies include:

• Setting clear KPIs – Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that align with your product adoption goals to focus your analysis efforts.
• Segmentation: Analyze data based on user segments to understand different behaviors and preferences within your user base.
• Iterative experiments – Conduct experiments to test your hypotheses about product changes and their impact on user behavior, using data to inform your decisions.

Blending feedback and data

The real magic happens when you blend feedback with data. For instance, if the feedback suggests that your users find a particular feature confusing, checking the data on feature usage can confirm the issue.

This enables you to work out how to refine that feature based on user suggestions and data analysis and then to keep checking back with both feedback and analytics to see what difference your changes have made.

Real-world examples of product adoption strategies that worked

Now I’m going to serve out some proven product adoption strategies, sprinkled with a dash of real-world examples, just to keep things spicy and interesting:

Gamifiying your onboarding

Think of it as turning the chore of learning how to use a new app into a fun, engaging game. You know, like when you turn cleaning up after dinner into a dance party for the kids or write yourself a quest log for the day rather than a to-do list.

Duolingo does this beautifully. They make learning a new language addictive by rewarding you with points, levels, and virtual high-fives. Challenges, rewards, and milestones can really help to engage and motivate users new and old.

Here at ProdPad we take a similar approach with our free trial. Our users can earn extra days of trial time when they complete various onboarding tasks. It’s a strategy that has proven very successful for us! Sign up for a trial today and see how it works for yourself. 

Personalize your onboarding

Customize each dish to suit the dietary preferences of your guests (like their job roles, industries, and specific needs) to provide a more relevant and engaging introduction to your product.

Spotify does a great job of this by mixing up playlists that feel like they were curated just for you, right from your first login. Soon enough they get you wondering why you even made playlists yourself in the first place.

Provide interactive walkthroughs

This is like offering cooking classes where you get to make your meal under the guidance of a professional chef. Instead of reading a recipe book, you’re in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, learning by doing.

Ever noticed how Canva guides you through designing your first graphic? It’s so seamless that before you know it, you’re creating masterpieces, feeling like a pro designer without ever having attended art school.

Here at ProdPad, we have a few ways of doing this, from offering demos from members of our team, as well as a live Sandbox, populated with data, where you can play around with the product to see how it will help you.

Build a community around your product

This is like those supper clubs where everyone shares a love for gourmet food. It’s not just about eating; it’s about connecting, sharing recipes, and learning from each other. A user community that provides support, allows for the sharing of ideas and gives a space for providing feedback fosters a sense of belonging and loyalty among your users.

GitHub has cultivated a massive community of developers by providing them with a platform that doesn’t just host projects but also fosters collaboration and learning. They’ve created an ecosystem where users can contribute to each other’s work, offer feedback, and share insights, all within the context of their product.

Offer incentives for early adoption

Ever seen a new restaurant offering deals to bring people in? After all, who can say no to a free dessert or a half-price bottle of bubbles? Discounts, extended trials, or the chance to test out exclusive features can really help to draw in the early crowds.

Dropbox used to entice its users with extra storage space for every friend they invited, turning them into their most passionate marketers.

Provide continuous user education and support

Offering comprehensive resources, tutorials, and customer support to educate users about your product ensures they can overcome any obstacles they come across, and also clues them in about new features, and how to use them.

That’s the kind of ongoing support and learning tools companies like Semrush offer, not only providing one of the industry standard SEO tools but also a comprehensive knowledge base in the form of their Semrush Academy content. It’s so effective that it’s basically required reading for people entering the industry.

Feedback loops and product iteration

It’s akin to tweaking your grandma’s secret recipe based on what your dinner guests liked most about it. Implementing mechanisms for collecting user feedback and rapidly iterating on your product based on what you find out will help to meet your users’ needs better and faster.

Spotify (again!) is always tuning its playlists and recommendations based on feedback and usage data, ensuring that the more you listen, the better it gets at being DJ to your life’s soundtrack.

There you have it – a veritable feast of strategies that have helped products you probably use to go from being unknowns to must-haves on the menu.

Upcoming trends in product adoption strategies

The world of product adoption is always evolving, and there are some pretty exciting trends on the horizon.

AI and machine learning

Think about how Netflix keeps getting better at knowing what you want to watch next. That’s AI and machine learning doing its thing, getting smart about what you like. Companies are getting better at using this tech to figure out what you might enjoy or find useful, even before you do. So, when it comes to getting folks on board with your product, AI done right could help it be so spot-on with what each user needs that it feels like magic.

Voice and conversational interfaces 

More and more, we’re just speaking up to get things done. “Hey, Siri, turn on the lights” or “Alexa, play some chill music.” Products that respond to people talking, and even being a part of that conversation, are becoming a big deal. It’s all about making it super easy to use something without even lifting a finger.

AR and VR

Picture this: instead of reading about a travel destination, you’re suddenly transported there, feeling the breeze, and hearing the sounds, all from the comfort of your couch. Products are already becoming something you can experience before you ever make a purchase, like test-driving a car, trying on clothes in a virtual fitting room, or walking around a house in 3D.

