Top product areas for growth
Focus areas
It can sometimes feel like everything needs your attention, but it’s important to stay focused on the areas of the product that truly deliver for the business.
A handful of product areas have an out-sized impact on growth. Successful experimentation on the new user experience, invites and referrals, and the core app navigation drive the biggest wins.
New user experience ✨
The new user experience is the only part of the product that everyone sees. From account creation to the rate of team activation, there are many ways to understand and measure this vital area of product investment, and companies should never stop working on it. This is especially true for companies that are scaling into new markets or appealing to new buyers.
Invites and referrals 💌
Invites and referrals are the rare examples in which user interviews routinely mislead us. In the context of a user interview, people feel uncomfortable being asked to send invites and they will tell you that in… pretty strong terms. You should disregard this feedback, except for making it easy and obvious that you can skip invites. The compounding gains from the users with high intent who will send invites more than makes up for the people who skip it. Ask early and often.
Product navigation 🧭
Product navigation, especially areas like settings are almost never under the explicit purview of a growth team, but usability issues in the core product can massively impact growth. You probably already ask new users to send invites during their onboarding experience (and if not, you should) but what if they want to send invites later? How easy is it to figure out? Similarly, usability issues in the billing experience will impact self-service conversion and paid retention.
Takeaway
As you combine quantitative funnel analysis with qualitative user interviews, you’ll be in a position to understand what potential customers understand — or not — about the core product. Share these insights with your colleagues and advocate for the ability to experiment thoughtfully on “their” part of the product.
