October 2021 Summaries

The article discusses five essential collaboration strategies for product managers: creating an environment for fresh ideas, enabling open communication and honest feedback, defining clear goals, involving everyone in problem-solving, and negotiating win-win outcomes. It also highlights three important collaboration skills to foster as a product manager: adaptability, willingness to change, and active listening. The strategies aim to improve teamwork and collaboration within the product management process.

User engagement is crucial for businesses as engaged users are more likely to recommend the product, buy more from the business, and contribute positively to its bottom line. An effective user engagement strategy involves understanding the user's context, defining positive and negative app engagements, offering communication opportunities from day one, serving people what they love, focusing on UX and UI design, and following up with human-to-human interaction. Key metrics for measuring user engagement include active time in-app, Net Promoter Score (NPS), user retention rate, and core feature use. Product adoption and engagement tools & tactics can be used to keep users engaged throughout their entire product lifecycle.

In-app tutorials are interactive walkthroughs of what users need to know when they first use a product. They help users reach an "aha!" moment, uncover their job-to-be-done, and often encourage self-serve onboarding. There are three common types of in-app walkthroughs: customer success-led walkthroughs, automated product tours, and tooltips. Out-of-app tutorials include email messages, webinars, and video tutorials. To choose the right type of tutorial for a product, consider resources, onboarding goals, and user preferences. Key elements to pay attention to in designing in-app tutorials are modal backdrops, clear CTAs, staying on-brand with design, managing user expectations, and allowing users to opt-out. To keep users engaged throughout their onboarding journey, highlight a user's job-to-be-done, build knowledge with tooltips, shift strategies based on NPS scores, speak to customers for feedback, and continuously optimize the onboarding process.

User activation is a crucial part of user onboarding strategy. It refers to the moment when new users complete the set of initial onboarding steps for the first time, and involves a series of steps or predefined milestones that need to be completed. The activation rate is a key metric used to measure this process. To improve user activation, it's essential to create personalized activation flows based on user personas and their specific journeys. This can be achieved by using storyboarding techniques to outline the events frame-by-frame and keep track of users' thoughts, expectations, challenges, frustrations, and needs during each activity. Additionally, tactics such as creating effective onboarding product tours, using onboarding checklists for an interactive flow, asking for feedback early on, leveraging in-app feature announcements, and making offers that users can't refuse can help increase activation rates among new and existing users.