Learning and sharing with others

As stuff gets more complex, having a place to learn the ropes and share tips with others is becoming key. YouTube, Reddit, Quora, and all sorts of bespoke forums are where it’s at. They might not be brand new, but they are increasing in popularity when it comes to communities centered around particular products. It’s like having a massive group of like-minded friends all figuring it out together, which makes trying something new less of a solo adventure and more of a group journey. One of us!

Digging into the data

With all the analytics tools on the market now, companies can get super smart about what works and what doesn’t, almost in real time. And again, AI could play a larger and larger role in this, providing detailed analysis quicker and faster than ever before.

Being good to the planet and each other

People care more than ever about products being kind to the earth and fair to the folks making them. Products that nail this are winning hearts and minds, big time.

Subscribing instead of buying

You know how you can subscribe to movies or your favorite snacks? That’s happening with more and more types of products. It’s all about keeping you hooked with great stuff on the regular, instead of just a one-off purchase. It’s also why Home Depot only really sells annual plants. You’ve gotta keep ‘em coming back for more.

So, there we have it – a glimpse into the present and future of product adoption strategies, seasoned with a bit of imagination and a lot of anticipation. The key will be to keep experimenting, stay adaptable, and always, always keep the user at the heart of everything we do. Let’s toast to that future, shall we?

Takeaway (get it?)

We’ve explored the essential ingredients that make product adoption strategies successful, the emerging trends that are shaping the future, and the timeless techniques that bring products and users together in perfect harmony.

As we dab our sweaty brows and, like Mr Creosote, refuse just one more wafer-thin mint after this delightful culinary journey through the landscapes of product adoption, remember this: the key to a memorable meal – or a successful product – is not just in the quality of the ingredients but in the passion of the chef. It’s all about understanding your diners, experimenting with new flavors, and always being ready to adapt the recipe based on the feedback you receive.

The future of product adoption promises to be a blend of tradition and innovation, like a vegan steak tartare. As we look ahead, let’s carry forward the lessons learned and the insights gained, ready to meet the evolving tastes of our users with creativity, empathy, and a dash of daring.

So, let’s raise a glass to that future – a future where your product isn’t just used, but loved; where your users aren’t just numbers, but members of your community; and where the journey of product adoption isn’t just a process, but an adventure. Let’s keep cooking up something special, shall we?

The post Product Adoption Strategy: How to Get Your Users Craving More appeared first on ProdPad.

While it may not be obvious at first blush, there is a recurring theme across all these value paths: productivity.

The highest form of leverage that B2B software can offer to an enterprise is productivity. An improved ability to effectively and efficiently run the business is the intended outcome of all B2B software purchases. And running the business could manifest as any number of workflows, across any number of personas, involving any number of tools. So where does one begin?

As always, research is the ideal route, but we need to scope down the problem space from something as broad as enterprise productivity. In this post we identify an emerging organizational shift that product managers building B2B software should be aware of; more and more companies are becoming aware that team-level (vs individual-level) productivity is the real point of leverage. The team (vs a user in isolation) has become the atomic unit in an enterprise, and there is tremendous product opportunity in enabling intra-team and inter-team collaboration. An example of intra-team collaboration would be a product pod consisting of a PM, UX designer, and an engineer reviewing wireframes as part of a scoping discussion, while an example of an inter-team would be a product pod and marketing team coordinating on a blog post that includes a recorded product demo.

When conducting research into potential new product opportunities for your B2B software, consider not only your core user but also adjacent personas. Power users don’t operate in a vacuum; for every creator and champion heavily using your product, there is a consumer and beneficiary also being pulled into your ecosystem. In fact, this adjacent user may not even be part of the org chart at your customer, but they are part of the workflow that spans the extended enterprise (think contractors, partners, integrators).

As a product builder in B2B software, identifying points of intersection between core-user friction and team-level collaboration can turn up opportunities for enterprise-wide value. And such problems to dive into and innovate around are great items to put on a roadmap once you’ve ditched the timeline view.

If embarking on an exploration around team-level productivity, one thing to keep in mind is an inherent tension between user-perceived vs buyer-perceived product value in the realm of B2B software. This is a longer topic for a future post, but trends like the decentralization of purchase decisions, usability expectations of enterprise software, and product-led growth all point to a future where users wield more power in the ultimate purchase decision.

If you’re interested in learning more about what ProdPad has to offer with regards to synthesizing feedback and lean roadmapping, please check out the ProdPad Sandbox, a pre-loaded product management setup where you can see ProdPad in action at your own pace.

And if you enjoyed this guest post from our former and future webinar collaborator Ibrahim Bashir, you can read more of his writings here, as well as sign up for his upcoming cohort-based course on scaling B2B products here. 

The post Product Value in B2B Software appeared first on ProdPad.

But then we’d all spend the next few weeks trying to hit the deadline we’d set ourselves. The product development team would be inundated with questions and demands from sales and marketing, from senior management, who all want to know when they’re going to be ready. 

We’ve all done it, haven’t we? Overestimated our abilities, underestimated how much time something would take, and then found we can’t get it ready in the time we’ve allowed.

