Including a template

As the product world has evolved over the last few years, outcome focus and idea discovery have taken over the way product managers lead their work. Heavily written product requirement documents have become a thing of the past, and a new way of outlining problem statements has emerged.

They key to a good problem outline is to make it easy to for everyone to understand. It shouldn’t require several pages to get to the point of what has to be done, and most important, why the decision was made in the first place.

Problem Outline Template

Below is a template…

I want to start off this blog post by addressing the wording of the question itself.

Should you be using NPS to measure customer loyalty?

Let’s take a step back here…

Do you measure loyalty in your life? Do you have a board of leaders and laggers to see who are the most loyal people and see who will do things for you in the future?

Yeah, didn’t think so.

So why would you take the same approach with your customers?

NPS (Net Promoter Score) is an outdated metric, particularly for SaaS businesses.

Let’s take a deep dive into it…

It goes beyond just having copywriting guidelines and a brand personality. Really good UX copy draws knowledge from the product research you have done and applies that learning to drive users to interactions that create better habits.

I’ve been writing UX copy for a very long time, and I thought I’d write down some of my top tips when writing copy for your product.

TLDR

• Context is important: know what, why, how, for whom and what the expected outcome is in order to provide the proper guidance.
• Consistency is key. Words have implications.
• People don’t read, but people do skim read.
• …

It’s true when they say people don’t read.

People are busy, they don’t have time to read through hundreds of pages of how-to’s in your knowledge base, no matter how many you’ve written for them.

I don’t even read IKEA user manuals (and as my father would say, read the f*cking manual!)

Over the years I have created various product help resources, so I thought I’d write a little something about how to optimize your own documentation so that it’s actually helpful (and hopefully, people will actually start reading!)

If you want your docs to get read, here’s how to…

Short answer: None of them.

Long answer: None of them.

Let me explain, though.

In the world of SaaS products where customers are constantly expecting new things to play with, it can be difficult to decide what’s the next best thing to tackle.

We’ve got stakeholders to manage, customer to manage, and C-Level executives all with their own opinions about what you should do.

But how do you make the right decisions?

You get a framework, you get a framework, everybody gets a framework!

When the world changed from waterfall to agile, the need to want to predict things quickly followed thereafter.

The more you can predict how things will pan out…

When building products we celebrate when things go right, but it’s also important to celebrate when things go wrong.

To err is human — so why not be ok with it? You know it will happen at some point, so instead of putting yourself down for it, know that you can turn it into a win by looking at the situation and learning from it. That’s what product management is, it’s about learning from one’s mistakes.

If you know me, you know I’m a huge Buffy fan.

From the quippy lines to the ridiculous outfits, it wraps up everything I love about the 90s.

But aside from just the life lessons, I inadvertently realized on rewatch 250 (probably not an exaggeration, might I add) that there’s a few great product lessons to be taken from it.

Thank you, to the entire BTVS cast. You even help me improve my day job skills.

Here we go:

Imposter Syndrom is real

There will be times when you will doubt if you are doing things right. Remember when Angelus tried to corner Buffy…

When you’re building a product, you’re building something for other people. Naturally, tapping into your customer base will allow you to build the best version of your product.

However, in my time in tech, I’ve seen a lot of companies try to prioritize feedback — mostly by allowing users to vote.

💡Top Tip: This is a mistake.

Let’s break this down..

On the myth of voting

I usually recommend staying away from voting for a few reasons:

1. It’ll turn into group bias situation, where users are voting simply because others are.
2. You’ll have 20% of the loudest group of people getting most of the attention, while inadvertently adding room for churn…