PMF & Beyond
Here are 3 things one ought to focus on & sort out immediately after finding product market fit (PMF)…
Product Market Fit (PMF) helps one determine whether or not a given product has found its targeted users & vice versa (users have found THE product). And that is possible ONLY if the users are totally glued over the product’s regular usage, logging in, spending time over those sessions, feeling content / satisfied leading unanimously to the opinion that the product more than meets their expectations. That ought to convert predominantly into these 3 things for the org.:
improved referrals & sign-ups
improved engagement
improved revenues
Hitting PMF usually turns out to be a staunch validation of all their hypotheses, research, discoveries & also a significant achievement for the org. & the teams who are building the product given how their hard work / efforts seem to have paid off. But for some orgs. & teams it could end up feeling like they have bitten off more than they can chew, getting all too overwhelming & all of a sudden too, which isn’t a good thing to say in the least as that could lead to a lot of panic & transform into a state of disorder & chaos.
Alright, so you have built a product that the uisers have seamlessly adopted it into their regular lives…
What’s next?
What do you do now?
Is it even necessary that you ought do something now?
Could you just leave it at that, maintain status quo given how the metrics seem to be totally northbound & well beyond your expectations?
There’s no doubt one’s very happy watching users sticking on to the product & signing up in numbers more like a swarm of bees on a hive post hitting PMF. But that also happens to be a crucial point in time to get real & face facts. Yes, users may have heard something great about the product or witnessed something unbelievable over a visual somewhere which is what may have led them to sign-up in the first place.
But is a sign-up enough for an org.? Could that even be a goal?
No. Absolutely not. That ought to be considered the first step in the process.
That could never be enough for a product team. Ideally one would want the users to login across multiple sessions, play around, explore the whole gamut of options in there, which is also why the “user onboarding strategy” could prove to be crucial at this juncture.
What one also needs is to ensure that the users do reach that all-important “A-ha moment” sooner & find whatever it is that they were after & do it with exceptional ease so as to enable them to keep coming back for more.
Here are 5 things that ought to follow just as one finds PMF:
1.0 Absolute Customer Satisfaction
Alright, so your users are landing on the platform on an ongoing basis & there’s a realization of how heartwarming it is to see DAU swell by the day. But, just as that’s happening one ought to keep a tab on those CHURN numbers. What’s the fun in adding 5x the no. of users over a monthly cohort only to realize that ~80% of them never came back?
One ought to connect with their users & employ various methods that could help gauge customer satisfaction in real-time, which could be done via these steps:
1.1 Identify Friction Points
Given the metrics, one could imply that the users have taken an interest in the product which is justified by their usage it every day. But, it is important to understand exactly what they like about the product & what they find troublesome / not all that comforting over those daily sessions so as to enable smooth & continual adoption.
That could be as straightforward as studying the metrics, measuring the no. of critical CTR clicks, going through the recordings of the session / user trails so as to establish friction points
1.2 Ask for Specific Feedback
The clarity over the friction points could point to a specific kind of a problem ranging from design / UX / development. When some problems could be pretty easy to map out to their causations, some could be complex given how the trail may not suffice, which is when one ought to resort to other methods 1:1 interviews. It could also be a major factor influencing the future of the product thereof.
Supposing you learn how the user didn’t reach the expected outcome over a given session, you could push a video walkthrough link to their e-mail & if the issue persists you could hit them up with a few questions that would help you understand their perspective better
2.0 Discovering More Problems
If one takes a substantial chunk of time (may be decades) into consideration, one’d realize that there’s nothing like a perfect solution to a problem, EVER. It’s just about being right & fitting the situation & being able to do that amazingly well at that point.
But your best bet as a product manager is to see that the period under consideration is significantly large which means it ought to stay relevant for a sizeable period of time. During this stage it may feel like one’s moving away from the core given the penchant to identify those product pivots, but as long as that’s still aligned with the vision & relevant to the goal that ought to be perfectly fine.
1.1 Enumerate a problem list
The friction points that you came across over the previous steps & the feedback thus obtained over those 1:1 interviews ought to form the base for curating what a problem list. When “list” could be informal, product managers would find that a problem backlog suits them pretty well.
A problem backlog could be envisioned as an unsorted list of problems comprising various headers as relevant to the workflow of the users
1.2 Prioritize those Problems
Just supposing the product usage is perfect & is going just as planned, it may be a great idea to drop an NPS survey. The larger understanding is that, the score would be tilted in the product team’s favor in such a scenario. But time stands testimony to the fact NPS surveys have led to revelations about pain points better than direct F2F interviews given how the user may not be under some heavy influence & could be at total ease.
The results of an NPS survey aren’t just about satisfaction & the likelihood of users recommending the product to their peers; it could be used in conjunction with the verbatim to glean enough insight the problems leading to a methodical prioritizion of features
3.0 Improved Value Addition
Life beyond PMF could be fraught with a lot of trouble if one isn’t focused on continual value addition, which is the central stub of this article as well. PMF is more about realizing that there’s hell of a lot of work left to do, buckling up towards doing all of them in a prioritized order so as maintain user satisfaction as is, if not improve it manifold by pinning on continuous value addition.
1.1 Periodic Releases
“Familiarity breeds contempt”. It possible that users are all glued to a given product one day, have only good stuff to say about it & the other day they could just be up & gone like they didn’t even exist. And that could happen to even the best in the business given how innovation is moving at the rate of knots, which is why it becomes important to have a solid roadmap encompassing features that are stacked with relevance to the markets, users & of course their problems.
Its important to have a well pruned backlog stacked with relevant features that address a few major problems / are targeted at removing a few major friction points so as to ease the user’s troubles & encourage continual usage
1.2 Optimize CLTV
Unless you tap into the existing user base & turn that existing relationship into a continual & endearing one by introducing some loyalty programs that could shower them with suitable rewards, you’re perhaps missing out big time. Not only the periodic release of features keeping the users & the larger audience intrigued, one ought to find ways to tap into the existing users just as much.
Overall the CAC (customer acquisition cost) could turn out to be significantly lower if you have hit PMF by pinning entirely on growth models like PLG as compared to those inorganic channels, And incentivization could lead to referrals getting multiplied on one hand but OTOH one ought to be able to convert users to premium by pitching more relevant features effectively multiplying revenues & improving the life-time value thereof