Finest-5 Product reads #54
Pitfall of discovery, Crowded SaaS, Duolingo growth among other reads..
Hello! Happy Sunday,
As I delved into the realm of product careers this week, I realized that while there is an abundance of data on how to break into product management, there is insufficient material available to help product managers advance up the hierarchy. Here is a piece on advancing from a product manager to a product leader.
Each week, I curate the most noteworthy product and growth reads from 100+ articles to help you learn with minimal effort. Don’t forget to subscribe!
The Pitfalls of Continuous Discovery Research
Continuous discovery is a powerful component of a comprehensive research operation that provides real-time value. However, if not conducted properly, it can have pitfalls.
Key Takeaways:
- To ensure accurate results and informed decision-making, it is crucial to implement a rigorous analysis methodology in continuous discovery research.
- Analyzing data in the context of product updates is essential to gaining a comprehensive understanding of user feedback and behavior.
- Establishing a clear timeline and expectations through continuous research sprints ensures that the team remains aligned and focused.
Product-Led Growth: The Key to Dominating in a Crowded SaaS Market
In a red ocean market, there’s a clear need for a solution, and so you don’t need to spend time and money educating the market about the solution. The competition is brutal, but choosing the right market to serve can make all the difference.
Key Takeaways:
- Make it easy for users to bring their data from other apps with 1-click migrations, invest in the product: make it easy to discover, simple to use, deliver quick value, and offer contextual help.
- Get to know your users better with a simple onboarding quiz based on user data (team size, integrations, etc.) and identify the most relevant path for them.
- Funnels are linear and focus on moving users from one step to the next. Instead, think about creating loops that encourage compounding growth and repeatable user habits.
The power of defaults
Network effects are extremely hyped and have become a bit of a meme in recent years among tech entrepreneurs, investors and policy makers.
Key Takeaways:
- Network effects can be broadly divided into three different categories: direct, indirect and data network effects
- Multi-homing costs explain how easy or likely it is to use multiple competing networks simultaneously.
- Software doesn’t have marginal costs. The fact that you can copy and paste software at virtually zero cost has led us to a world of abundance where many things are free and infinitely available.
How Duolingo reignited user growth
Duolingo is a growth story with 4.5x growth for a mature product, driven by a handful of product changes, rooted in an innovative growth model, and explained in such actionable detail.
Key Takeaways:
- Borrowing successful features from other products, but the wrong way. Once can fail to account for how a change in context can affect the success of a feature.
- To improve your product, it’s important to conduct user research and experiment with incremental changes, understanding how each change impacts user behavior and outcomes.
- Duolingo’s success shows the potential of edtech platforms to disrupt traditional educational models and make learning more accessible and engaging for a wider audience.
Make it easier is not a product strategy
Without understanding specifically how a product is hard to use, teams will always fail to provide real value to the customer.
Key Takeaways:
- “Would this make it easier” is especially unreliable because it commits the two cardinal sins of user research: asking participants to imagine a hypothetical future behavior and asking them to choose between improving a product they use and…nothing.
- Borrowing successful features from other products is a good idea, but only if you can execute them in a way that fits the context of your own product.
- It’s important to test new features in a controlled and iterative way, so you can understand the impact they’re having on user behavior and outcomes.
Product of the week: june
A new way to do product analytics. June is the only product analytics tool that gives you auto-generated reports focused on companies.
Interesting around the web:
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