October 2014 Summaries

Intercom has launched a new feature that integrates with Stripe, allowing businesses to consolidate customer information and make data-driven decisions. By bringing together customer data from multiple sources, Intercom enables companies to prioritize their customers, target effective marketing campaigns, and inform product development decisions. The integration provides access to detailed customer payment history, plan details, and other valuable insights, enabling support teams to focus on paying customers first, marketers to target qualified users with relevant offers, and product managers to categorize feedback by customer type. With the new feature, Intercom aims to help businesses unlock their full potential by leveraging consolidated customer data.

The experience of primary mobile screens being a bank of app icons that lead to independent destinations is dying. Instead, the idea of an app as a publishing tool with related notifications containing content and actions is becoming more important. This shift requires designers to rethink their approach, focusing on systems rather than individual apps or destinations. The concept of cards is emerging as a key design pattern, where content can be presented in a way that's personalized, ranked, and context-aware. Cards can come from various sources, including apps, websites, and even external services like vending machines. This paradigm shift has significant implications for businesses, product design, and user experience, offering opportunities for better discoverability, personalization, and interaction. As people interact with cards presented to them, the system will learn and adapt, creating new competitors and changing who you might think you're competing with. The key takeaways from this emerging trend include designing systems rather than destinations, focusing on responsive design beyond screen size, prioritizing notifications and actions within them, integrating with other services, and embracing a trial-and-error approach to figure out what works and fails.

The text discusses a feature added by Intercom, a customer communication platform, which was initially intended as a "show piece" or map feature to showcase the company's global presence. However, it became popular among customers due to its ability to be shared on social media and at trade shows, rather than being used for its intended purpose of providing geographical information about customer locations. The company learned that by focusing on how the feature was being used, they could improve it by making it more visually appealing and easy to share, ultimately creating a better experience for their customers. This approach is highlighted as a key takeaway in Intercom's fourth book, "Intercom on Jobs-to-be-Done", which aims to help businesses understand what needs customers meet with their product and how to ultimately improve upon that experience.

Google Glass and other technologies are struggling to find their "job" because they have amazing technological advancements but lack a clear understanding of what problem they solve for customers. This is often referred to as being in the top left quadrant, where technology precedes the job. In contrast, companies that focus on defining the jobs-to-be-done, such as weather apps, are more likely to succeed. These products understand the simple, practical problems their users face and deliver solutions that meet those needs. On the other hand, game-changers like the iPhone launch are successful because they present new technology alongside real, useful things it can clearly do, without relying on hypothetical use cases or aspirational marketing. By focusing on what customers can do with a product, companies can ultimately improve upon their experience and achieve success.

The thickness of napkins can be an indicator of a restaurant's quality and customer satisfaction, as it represents a degree of care and attention to detail. This concept is also applicable to software development, where the quality of code can reflect the developer's habits and attention to detail. The idea that excellence is not just an occasional act, but a habit, can be applied to both restaurants and software companies, emphasizing the importance of consistently striving for high standards in all aspects of their work.

The text discusses the importance of conducting a feature audit to understand how users are actually using your product's features. It highlights that most users do not use all the features in a product and that some features may be poorly adopted or irrelevant to certain user groups. The author suggests four options for dealing with underutilized features: killing them, increasing adoption rates, increasing frequency of use, or improving their quality. To increase adoption rates, it is essential to identify the root causes of why users are not using a feature and resolve these issues. Increasing frequency of use involves identifying changes that will get existing users to use a feature more often, often by creating habits with four key elements: trigger, action, reward, and investment. The text concludes that conducting a feature audit is a powerful tool for product teams to focus their work on areas where it has impact and avoid valueless pixel pushing.