The big problem with this all-too common big bang approach to a product launch is that it stacks two contrasting and mismatched projects together. The marketing project that goes with a launch is all about tying campaigns to specific dates, whereas the development project is more of an art than a science – where you really want to avoid specific dates because you don’t know how long it may take to get a product ready for launch. This ‘hard launch’ makes for friction between teams, half-completed products that no one is happy with, flagging morale, in short everything you’d normally want to avoid when launching a product.

A soft launch is a better bet

This is why I believe it’s important for product managers always to advocate for a soft launch. Rather than trying to coordinate a development release with market announcements, consider going live with the new feature before making a big marketing splash. When you’re confident in the quality of the code, and that it solves the problem in the way you hoped, you can go to market confident that your product will hit the mark and be well received by your customer base.

There are different ways of doing a soft launch. You can beta test, add feature flags so that you can turn bits of the functionality on and off, pick a cohort of users to test, and so on. There’s more on soft launches in this blog, Planning for Success – How to Master Release Planning. A soft launch is also less expensive, plus it allows you to test the market and get customer feedback. 

Product managers should show the rest of the organization what the benefits of a soft launch can be. You can set the best expectations, and provide real clarity on what can be marketed and when. No one has to cross their fingers and hope that the timing will be right, and marketers can plan and invest resources better. 

Now, at ProdPad, we take a soft approach to product launches. We have a release train, with a release every Wednesday. The product team preps our marketers so that they know what’s coming out next and they have the pick of new features to include in their campaigns, planned around market trends. It certainly works for us – and it could work for you too!

The post Why Should Product Managers Always Push for a Soft Launch? appeared first on ProdPad.

We’re all familiar with the term, ‘passing the buck’ and how people evade or reassign responsibility to somewhere or someone else. Senior execs do it to product teams all the time. 

I’ve seen it happen to many product people in different ways over the years.  Perhaps you can spot some of the patterns below in your own organization and take action before they have an impact on your work.

Product management always takes the hit

You see it in companies where the bosses set expectations like unrealistic deadlines and then pressure the product team to stick to them. The team then has to struggle to get things out on time, even though it wasn’t their call in the first place.

Product teams could pass the buck to the development team – after all, they’re the ones who build and come up with the estimates that always seem to slip. But PMs always seem to take the hit for everyone else – and I think proudly so – I wouldn’t want to be advocating for a role that was known for throwing its teammates under the bus. Rather, PMs are known for defending the time of their developers (and designers), helping to get them breathing room and much-needed air cover. 

On the flip side, however, product managers often don’t get the same consideration from the rest of their organization, with the most notable offenders being sales teams and the executive team.

Sales teams may well ask for features to be built, rather than selling what they have. Saying they can’t sell the product until X feature is delivered puts all the pressure on the product team – but the sales team should take responsibility and learn to sell or reposition what they have. It’s easier for salespeople to expect the product team to add what they feel is missing. (And don’t get me started on the salespeople who sell things that don’t exist and dictate the roadmap!)

Executives with a badly formed business plan or model put the product team in a difficult position. A classic example is the agency trap, where the company (usually for short-term cash gains) accepts custom project/client work, while also expecting the product to develop at speed. But the product team only has so much time, and can’t do client project work and product discovery and development work at the same time, especially if the client work leads to a stream of deadlines to hit. And it’s not the product team’s decision or fault that they’ve ended up in a delivery-focused way of working. It’s been foisted on them by poor decisions at the executive level.

Unreasonable reliance on the product team

To be clear, the management team is responsible for creating a viable business and workable company strategy. But sometimes they over-rely on the product team to create something that doesn’t yet exist, in timeframes that they can’t know are reasonable (let’s be real: you and the dev team are still working out the scope of this thing, never mind how long it will be before you’re able to deliver). By doing this, management absolves itself of the responsibility of creating and maintaining a viable business, brushing it off as the product team’s problem with no consideration of whether it’s achievable. I’ve seen some teams given ridiculously tall orders.

A company strategy should encompass a realistic product strategy (plus realistic marketing strategies, tech strategies, and so on). It’s not a good strategy if it relies on miracle workers to make it happen or if it’s dogged by insurmountable problems.  The execs shouldn’t just ‘pass the buck’ on their bad decisions or bad planning to their product team and hope that the team figures it out. 

How do you stop it?

The product team must call out this passing the buck when they see it. To be able to do this product people must understand the wider company strategy and where the product strategy fits in it – it’s one of the most valuable things a product person can do. 

They should also understand who’s had a say in product strategy and where some of its assumptions came from. Was the strategy handed to the product team, or did they play an active role in defining how they could help the company reach its goals? 

If there’s a sense that others are ‘passing the buck’ to the product team, then call it out and set boundaries. If you don’t, then the product team risks having more work pushed at them, setting them up for failure further down the line. For example, if you keep agreeing to custom client work, to the detriment of discovery work, you set a precedent that you will always accept project work…  and the core product will never progress and the company won’t move towards its ultimate goals. 

Calling it out helps management and other team members to see the broken parts, like missing resources or misdirected efforts, so that they can help to correct them.

The post How Passing the Buck Sets a Product Team Up to Fail appeared first on ProdPad.

