
How ‘Critical User Journeys’ can help a product take off - wyndham
https://medium.com/initialized-capital/what-to-do-if-your-product-isnt-growing-7eb9d158fc
======
kbos87
This is sound advice, but not new advice. A couple of things that jumped out
at me -

Yes, yes, 1,000x when it comes to the importance of simplicity. It's far too
easy to unknowingly distract yourself and your users from what is important in
your product.

My criticism is that this pays very little attention to how important it is to
get to know who the people are you are attracting at the top of your funnel.
It's tempting to reduce your acquisition funnel down to the level of "here's
how many people we dumped in the top, and here is the % rate at which they
activated." The truth is a lot more complicated. Too many people overlook this
and optimize for what is working, which puts you at risk of unknowingly
niching down into a small portion of your addressable market.

~~~
kitotik
Great point. Responding to feedback from the ‘wrong’ customers kills so many
products/startups.

This is the point of methodologies and techniques like Customer Development,
Ideal Customer Profiles, and good ol’ fashioned business modeling.

~~~
delhanty
>Responding to feedback from the ‘wrong’ customers kills so many
products/startups.

That's something I wonder about with Show HN. Aren't many of us on HN
inherently the 'wrong' customer for any product or service that aspires to be
mainstream?

Famously, for example, 10 years back, some of the comments when @dhouston
submitted "My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive" [1] pretty strongly
indicated 'wrong' customer.

I won't pull out the comments, because: 1. I don't want to make it personal &
2\. It's with the benefit of hindsight.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

~~~
opportune
Exactly, powerusers are in many ways actually terrible customers because

1) They are ok with using worse/harder solutions because they know how to use
them.

2) They don't like to pay for things.

3) They are much more technically adept than the general population.

4) There aren't that many of them compared to the general population.

5) They skew towards 20-35 years old, white/asian men with good income.

For example, this startup: [https://unlockd.com/](https://unlockd.com/) pays
you (via phone bill discounts) to watch ads on your phone after you unlock it.
It had raised $17m as of May. I first thought it was the dumbest idea ever,
but then I realized that this was because _I_ would never use it. In fact, I
couldn't even see my friends using it. That doesn't mean others might not.

~~~
heisenbit
Power-users are not good proxy's for broad markets. But then aren't there
markets where power users are the bulk of users and are actually willing to
pay?

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shizcakes
This article seems very similar to "Jobs to Be Done":
[https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-
done](https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done)

~~~
vogt
Nice to see this here. I have spent a lot of time over the last year or so
studying this. myself and the rest of our UX team did a three day JBTD seminar
last year. Very valuable in shifting your perception of how to create stuff
that adds value in people's lives. I highly recommend it for any person
building software, as well as Outcomes-Driven Innovation which offers a great
framework for making new things and figuring out empirically what users (or
"the market", whatever) are asking for.

~~~
khaledtaha
I'm curious to see what improvements to your workflow and to the experience
you have seen. I'm open to anecdotes but I'd love some metrics if you have
any.

~~~
vogt
I can't give specifics since I'm no longer with that company and even a
cursory search of my profile here could put 2+2 together, but using an
outcomes-driven framework survey (~150 respondents, we were a niche industry
so this was a huge sample size) we were able to add critical new features to
our roadmap that were opportunities we never saw before. By using the formula
in that book you are able to objectively determine underserved portions of the
market "I really need the ability to do X, and currently am very dissatisfied
with my ability to do so with my existing setup". And by using numbers, which
is cool.

More on the research methodology here: [https://medium.com/envato/a-step-by-
step-guide-to-using-outc...](https://medium.com/envato/a-step-by-step-guide-
to-using-outcome-driven-innovation-odi-for-a-new-product-ded320f49acb). I
realize this seems a bit OT from the original comment, but Jobs to be Done and
ODI are the same authors and they are intimately tied together philosophically

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will_pseudonym
To me, it's sad that this isn't just called "software design". If you aren't
building software to solve your users' problems, why are you building anything
at all?

~~~
andrewstuart
Because often a software application is many things, with alot of features and
power.

The people who design and build it understand the entire picture and can see
the value (hopefully).

It can be very hard from the position of totally understanding a system, to
put yourself in the shoes of someone encountering it for the first time, and
it can be hard to see what they see when they first use it, and it can be hard
to empathise with their journey through learning the software application that
you have built.

This is an incredibly valuable article because it helps people who have built
systems to put themselves in the shoes of their users - that is not an
intuitive skill.

~~~
briandear
Another problem that we faced at my little startup is the public perception of
our product is different that what the product really can do.

As an example, we are somewhat known as an “online therapy” company, while we
do offer that capability, that’s just a tiny part of the value we provide
customers (behavioral health private practice professionals.)

And as a previous commenter said, you have to be careful listening to feedback
that might inadvertently “over-niche” your product thus losing out on a larger
market. As a result we’ve been careful to onboard users in such a way that
“online therapy” isn’t the headliner feature being presented while still being
responsive to those that find us because of online therapy-related organic
traffic.

Marketing and “framing the solution in a meaningful way” is the toughest
challenge there is. For us, the tech is the easy part, it’s the damned
psychology of the users that keep me up at night – which is funny to me
because our customers are psychologists/therapists/behavioral health pros.

~~~
danieltillett
We face the same problem in an even more niche market. It seems to be very
hard for customers to understand that a product can have more than one use and
that the first use they think of is not the only use.

We haven't solved this problem, but our current thinking is focused towards
splitting up the application into separate offerings solving one thing at a
time - ultimately a worse solution for the customer, but one with a lower
cognitive load.

------
steffisekar
As we’ve been discussing the user/customer life cycle quite a bit now, to take
a closer look and know more about a specific customer/company, we need a tool
that does more than just showing where users clicked, focused and similar.

Zarget’s Session Replay is one such feature that captures and plays the user
path without any flaw in the user usage patterns. Importantly, having the hold
of real-time user interaction data will help us conceive when and why the
losses are happening. And with such strong insights it gets easier to fix any
conversion funnel (regardless the type business you’re in).

Perhaps, employing a session replay tool to map out the critical customer
journeys is the only possible step we could take to fix this issue.

Whether we dogfooded? Yes, we ran recordings within our product. It busted
many myths on users’ behavior and needs, as we were able to track our own
journey as a customer. And we were able to make changes to customer’s
onboarding process and do tweaks based on the findings. Now our product
managers know how users interact inside our app and don’t make any guesswork
on how users will adopt a feature. Also, our product folks can’t live without
Session Replay anymore.

[https://zarget.com/features/session-
replay.html](https://zarget.com/features/session-replay.html)

~~~
nope_42
Can this session replay deal with secured fields like credit cards? e.g.
during the replay don't record the credit card field

I'm just wondering how any technology like this would work in a PCI compliant
environment.

~~~
steffisekar
We take security and privacy seriously. We don't track any sensitive data
including Credit card numbers, CVV, passwords etc., Zarget cleverly tracks
these fields and masks those details while it is recorded in a session. Hence,
the user can be assured that their payment details are secured and safe.

[https://docs.zarget.com/v1.0/docs/handling-sensitive-
data](https://docs.zarget.com/v1.0/docs/handling-sensitive-data)

