How do you improve product adoption and boost user engagement?
Murat Hacıoğlu
7 replies
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Nick Basile@nickjbasile
It depends on a couple of different factors.
- Do I have users or not?
- Are they using some features, but not all of them? Or, are they trying the product out and quickly churning?
- How does my product fit into their life? Does it provide a quick fix, or should it be used for a long period of time?
That said, in most of these cases, I find the fastest way to get unstuck is to talk to users. I like to dig into these kinds of questions.
- Walk me through how you were solving this problem before you started using this product?
- How does this product fit into your workflow?
- Tell me about the last time you used the product – what did you do? How helpful was it? What could have been better?
With these questions, I'm trying to understand how they solve the problem my product helps them with and how my product fits into their workflow. From here, I can usually identify a few areas for improvement that'll help boost engagement & adoption.
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@nickjbasile Hey, thank you for the great answer. Let's assume you have a B2B SaaS product and your buyers are mostly marketing and data analytics team. How you can change your answer?
@murat_hacioglu thanks for adding the context!
Not sure that it would change my approach thought – I'd still try to talk to users.
That said, I know it can be hard to get time with B2B users because they're usually busy. So, assuming you can't find any users to talk to, I'd echo what @diana_iun and @jesscadoodles recommended – focus on designing your experience so it quickly communicates and demonstrates value to your target audience.
@murat_hacioglu seconding @nickjbasile here.
Building up from what Nick said, the most effective way to communicate your product’s value is by drawing out exactly what your users find valuable about the product or the experience of the product.
You can do this by:
A. Talking to them during demo calls, or
B. Through feedback interviews/surveys.
The degree of personalization and the amount of time required to conduct these conversations can be altered accordingly.
Two Considerations:
1. User Preferences:
How much time are they willing and able to allot to talk to you about your product?
✨Make it as easy as possible for them to give feedback. Keep it simple and quick.
2. Resources:
How much energy, time, and funds are you able to use for this purpose?
✨Make it manageable enough for you and/or your team to execute without using more time and energy than it needs.
—-
Tools to simplify feedback collection:
📌 Maze.Co: Testing, Customer Insights, Survey Templates,
📌 Tally.So: Creating feedback forms
📖 The Mom Test is a highly recommended read to help you structure your questions in a way that gets people to actually tell you what they really think VS what they think you want them to say.
—-
Basically:
🔸Feedback = Data;
🔸Conversations with users = Data Collection
You might find out that you consider your product valuable for entirely different reasons from what your users actually love it for. Just like how bubble wrap was originally marketed as textured wallpaper, and then later turn out as a security precaution for packaging fragile goods. Discoveries like this have the potential to:
Reshape the demand for your product and
Discover or create a new market for it (wherein you are the first and only solution available);
Thus
Increase your profitability and
Expand your opportunities to scale.
Let me know if you need more help with this.
Happy to support you!
Improving product adoption is all about making it as EASY, CLEAR, and SIMPLE as possible for people to understand these 3 things:
1. What your product is for;
2. How your product helps them reach their goals:
✅ with faster time,
✅ with less risk,
✅ with higher chances of success,
✅ using less energy/money/tools, etc.
3. How to use your product.
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Boosting user engagement, on the other hand, will depend on what your engagement goals are specifically. Beyond vanity metrics such as product reviews, upvotes, likes, and shares, here are some points to consider:
📌 If your product takes your users from "A" to "Z", what actions do they need to do more in order to achieve "Z"?
📌 How can you encourage them to do those actions more consistently?
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These are two pretty different goals. For more success, it would be easier to prioritize which one:
✅ your product really needs,
✅ will drive the most impact,
✅ will be the easiest to execute
...at this point in time so that you can focus all your time, energy, and resources on it. Typically improving product adoption comes before boosting user engagement.
Hope this helps! :)
@jesscadoodles thank you so much. It's so detailed answer. I'm confused about risks, what do you mean about less risk? What kind of risks do you mention in that manner.
@murat_hacioglu sure thing! ☺️
The more people invest their:
✅️ time,
✅️ energy,
✅️ attention,
✅️ thoughts,
✅️ trust, or
✅️ money
...Into your product; the deeper their commitment.
They trust your work to give them returns in exchange for what they put into that commitment.
Because they invest these resources (time, energy, attention, etc.) they risk potentially losing those valuable resources for nothing.
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So how can we reduce risk?
Ideally, we wouldn't want to decrease the rate of our product subscription for the sake of our startup's profitability.
Which of the other resources can we reduce or shoulder for our users?
👉 Let's say we pick time.
Instead of taking 10 days to see results, can we implement better strategies or functionality to let them see results in 7 days?
👉 Energy
Can we make the process more efficient to reduce the necessary actions to achieve success?
👉 Attention/Thoughts
Can we take a certain load off their plate so that they can allocate their attention on other aspects of their lives? Do we have frameworks or systems that can turn winning into a no-brainer thing for them?
👉 Trust
Can we provide guarantees such as their money back if they're not satisfied with the service? Can we provide proof of how effective our product is at helping them achieve their goals?
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💡 There are a lot of ways to go around this. To make it simpler, the main goal is to really just to:
Make reaching their goals EASIER, FASTER, + WITH MORE CERTAINTY.
Does this make sense? 😅 Don't hesitate to ask if it doesn't. Happy to chat :)