Instead, I’d be proud if your first roadmap looked something like this:

Why? Because a roadmap is a prototype for your product strategy.

As simple as you can articulate and test. And in the case of a product strategy, that’s usually outlining some key problem areas or opportunities you think are noteworthy, and laying them out in the order you think they should be tackled.

That’s your first roadmap.

Is that what you’re going to go DO and build now? Oh hell, no! That would be incredibly presumptuous. On par with taking your back-of-napkin sketch of an untested idea and ordering a developer to go build it. 

Your first roadmap is just the beginning

That first product roadmap is a starting point for learning. Now that you’ve laid out your assumptions, you’ve got a handy way to check them with other stakeholders and see what holds water or not. 

And your first roadmap is going to be imperfect. Your stakeholders are going to pick holes in it. Product managers need to have thick skin for exactly this reason. You’re not here to be right. You’re here to facilitate the discussions to get us all to better.

Over time, and over the course of lots of useful and enlightening discussions, you’ll start to unpick what the real problems and opportunities are, and what order your team can tackle them in to be most likely to achieve your objectives and reach your ultimate vision. Over time, you’ll iterate on your roadmap, and move from the hot mess you started with, to a cohesive strategic plan.

It’ll become more granular and useful to a wider range of stakeholders. It’ll be more robust, as more and more eyes and brains from around the organization sense-check it. And It’ll look more like the roadmaps we showed you in your ProdPad demo when you first got on board. 

It’ll never be 100% perfect though. That’s a bit of control that we’ve all just got to let go of. After all, we don’t have perfect information, so we can’t craft a perfect plan. 

It starts with picking the right format!

Our go-to here at ProdPad is the Now-Next-Later roadmap format because it has that sense of imperfect information built right in: You’ve got higher granularity of information about things right in front of you, and less for things further and further out on the horizon. 

Your roadmap is meant to have this flexibility built in so that as you learn, you adapt. Your roadmap flexes and is updated based on new information, and so what was considered the best roadmap for the information of the time is set aside to make way for a constantly iterated version of that roadmap, always showing the best version for the information at hand. 

So always remember: Your first roadmap is not going to be perfect. Far from it! Embrace the fluidity of the imperfect assumptions, nowhere near set in stone. 

Your final roadmap won’t be perfect either. It’ll just be the best representation of what you know at the time, which should be informed by all the insights and inputs you have access to as a well-connected product manager. 

Let go of perfect. Get roadmapping instead. 

The post Building a Product Roadmap: Your First One Shouldn’t Be Perfect! appeared first on ProdPad.

Adding product features is fun and addictive, and it’s how the product management lifecycle works in many companies. If you’re measured in velocity and burn-down rates, then you’re optimized to deliver features. But we know that a bunch of features doesn’t necessarily make the best product. There’s more to do once the last lines of code are pushed out and developers have closed that ticket in Jira.

Let’s look at the steps involved in launching a product feature, from release to post-launch, and at how feature flagging and feedback can maximize your chances of success.

Beta modes and the definition of Done 

Development teams often refer to the “Definition of Done” to describe a completed piece of work. It might include unit tests, documentation, and any integration work that needs to happen. But although it’s done in development, that doesn’t mean it’s done. There’s a lot more to do before you can call the feature a success.

For example, you might want to manage the feature as part of a Beta test with a select group of customers. You can glean many insights in a relatively ‘safe’ space by releasing features behind a feature flag, and many product teams build this in as an essential ‘post-build’ stage in their product workflow.

Beta modes are a great way to test criteria for your product feature’s future greatness:

1. Does your product feature work as expected? Do customers use it as expected?

Use Beta mode to check that customers use the feature as expected. Sometimes users have surprising workarounds or use your product in ways that you didn’t think about! You should also check that it functions as expected, from a customer’s first log-in to when they get the feature to work.

There’s no test quite like production, and it’s your chance to see how your new addition fits into the bigger picture.

2. Can it be accessed as expected? Is it easy to navigate to and activate?

Features often flop because they’re not easily found. Launching a feature in Beta first allows you to see if users can find it in the product.

Don’t just rely on a marketing push to tell the world about your product feature. Marketing campaigns have time limits and may not hit your users at the right moment. Instead, the feature should be discoverable as part of a customer’s existing journey. If they skip over it, you should think about how to identify when the customer is likely to have the problem, and put access to the feature somewhere more obvious.

This doesn’t mean you put all your features at a user’s fingertips at all times. That would make for a hugely busy interface! Think about when the user is likely to need to use the new feature, and progressively disclose more functionality as they dive deeper.

3. Does your feature solve the problem? Do users find it valuable?

Many teams use their Beta phase as a staging period, and not as a huge opportunity to dive into learning mode. Don’t waste your chance! Talk to customers to find out if they’re getting real value out of the product feature. Ask questions like ‘How would you feel if you could no longer use this feature?’ to figure out if there’s a fit.

Connect your Customer Feedback Portal to your product, and capture feedback on new features right where they sit in your app. It’s important to make this flow as smooth as possible so you don’t miss valuable insights.

