December 2013 Summaries

Designing features using Job Stories is a design technique where teams use a granular way to bring the concept of Jobs To Be Done into product development, focusing on causality, anxieties, and motivations. This approach helps teams understand customer consumption or non-consumption patterns, and craft solutions that resolve specific jobs. By reframing feature development around Job Stories, teams can design products that meet customers' needs more effectively, without relying on Personas or User Stories, which have limitations such as ignoring context, situations, and anxieties. The technique involves identifying high-level jobs, smaller jobs that help resolve them, observing current problem-solving processes, creating Job Stories to investigate causality, anxieties, and motivations, and then designing features, UI, and UX to solve those Jobs. This approach helps teams design for real people, rather than just abstract attributes, and uncouples implementation from motivations and outcomes.

The author of this article, Clement Delangue, head of marketing at Mention, shares their experience on increasing the activation rate by 50% for their product. They emphasize the importance of measuring and improving an activation metric, which is a key aspect of user engagement. The author identifies four steps to increase activation rates: letting new sign-ups know they're there for them, letting people know a feature is available, explaining why users should use it, and teaching people how to use it. They attribute their success to using efficient tools like Intercom and clear metrics, without changing the product itself. The article concludes that improving activation can lead to improvements in conversion and churn ratio, ultimately benefiting both businesses and their users.

With the abundance of tools to measure and experiment with cloud software product designs, it's tempting to focus on iterative improvement rather than creative design. However, good product design starts beyond quantifiable metrics and relies on understanding customer needs, storytelling, and designing engaging experiences. Micro-improvements are commercially introverted and don't drive real growth, whereas optimizing for real growth requires making a product that meets customer needs. The pursuit of perfection through accumulation is misleading, as it's about choice and setting design directions. Optimizing for proxies of an outcome rather than the outcome itself can lead to a product design rathole. Funnels are useful for troubleshooting flows but shouldn't be the sole focus. User behavior should be measured, understood, and interpreted, not forced by design. In a startup environment with limited resources, it's crucial to pick one thing to obsess over and only optimize for that one thing, such as increasing acquisition rates.