November 2016 Summaries

Churn, a key metric for startups, is often misunderstood and misinterpreted. To truly understand churn, it's essential to consider various factors such as revenue churn vs user churn, activity churn, and the impact of churn on customer lifetime value (LTV). Activity churn, which measures the decrease in usage over time, is a more effective indicator of future problems than traditional metrics like account cancellations. Identifying and addressing drops in team-level activity can help re-engage customers, while well-timed personal emails can also be an effective strategy. Effective communication with customers, including being personal, interesting, visual, thankful, honest, and respectful, is crucial for reducing churn. By understanding the impact of churn on LTV and adopting strategies to engage customers, startups can mitigate its effects and drive business growth.

Setting targets for a new feature can be daunting, but having a well-defined target can be empowering. To overcome the fear of setting targets, product managers should view them as a learning opportunity rather than a definitive measure of success or failure. Using rigorous logic and data to inform their targets can help them learn more about their assumptions and product. Setting short-term targets that directly impact the team's work can encourage full engagement and motivation. By doing so, teams can shift from a "wait-and-see" mindset to a "fight-for-usage" mindset, leading to increased productivity and success.

Staying connected to a company culture remotely requires deliberate steps to maintain relationships and values. Using the right tools, such as Slack or Google Hangouts, can facilitate communication and connection. Avoiding direct messaging for questions promotes a culture of collaboration and discussion. Maximizing in-person time when available strengthens relationships with colleagues. Seeing customer interactions as opportunities to internalize company culture is also crucial. Lastly, contributing positively to the culture through ideas, feedback, and improvements ensures remote employees feel part of the team.

The text discusses how designing for the "other side" of the screen, i.e., understanding and solving real problems, is a challenging task. Even with good intentions, designers can get distracted by the details of what they're building rather than focusing on the people it's for. The author suggests that traditional design processes and tools, such as sketching and wireframing, are not enough to help teams stay focused on their goals. Instead, observing how users interact with their products is crucial in gaining actionable insights and staying focused on the underlying problems. By keeping the end goal in mind, rather than just the screen being designed, designers can create meaningful changes that impact people's lives.

The relentless march of technological improvement means that technology businesses inevitably fail. As founders, product people, and marketers, we need to be aware of all the different technological shifts happening in the industry and ask ourselves if and how these things affect us. The key to survival lies in being paranoid about the future, observing current user interests and behaviors, and adapting quickly to new trends. This includes consolidating enterprise workflows, leveraging AI and machine learning, and using conversational UI to make it cheaper, faster, and easier for customers to make progress in their lives. By thinking of our products as systems rather than screens or user flows, we can be more resilient to technological changes and focus on providing value to our customers.

This entrepreneur recommends several books for new entrepreneurs, including "Getting Real" by Basecamp, which is inspiring and ageless, and "The Secrets of Consulting" by Gerry Weinberg, which offers valuable insights on interpersonal dynamics and how to stay on track. They also recommend "Revising Prose" by Richard Lanham, which teaches effective communication skills. The entrepreneur emphasizes the importance of reading books multiple times at different stages of one's career, as they may not resonate with you initially but become more relevant later. They also mention that book recommendations can change over time and depend on personal experience and circumstances.

The text discusses the power of platform companies and how they can bring producers and consumers together to create value. It uses the example of Lou Groen, a McDonald's franchise owner who created the Filet-O-Fish sandwich as a way to attract customers in a specific area. The text also talks about Intercom, a platform company that provides a canvas for its users' creativity by being flexible and adaptable. It highlights the importance of an ecosystem made up of smart people building things and how Intercom's Developer Program is designed to help developers make integrations with the platform successful and easy to discover. The program has already introduced several approved members, including Aircall, AskNicely, and FullStory, among others. As Intercom continues to grow, it plans to explore more ways to support its ecosystem and customers, and invites developers to build integrations with the platform through its Developer Hub.

We're strong proponents of finding common ground where both you and your customer get value. Every new customer has potential to be successful with your product, but they need to do groundwork before unlocking full value. We call this "Day Zero" - the moment when a customer completes necessary tasks so they can start realizing the full value of your product for the job they're hiring it to do. Achieving Day Zero doesn't mean customers are realizing value, but rather that they're able to begin doing so. Defining your Day Zero involves identifying ideal end states and working backward to find ultimate causes of success. For Intercom, our own Day Zero came out of re-examining customer onboarding processes, focusing on key tasks like installing code, tracking live users, and setting up custom data attributes. Validating this definition with retention data showed a strong correlation between customers reaching Day Zero and increased retention rates. To put Day Zero to work, start small, track progress, and be on the lookout for positive side effects. Broadening its impact requires education, process changes, and resource allocation across teams. By finding your own Day Zero, you'll lower barriers to success, shorten time to value for customers, and increase retention.

We decide what to write by considering our high-level editorial policy, which includes targeting the right audience with the right content type and frequency. Our product and its problem-solving capabilities should be at the core of our content strategy. We aim to create evergreen content that addresses real problems rather than trying to attract traffic from current events or news. By viewing the world through the lens of our product, we deliver on our brand promise and provide value to readers regardless of their messaging product. To come up with article ideas, we use actionable tips such as recycling existing content, exposing data, sharing our work, moving the conversation forward, and reading widely from various sources including industry publications and non-tech topics like advertising.

The text highlights the importance of storytelling in presenting complex research data to a team, emphasizing that presentation matters. It suggests using storytelling as a powerful tool to make data easily comprehensible and establish common ground for collaboration among diverse skillsets and technical knowledge levels. The article outlines three steps: outlining your story, developing visuals as a storytelling device, and creating your digital presentation. By following these steps, researchers can transform their work from being interesting to observe into something impactful and actionable for the entire company.