Learn about what customers love, and what irks them. Your first try at a new feature won’t be perfect, so embrace the feedback and learn from it. If customers find it valuable, listen to how they describe it. This will be the baseline for your marketing material later.

If they don’t find it valuable, either iterate until they do, or kill the feature!

4. Are you able to support it?

While developers might have a Definition of Done that includes technical documentation, a Beta phase will teach you what you need to do in order to support the feature. 

If the feature turns out to be too complicated to support and maintain then be ready to turn it off. It’s a lot easier to determine and do this at this stage, rather than later.

5. Are they willing to pay for it?

Most of the Beta programs I’ve seen involve the free use of the features in order to collect feedback and start to get customers on board.

But this doesn’t mean you can’t and shouldn’t ask questions about pricing. If customers find your product feature valuable, find out if they will pay for it, either as an add-on to your usual pricing or as part of a larger price increase that represents the growing value your product will soon provide.

Are there other business drivers that you can attribute to the new feature? Perhaps you can see research and usage data that indicates users will churn less, or that referrals will increase, as a result of your feature.

Compare your insights about the potential upside to the costs you’re also learning about, and paint a picture of whether this is a healthy feature to bring out of Beta and on to the next stage.

Beyond Beta is just the beginning…

Once you’ve thoroughly aired a feature in Beta, you must make the call on whether it lives or dies.

If it dies, record your decision and the insights that led to it in your ProdPad account. You never know when you’ll need to look back on these again. You can revisit the feature in the future or prove a point that something’s been tried before, so you don’t repeat your mistakes!

If it lives, it’s time to take it to your marketing team.

You can use the customer feedback which describes how the feature is valuable to craft a compelling story. 

After all, the best way to speak to your customers is to use the voice of your customers. 

Your launch material should cover things like:

• What is the feature?
• Who does it benefit?
• How will this make their lives easier, or better in some way?
• Why should they care about it now that you’ve built it for them? How do they start to use the new capability?

It’s no good making a great product that neatly solves a problem for users if no one knows about it. You should test and iterate on the marketing copy just as much as you do your features themselves.

Don’t worry if you have to iterate after your ‘big launch’. Any initial marketing will likely increase traffic over a couple of days, but the spike won’t last. The real value is in whether the feature continues to attract people to your product as a whole.

Your features aren’t there to drive spikes in your traffic, but to build the case for why your product is the right solution to your customers’ problem.

So use your launch-day data and beyond to measure how well your product feature is received and understood. Be ready to change your feature pages, on-boarding emails, and in-app guidance to reshape how you talk about the feature, so it has the best chance of living a long, healthy life.

We’ve all been there. We build a feature, launch it and forget about it because we’re too busy building more new features or tackling other marketing initiatives. Building is only the beginning. To succeed, you need to be able to iterate in both development and marketing.

That’s why it’s important to take time to consider how new features will fit into all aspects of your post-development workflow, including your beta phase and launch phases, before you release them. It means you can make sure every decision – from positioning and pricing through to customer on-boarding and user experience design – is in line with what customers want most from your company.

Want to get better outcomes for your feature launches? See how ProdPad can make sure your feature experiments come to life and provide you all the insights you need to continuously improve your products.

The post Don’t waste your new Product Feature – Tips for a Successful Launch appeared first on ProdPad.

There’s often more than one way to solve a problem. To avoid wasting resources, you need an effective way to assess feedback and understand customer problems. Here are my top tips for creating a framework to make managing feedback manageable.

1 – Separate user feedback from ideas

Feedback is a piece of evidence to understand the root problem. It doesn’t have to represent something you are going to work on immediately. So, you shouldn’t treat feedback in the same way as you would an idea in your product backlog. 

How are feedback and ideas different?

Ideas:

• Normally at the Epic level
• Represent opportunities/solutions/experiments
• As product teams, you only want one version of an idea in your backlog

Feedback:

• Summarises problems and pain points
• Naturally some will be requests, like a specific integration for example
• As product teams, you want lots of feedback of the same thing as it shows evidence of need

You should also think about the language when asking for feedback. Terms like ‘feature requests’ are misleading. Customers start thinking about solutions not problems, because it implies they can request an actual feature.

Below are some real-life examples of negative nicknames for an organization’s product backlog. This negativity arises from lumping feedback and ideas together, which leads to frustration from colleagues who work closely with customer feedback as they can’t understand why their feedback seemingly isn’t being listened to. This can be rectified by creating separate processes for managing feedback and ideas. 

A transparent product workflow will alleviate this frustration, showing the customer-facing parts of the business what stage ideas have reached and how decisions are made around prioritisation. They can also see all the other great things going through discovery and being built to meet customers’ needs. Below is an example workflow, including discovery, development and released processes, to help with this.

Idea discovery workflow

• New idea 
• In Review – Indicates you are reviewing/validating the idea.
• Needs More Info – Indicates the idea requires more information/is being spec’d out.
• Approved for Development – Indicates the idea has been approved for development.
• Queued for Dev – The idea has been sent to the dev team and is being prepared for a sprint.
• In Development/In Progress – The idea is with the dev team and is being worked on.
• QA – The idea is being QA’d.
• Released – The idea has been released.
• Not Doing – The idea won’t be done.
• Duplicate – There is a duplicate in the system.
• Failed Experiment – The experiment failed.

