In most orgs, it can be hard to justify product qualities that are hard to measure or don't impact growth. 🤔 But your team likely has dozens of ways to make your product more fun, joyous, and delightful! 👾 Pick 1 or 2 and insist that they happen! Then ask these 2 questions… ❶ How can we make this so striking that people can't help but talk about it? True virality boils down to word of mouth. So create experiences that are so striking, so compelling, and so worthy of attention that your users can't help but talk about it! 📢 ❷ How can we build things users don't have to remember to use? We use RICE to score features: Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort. The problem is usually reach: most users will not use most features. So focus on features users don't have to remember to use. Those are gold! 🏆 #startups #product #design #productdesign
you nailed it, have been struggling to prioritize the fun stuff : (
Love this!
Moments of user delight are so real though. Those little often ephemeral moments that unconsciously suck you in. Powerful stuff
That first sentence got me. So true. I went around and around in a previous job trying to justify spending time on one of the primary customer experiences. Because the existing data wasn't good enough to quantify the precise impact down the line, we were willfully ignoring the problem. And then I started my own company. 🙂
Howdy Rahul, just to add to RICE - add a customer component. Picture it like a Pyramid - if you build for the top of the pyramid (low surface area, high penetration and great adoption), you're forced to think about bringing enterprise functionality, the how and why, to more customers. If you build for the bottom of the pyramid (average customer, constraints for time, constraints for expertise, culture....a lot of stuff that pushes out, more that is easy), figuring out how to solve for ecosystem and non-technical challenges, holistically, why market to a wide audience. It keeps people in it, so does the lean method and operationalizing through agile and SWOT, but how so. How so. Monday through Friday conversations get lost. Then people can tend to feel more frantic, and less grounded, less able to see their impact in the business and overall ecosystem.
Spot on about making product delight a non-negotiable! 🚀 We've seen this play out at scale - our most viral features weren't just functional, they were unforgettable.
Creating memorable moments that users naturally want to share can be a game-changer for product adoption and virality. It's smart to prioritize features that seamlessly integrate into users' workflows without requiring conscious effort to remember and use them.
Rahul, thanks for the post!
Founder CEO of Superhuman & Rapportive. Investor in 120+ startups: Placer, Mercury, ClassDojo, Clearbit, EasyPost, Supabase, NexHealth, Circle, Descript, Zip, Hex, Scratchpad, Manifold, Wander, AngelList, Seam…
3moMore here from the latest First Round Capital Review: https://review.firstround.com/25-hard-questions-every-founder-should-ask-themselves/ h/t Jessi Craige Shikman