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Forget the Funnel · Georgiana Laudi, Claire Suellentrop · 2023
I can't wait to try the approach outlined in this book. Having a customer-led growth framework makes a lot of sense. A company is a value exchange mechanism; it must provide customer value and capture some of it. The authors did a great job of showing how this framework complements and intersects nicely with customer research and JTBD theory. The way it promotes a radical focus is helpful. In my experience, it's often a lack of focus that stops product teams from making rapid progress.
Key Highlights
The traditional marketing funnel is ineffective for recurring revenue businesses. Instead, companies should adopt a customer-led growth framework that focuses on understanding and delivering value to their best customers. This approach involves researching customers' experiences, identifying their jobs-to-be-done, and mapping their journey from struggle to success.
To implement customer-led growth, start by identifying your best customers - those who understand your product's value, pay without hesitation, and have achieved their desired outcomes. Conduct interviews or surveys to uncover their underlying motivations, pain points, and the steps they took to find and choose your solution.
Analysing customer responses reveals their jobs-to-be-done, which can be summarised as: "When I [struggle], help me [motivation], so I can [desired outcome]." Prioritise the most urgent and valuable jobs based on factors such as willingness to pay, retention potential, and alignment with your company's vision and strengths.
Next, map the customer experience by breaking it down into three phases: Struggle (realising the problem and seeking solutions), Evaluation (trying your product and recognising its value), and Growth (embedding your product into their life and expanding usage). Identify milestones within each phase where customers' thoughts, feelings, and actions shift.
Develop customer-led KPIs for each milestone, focusing on actions that indicate customers have received value from your product. These leading indicators help you understand customer success and guide your team's efforts.
Identify success gaps by comparing your customers' needs with your current experience. Choose the gap that, if bridged, would have the biggest impact on customer value and business growth. Focus your team on implementing solutions that directly address this gap.
Share customer insights and the experience map widely within your organisation to align everyone around a customer-centric approach. Use the map to guide planning, projects, and individual targets, and create accessible dashboards to track progress.
Continuously iterate and expand your customer-led approach by investigating additional customer jobs, segments, or product areas. Make the customer experience the foundation of every decision and action within your company.
By adopting a customer-led growth framework, product managers can avoid wasting time on ineffective tactics and instead focus on delivering genuine value to their best customers. This approach leads to increased satisfaction, retention, and ultimately, sustainable growth for the business.
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Augmenting Human Intellect. A Conceptual Framework · Douglas C.Engelbart · 1962
This is an initial summary report of project taking new and systematic approach to improving the intellectual effectiveness of the individual human being detailed conceptual framework explores the nature of the system composed of the individual and the tools concepts and methods that match his basic capabilities to his problems One of the tools that shows the greatest immediate promise is the computer when it can be harnessed for direct online assistance integrated with new concepts and methods.
Douglas C.Engelbart committed to ‘augmenting the human intellect’ because he theorised it would be the most impactful way he could spend his working life. He wasn’t wrong, what an amazing impact he had on the world.
He showed the power of bringing humans into the research and development process for computers. There is no doubt his work accelerated the the usability of computers. In today’s rush to create AI assistants, this couldn’t be more relevant.
Thank you, Doug. For those brief moments of flow. Those moments when there's no friction between us and the machine, and we’re able to work on an idea without friction.
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Book Highlights
Programmers are not given sufficient time, clear enough direction, or adequate designs to enable them to succeed. Alan Cooper · The Inmates are Running the Asylum
Higher percentiles are important to look at because even though they account for a small percentage of your users, sometimes they can be the most important users. For example, on the Amazon website, the customers with the slowest requests are often those who have the most data on their accounts because they have made many purchases—that is, they’re the most valuable customers Chip Huyen · Designing Machine Learning Systems
Design Studio (and simple ideation, for that matter) is the opposite of what most folks, including me, often do: go with the first idea that seems like it’ll work Jeff Patton · User Story Mapping
Any user experience effort aims to improve efficiency. This basically comes in two key forms: helping people work faster and helping them make fewer mistakes Jesse James Garret · The Elements of User Experience
If you’re testing the core of your product, if the basic functionality can flex and change depending on the whims of an A/B test, then there is no core. There’s a hole where your product vision should be and you’re just shoveling data into the void. Tony Fadell · Build
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Quotes and Tweets
Learn to ask if this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day? Tim Ferriss
By far the dominant reason for not releasing sooner was a reluctance to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback. Kent Beck
My personal rule is that it's a good idea to be patient as long as I'm in the mix. If I'm taking action, putting in my reps, and trying things out, then I should remain patient and see what opportunities arise. But if I'm not taking action consistently, then I'm not practicing patience. I'm just waiting. James Clear