At the bottom of this post, you can find a framework for creating your own workflow for managing feedback. By creating two separate, but connected processes, this will create more understanding and harmony in your organization.

2 – Understanding customers’ problems

User feedback comes into the business from many different places, and it can be difficult to know where to start. If you’ve already separated feedback from a new idea, then you’ve taken that first step to making it easier. But it’s important not to take the feedback at face value, and instead to understand the real problems. If you don’t, you could end up making expensive mistakes.

Often user feedback can be very specific and requires research to fully understand the problem at its root. It can be difficult to do this, especially for colleagues outside Product when this type of feedback comes from a conversation focused elsewhere, such as a sales or success call.

The key thing is to remember that you’re trying to understand the problem at the root of the feedback. You should focus on understanding the WHY, rather than HOW they would like something e.g. the solution they have decided they would like. 

Here are some tips for understanding these customer problems better. 

• The five whys – keep asking why to dig into the deeper problem
• Understand their current frustrations
• Ask them to show you how they currently do this
• Get more specifics on what they are trying to achieve

If it’s not appropriate to follow up with these questions during a call that is focused on achieving a different outcome, get used to going back to customers to dig in further.

3 – Collect varied user feedback

There’s plenty of direct and indirect ways that feedback can come into the business, so you need to make sure you have an effective way to gather them. 

What do you currently treat as feedback?

Feedback, whether quantitative or qualitative, comes into your business from a wide range of sources:

• Support desk
• Sales calls
• Internal stakeholders
• Customer Success
• User research 
• Data insights

You need to make sure that all feedback is collected and made accessible to help with conducting different areas of the business.

Qualitative feedback can come from:

• Support tickets
• Feedback portal
• Sales calls
• Customer Success calls
• Face to face meetings
• User research

Qualitative is one part of the story, but you also need to try and understand how your product is actually being used, which is where Quantitative data comes in. There are lots of tools that can help you understand usage, such as Sherlock, Amplitude, or Mixpanel. Think about what data you want to see, which may include:

• Product usage
• What would you expect? Importance of the features/functionality?
• No. of logins
• Frequency

Identify what you want to understand:

• What does good look like?
• What do you expect from an activated account?
• Drill down into that data
• How can you try and tweak that metric?

How easily can customers share feedback with you?

Consider how to make it easy to gather feedback from these areas and centralise it for the Product team. We collect feedback in our Sales and Success tools and integrate them in ProdPad to collate it in one place. 

Think also about whether you’re making it as easy as possible to hear from your customers. I always use in-app chat as the first point of call for help and so I hate it if I’m asked to join a forum when I’ve just shared my feedback with someone in the company. The business should be joined up enough to tell the product team, otherwise they miss out on my feedback. Your customers’ time is valuable, don’t put blockers in the way of gathering useful feedback!

With all this feedback, both qualitative and quantitative, you’re building evidence of need for the potential ideas and opportunities that Product are exploring.

4 – Assign someone to be responsible for feedback

It’s great to have a single space to consolidate feedback, but the only real way to get it to work for you is by developing a proper process around it. You should make someone responsible for keeping on top of it so it doesn’t become unmanageable. 

Companies approach this differently. In some, Customer Success owns the feedback process while others keep it in Product, with internal stakeholders feeding into it, as they know the ideas backlog best. I don’t think it matters which approach you take as long as you consider the following: 

• Where will responsibility sit?
• Which team?
• Who has capacity?
• Those interested

And consider the following when you set up your feedback process:

• How much time you should set aside?
• When/how often feedback should be reviewed alongside ideas?
• How you map out the process?
• Will there be a place to collect feedback?
• Is there a feedback review process?
• Will the feedback sit with a sit or existing idea?

5 – Communicate

To help manage expectations it is essential to communicate your process around feedback both internally to sales, customer success, marketing, support teams, etc, as well as to external clients, customers, end users. By sharing and opening up processes, everyone can see how they feed into it, and feel heard. Therefore, they will appreciate how Product is making decisions on what to build next, with customer problems and business objectives front and centre.

Product teams can do this by sharing their roadmap so they can understand the focus for Now, Next & Later, and how this relates to customer problems. As a Customer Success Manager, for example, having access to this means I can understand the direction of the product and what ideas are being reviewed to resolve those problems, so I can discuss with customers.

How easy is it for colleagues outside Product to discuss the direction of the product?

Involving people outside Product in the feedback process can help to reduce the number of questions the product team is asked. If the roadmap and ideation workflow are open, people can easily access information for themselves. For example, I can easily see our roadmap, understand the direction of the product and what the status are of those ideas being reviewed to resolve those problems, for example if they are in discovery, development or released.

How to build your framework to manage user feedback

1. Show benefits internally of having this process
2. Understand the problems internally 
3. Identify where to get feedback/data from
4. Consolidate in a centralised location
5. Ideally connect it with your product discovery backlog
6. Allocate responsibilities to regularly review & manage feedback
7. Plan how to communicate & close feedback loop

This blogpost comes from a talk given at the Product-Led Growth conference. For more information on the topics covered around customer feedback, please get in touch. I would be very happy to chat more about this.

