🔮 2-min PMM Insights: Adobe's Design, Duolingo's Feature Success, Amplitude's CS Efforts, Digitec's User Insights
June 2023, Part 1 Release
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Allow customer success (CS) to run the same engagement programs for free customers as the paying ones to get better feedback on the customer journey.
Amplitude doesn't separate the paying customer base from the free one, as it believes they share the same pain points, use cases, etc. Doing so allows the company to apply the best practices and playbooks evenly across all customers and avoid siloed approaches.
[2] Create a 'user insights knowledge base' to group all insights of user personas to improve user-centered decision-making.
Digitec uses the knowledge base to avoid losing user insights and uniformly spread knowledge about users across the company. Besides the decision-making benefit, this practice lets you break research into understandable chunks, connect product features to the 'why?' faster, and gets developers closer to the customer mindset.
[3] Ask these 3 questions before borrowing a popular feature from a different product onto yours to ensure success.
Duolingo's earlier attempts at gamification failed since they didn't account for the context of their product vs. the type of games to promote. The company gradually fixed this issue by asking these questions for adopting new features from other products - "(i) Why is this feature working in that product? (ii) Why might this feature succeed or fail in our context? (iii) What adaptations are necessary to make this feature succeed in our context?"
[4] Recruit a list of 'challenge people' to help you design and build for future (desired) users per your product strategy.
Adobe's Photoshop team was split, trying to figure out whether they wanted to satisfy existing users or the users who would fit better with the future version of the product. To tackle this issue, choose actual people ('challenge people') - ex: folks with extreme versions of product needs, early adopters, specific challenges, and future-leaning - to help design the product in line with your long-term goals.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] Don't rely on product or demographic data to get into your customer's head. Instead, create a documentary of your best customer's journey - "from the struggle, to the search for solutions, to finding your product, to trying it, to buying it and being so happy that someone would now have to pry it from their hands."
[2] You can find the customer's motivations in response to these questions - "What was the most important to you in a new solution? Why did you decide to choose us over the other options? Can you recall if anything, in particular, stood out to you? What deal breakers would have prevented you from choosing us? Once you started using our product, what happened that made you feel certain it was right for you?"
[3] Break down the customer experience mapping effort into 3 main phases - (i) The Struggle Phase - "your customer realizes they have a problem and begins seeking and exploring possible solutions," (ii) The Evaluation Phase - "your customer commits to try your product and decides it's the solution they were looking for," (iii) The Growth Phase - "your customer successfully embeds your product into their daily life and even may use it in new ways beyond the scope of the original problem."
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] AI Is Life: Technology is not artificially replacing life — it is life!
[2] 6 Keys to Human-Centric Software Development
[3] Guide: Implement a sales-assist function in 7 weeks
[4] Short Form Content is Broken. Can We Fix It?
[5] Différance: How To Think Critically In The Age of Content