🤖 2-min PMM Insights: Abridge's AI, Portage's North Star Metric, ICONIQ's Sales Guide, Superhuman's Onboarding
July 2023, Part 2 Release
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Get your users, in some fashion, to offer feedback on your AI-powered features to build long-term competitive advantage.
Abridge's AI allows doctors to summarize their conversations with patients and removes clerical work behind coding, billing, and risk assessments. To build a competitive advantage, the consumer version of the product lets patients share feedback on the same summaries, thereby training the company's models better.
[2] Rely on Net Dollar Retention (NDR) as a north star metric to grade your customer outcomes relevant to growth and retention.
Portage uses NDR to direct every team member to think about their inputs - ex: product adoption, account planning, relationship management, etc. - that are key to growth and retention. Stripe chooses NDR since the metric uses both churn and expansion to tell the complete story.
[3] Tie your compensation plans to how well leads convert (for TOFU) and net revenue, i.e., gross minus churn (for BOFU).
ICONIQ's portfolio of companies prioritizes quality over quantity for both SDRs and AEs. For SDRs, comp plans link to lead conversions instead of weekly call and email volumes. Similarly, AEs must also focus on avoiding churn as they rely on net revenue.
[4] Experiment with human-led onboarding to show value to your early users and build brand rapport.
Superhuman would use 30-min in-person or video sessions to ensure its early users saw full value in the product while uncovering bugs and taking new feature requests. As an add-on, the human interaction made getting users to pay for a premium product easy.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“Product-Led Onboarding: How to Turn New Users Into Lifelong Customers” by Ramli John
[1] Think of user onboarding as an interview process. A user is hiring your product to get a specific job done. It helps to really understand the job you’re being interviewed for.
[2] Evaluate every onboarding step on 3 components - (i) necessity: remove steps that delay a user's first productive task, (ii) ease: reorganize steps from easy to hard, (iii) simplicity: wherever possible, show fewer options and shorter steps in the process.
[3] A PQL should capture a new user's engagement within a product, a mix of (i) activation - % items completed on the road to the first productive task and (ii) engagement - frequency of use of the core product features.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Prototyping the path: how Slack builds ‘product’ with customer love (Config 2023)
[2] From LaLa Land to The Matrix: Can AI replace product management?
[3] Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is Betting Everything on AI
[4] ‘I can’t make products just for 41-year-old tech founders’: Airbnb CEO is taking it back to the basics
[5] How to Blow Up a Timeline (Eugene Wei)