Below you can find the slides from my presentation.

The post Tapping Into Your Market: Making Sense of User Feedback appeared first on ProdPad.

Top Down

What do we mean by a “top down” approach to planning? It’s the information provided to the product manager by the senior levels of the organisation (or if they’re lucky, produced in collaboration with the leadership team). The first of these is the vision.

Vision

Often the company’s founder/CEO will have a vision which acts as a guiding star for the long-term focus of the product. Steve Jobs once said: “If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.”

So vision is quite lofty. It means there’s little you can actually execute on, but knowing the ultimate goal for the product can help you to make day-to-day decisions about which problems to solve, and also help you decide what NOT to build. For example, implementing a gamified onboarding solution is really important if your vision is to build an B2B internally-facing self-service SaaS application. However, as your product vision is to enable internal stakeholders to achieve results, there is no value in adding a feature for customer communication, as that’s not part of the vision. The vision for your tool (i.e. being an internally facing self-service application) has guided the decision-making on which features to build and which features are out of scope.

However you may decide not to build in an emailing service if it’s not the core focus of the application.

Objectives

Where vision gives you your guiding star, objectives tell you whether you’re moving in the right direction *before* you get there. Imagine you’re given a destination but you have no information about the distance remaining while you’re traveling, that’s what it’s like if you have a vision but no objectives. You have no idea if you’re going in the right direction.

Objectives take the form of measurable OKRs, KPIs, metrics and so on – whatever term you like to use – because you need to know that the work you’re doing will deliver the right outcome. Imagine you have decided that your objective is to increase user growth or reduce churn. Over time, you can see how the work you do affects those metrics, and adjust your plans depending on the results. Objectives are part of your “top down” planning process – they are the guardrails that help you to stay on track.

By measuring key objectives like customer acquisition, revenue, conversion, retention, engagement, user growth, and usage, we can see which areas of the business are performing well and which areas need some attention – and that means we can prioritise which objectives to focus on.

Initiative

You have a vision and you know how to measure your progress towards it – but that doesn’t tell you what to deliver. To be successful, you need to solve customer problems, and this means you need an Initiative.

An initiative is a high-level description of a problem you want to solve, something you want to build. It’s still not detailed enough for your delivery teams to execute on, but it gives them a better idea of what they’re building – so that together with the objective to which it contributes, you have “What” and “Why”.

Let’s go back to our earlier example of the user growth objective. There are many things you could build that contribute to an improvement in user numbers – perhaps a referral program that leverages your existing user base or a redesign of your marketing site to increase the conversion of visitors to subscribers. All of these are initiatives – high-level plans for work you could do to improve your metrics and get closer to your vision.

Building Your First Roadmap

We should pause here. We have a vision, some objectives and a list of initiatives. We know which objectives are the most important for us to focus on. We now have enough information from our “top down” planning to create our first roadmap. It could look something like this:

So far so good. We’ve built a roadmap, so surely that’s all we need? Unfortunately, the answer is no. You can’t just work from a roadmap, as it means you’re likely to miss many opportunities – changes in the market, new competitors and the like are all missed if you blindly follow a roadmap, even if it’s really well aligned with a vision and tied into objectives.

You wouldn’t and shouldn’t expect your 2018 roadmap to look the same in another 12 months, it’s normal and natural to change it as you learn. This is why you need a flexible format, which gives you the ability to build in any insights gleaned from a bottom-up product management approach where you constantly assess opportunities. This is the only roadmap format that works in practice. In order to make that work, we need to start our “bottom up” planning.

Bottom Up

Our roadmap shows a list of initiatives (the “What”) and the objectives which will be affected when changes are made (the “Why”). In order to execute these initiatives, we need more detail – and we need to be lean and agile – and to be able to adapt our product management approach based on what we learn along the way. That’s why we need to break down those large initiatives into individual changes which are manageable and can be delivered. For that, we need ideas.

Ideas

A list of ideas is a list of changes that may (or may not) be worked on to improve the product – our product backlog. There are always more ideas in our backlog than we have time to deliver – and that’s a good thing, because it forces us to select the ideas for our product that are most likely to bring us (and our customers) success. The godfather of product management, Marty Cagan, calls this the opportunity backlog.

Ideally, an idea should outline the problem, the solution and the expected outcome if the solution is implemented. This information means that the idea’s business impact can be identified. Business impact is a measure of how much benefit users will gain – and therefore the value of the idea to our business. If we have an outline of the solution, we can estimate how much effort is involved in delivering the solution. Having these measures in place gives us the ability to prioritise – we can select the ideas which provide the best return on investment (the quick wins).

Plotting impact vs effort allows us to see the ideas that are quick wins (1), the ones which are valuable but complex (2), the ones which are time sinks (3), and the ones which will only be valuable if delivered as a cohesive group (4).

