Finest-5 Product reads #41

Inconvenient design, product research, automated onboarding, etc..

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The Value of Inconvenient Design

Humans are friction-obsessed, believing it to be the ultimate foe in a constant crusade for efficiency and optimization. Resulting in endless products aimed at smoothing increasingly insignificant inconveniences.

Key Takeaways:

• Despite the endless slate of A/B tests over billions at scale, in nature, fiction and inconvenience have stood the test of time. Not only do they remain in abundance, but they’ve proven themselves critical.

• Both too much friction and too little friction reduce value, but just the right amount of friction maximises it.

• Over time, we’ve increasingly tied the value of technology to the revenue it can generate as opposed to the benefit it can deliver to the humans who use it.

Revisiting Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition

Isn’t business all about getting new customers, showing them value created, and capture value from them? CAC is the cost of acquiring the customer and LTV is the value captured.

Key Takeaways:

• A mistake that many companies make: they use revenue as a proxy for LTV, which is a cardinal sin

• A rule of thumb that applies to both LTV and CAC: it’s important to segment users by organic vs. paid

• The best consumer internet companies can pay back CAC immediately, often by motivating an annual subscription plan rather than a monthly plan

Why is Customer Feedback so Important for the FinTech Industry?

Customer feedback is important in almost all the industries, but for FinTech, dynamics are changing fast and feedback is becoming more important.

Key Takeaways:

• New and disruptive technologies have emerged so fast that there was no rule book or benchmark to understand the end-user sentiment over the usage or performance of these products.

• New users everywhere started relying on FinTech products, even without fully understanding how to use them or how they operated, thus creating trust issues.

• Given the speed at which the industry grows and its reliance on mobile devices, customer feedback needs to be a top priority because bad reviews — or a bad rep, in general — will make a big dent in brand perception.

Setup automated User Onboarding Journey for your Product’s Growth

Engaging users with an effective onboarding journey can solve many problems, biggest obviously is retention.

Key Takeaways:

• Your product might include features that offer a lot of value. But if they stay hidden in some dark corner or are hard to discover, most users may never know they exist.

• Taking a deeper look at the Day 0 flow, it should include a Welcome message to the user , making the user a part of your family, so to speak

• An automated user journey will help you in mapping customer responses in real-time to decide the next best action towards nurturing your user in achieving the desired goal

Research Twice, Build Once: How to Know Your Users as You Grow

Far too many products still fail because there’s simply no demand for them. How does that happen? Or, how do so many startups launch entire businesses without realizing users didn’t need their products? By overlooking user research.

Key Takeaways:

• There are multiple types of research that suit different situations: Strategic vs. tactical, Moderated vs. unmoderated, Quantitative vs. qualitative

• In the early stage, the goal is to prioritise those decisions that users actually want — both pre- and post-launch. Research at this stage doesn’t need to be perfect, but it needs to provide a general signal on which direction to go.

• Scaling up the company needs to put into place more rigorous research practices, enabling teams to ask the right questions of the right users at the right time.

Product of the week: beautiful.ai

Presentation software that designs for you

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Every week, I summarise the best reads from 100+ articles with the sole purpose of helping you become better at product with minimal effort. Subscribe!!