Of course, once we have identified that the idea is worth delivering, we need to ensure there is enough information for the development team to pick it up and action it. That requires another level of detail, with user stories, designs, functional specs all part of our idea’s definition. (More on that in another of our blogs, here).

So how do you obtain the ideas in the first place? They can come from users of your product, potential customers or internal stakeholders – or maybe even as a result of research you carry out into the market and your competitors. If an idea has arisen from customer feedback, then tracking the source of that feedback is valuable, as it can help you to understand the depth of the problem you want to solve.

Customer Feedback

The chances are that you already have access to customer feedback via a number of sources. It’s vital you make the most of it, and use it to identify trends, establish business value, build confidence with your customers and drive feature adoption.

But how do you achieve that? There are a number of best practices which we in the ProdPad team recommend and take advantage of ourselves.

Collect Customer Feedback

Think about all the interactions between your company and your customers. Your sales team, your customer success/support teams, operations, professional services, marketing, user experience – they all have contact with customers and end users, and hear lots of snippets of information about how your product is used. They might be using email, Slack, Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce, face-to-face meetings, phone calls – many different ways of communicating. In an ideal world, they would tell you, the product manager, about everything they hear, but as this requires them to deviate from their day job, it needs to be easy! That’s why ProdPad includes lots of way to collect customer feedback – more on that here! However, let’s assume you are building up a backlog of collected feedback and want to maximise its value. How can you do that?

Link Feedback to Ideas

Firstly, you need to connect the collected feedback with the ideas in your backlog. Each Idea is likely to be supported by one or more customer requests – in fact having good market fit means you’re probably hearing the same thing over and over again. Imagine you have two ideas in your backlog, one of which is supported by feedback from 12 different customers, and one which is supported by 45 different customers. You can then understand which idea is more valuable to your customers and your business.

Collaborate With Feedback Contributors

If you’re ready to start developing a new idea what’s the best way to ensure you’re building the right thing in the right way? Run it past the people who asked for it! As well as helping you with prioritisation, keeping track of the customers who requested a solution to your problem gives you a ready-made list of beta-testers, or contributors to your user testing. Not only will it help you to get the solution right, it also gives your customers a nice, warm glow – they told you about something and you are acting on it, using their input!

Once the feature is delivered, this list of people can also act as your early adopters – so let them know about the new feature when it is released and get adoption off to a great start!

The Advantages of Bringing Everything Together

We’ve talked about the top-down approach, where we take guidance from senior stakeholders and use it to build a high level roadmap – the prototype for our strategy. We’ve also talked about collecting customer feedback and using that to support and help maintain our product backlog. But how do the two planning methods work together?

This is the fun part. Looking at your roadmap, it should be possible to connect ideas in your backlog (particularly those with good evidence from customer feedback) to the initiatives you’ve identified as being worthwhile. That home page redesign you’ve talked about? Well, it looks like you have customer requests for improved navigation, or feedback from your sales team that the sign-up page is too complicated. Maybe someone has mentioned that a video which explains your product would be a big help. All of these fit into your “Home Page Redesign” initiative, and so you are able to marry up the top-down planning with the information you’ve collected from customers and internal stakeholders. This is the best possible outcome, as you’re using the information from the coalface to move in the direction laid out by the company’s leadership.

The result is a roadmap card that looks something like this…

It has high-level information about what is being done and why. It allows for changes in scope to be made – you can add and remove ideas without the need to change the initiative – so your roadmap is both agile and predictable. You can tailor the level of information you share depending on the audience – customers, sales, investors and C-suite may only need to see the objectives and initiatives, whereas development and the marketing team will want to see the detailed Ideas. And you know you’re delivering features that will please your customers while also moving the needles that you need to move.

So, top-down or bottom-up? The answer is both!

Looking for more PM advice? Try our product management blog for more top tips.

The post Product Management Approaches: Top Down, Bottom Up or Both? appeared first on ProdPad.

Take advantage of pre-set filters

Needs more detail

These ideas are just one-liners that could be fleshed out further. They probably need a little more detail so the rest of the team understands what was asked. Feel free to @mention colleagues to pull them into the conversation and get their feedback on the beginnings of the idea.

New Ideas Today

These ideas have been submitted in the last 24 hours. They probably need you to have a quick look, add your thoughts, or maybe get it on the roadmap.

Not updated recently

These ideas are at risk of being forgotten. Just have a quick look through at the end of each week. Even if you just add a tag or a comment, or answer something simple like ‘What problem is this idea solving’ in the business case, it’s a good step in grooming your product backlog effectively.

Potential Quick Wins

These ideas have a high impact and low effort. These are the ideas you should consider getting spec’d out and sent to development!

Alternatively, you also have access to create your own filters. If there’s a particular product or trend you want to keep your eyes on, save it as a filter and enter triage mode to decide which items you will be moving forward.

Investing in your product backlog pays off. Not only can you attack this vast repository of ideas with a bit more sanity, but you can shake its reputation as a place where ideas go to die.

At ProdPad we practice what we preach. Great feedback and user stories are at the heart of what we build. Tell us about your routine for taking care of the product backlog in the comments below.

The post Re-Introducing Triage Mode for a Tidier Product Backlog appeared first on ProdPad.