Align your team for key insights 🎯
The biggest destroyer of productivity & execution among the team is lack of communication & not providing info by the required time.🙅♀️
Hi 👋, Welcome to the 56th newsletter post.
This year - 2023 - I’ve been focused on Fractional CMO projects, building my network around it & did think about forming a company out of it. But naming it has always been a struggle for me, even with my last startup (so I’ll definitely write about it in future).
But now after much consideration, I came up with “by Default CMO” - completely focused on CMO & marketing stuff -, bought the domain & now looking for a Webflow developer to help me build it out. Let me know if you guys know anyone!
I’ve seen some major discomfort and delay in execution if the information wasn’t delivered on time & to everyone in the team. Especially for the early stage startups, where teams need to be on the same page.
Even though finding alignment isn’t easy, building a cross-functional team is the high road to faster growth and expansion and increased productivity, performance and team engagement.
While working with some of the fast-growing teams, I’ve discovered building a system that organises the team to work together and brings the alignment and strong understanding of product and customers can come from measuring key insights and metrics.
Before we dive into these 4 key insights,
Here’s a quick word from our partner… Byldd
If you’re a non-technical founder looking to build a software product, we know how hard it can be. It’s almost impossible to find a qualified, willing CTO, you shouldn’t pay $50k to a dev shop for your first product, and trying to project manage freelancers is a disaster waiting to happen.
That’s where we come in. Byldd is a development agency that helps founders launch software MVPs in under a month and for less than $10K.
1:1 customer interview - JTBD framework
Customer interview is essential for every team and most of the teams conduct this in their own way. But there is a little difference between a normal customer interview and a Job-to-be-done (JTBD) interview.
As it emphasises more on why your product is hired & for what purpose. Each conversation you have with your customers, paid or unpaid users, pushes you to think even further and you might discover a new piece of information.
The more handy approach is that you keep a common document within the teams for the same which covers the complete view of the situation, pain points, desired outcome and understanding of what motivates users emotionally and socially to purchase the product.
Each week with my by Default team, which consists of a developer, designer, sales, marketing & HR person, we go through these things so that everyone knows where we are, who we are for and what needs to be done by each team. This also has shown drop in communication blockage, misunderstanding and misalignment. Everyone stays at the same page & brings in new ideas or inputs.
Carrying out a JTBD interview allows you to market the product in a way that resonates with them and creates a story surrounding them.
It’s ideal to interview 5 to 10 people who have already used or brought your product in the recent past to help you get more fresh insights.
Keep an eye on these 5 questions:
In what situation do they buy the product
What are the pain points they enter with?
What motivated them to use your product
What was the ideal outcome or value they got?
What was the reason they left?
Acquisition funnel/pipeline
It seems more like a marketing thing but if you look closely, each department needs its own understanding of customer acquisition - Revenue, sales, design, et cetera.
Your team might want to track if the acquisition pipeline is seamless or not.
Is the development team ready to onboard huge traffic or requests?
There shouldn’t be any leakage or drop between these steps.
Is the copy delivering the right message?
You also need to keep track of the source of the acquisition.
There is likely a long list of potential angles to consider when building the customer acquisition funnel. Your marketing activities will identify target customers, attract them and convert them and develop an effective pipeline along with aligned cross-functional teams.
Understanding and mapping the touch points of your customer journey illustrates how prospects go through the sequential stages of awareness, consideration, conversion and retention.
Onboarding
Onboarding is like a gate to the product value for the users. It is said if it takes more than 2.5 minutes, the users won’t come back.
It needs to be done right with experiments and measurements on how it affects the overall onboarding experience.
I’m working with Yepto and last month we spent tracking their onboarding experience. Initially it took 15 mins to set up the profile & we could see users were frustrated as only 26% new users compeleted the steps. The changes we made increased the activation rate by 62%. Users were now smoothly, completing the onboarding. We worked on improving code, UX\UI and copy + reduce it to 5 steps.
Now you can bring your team together and discuss these things:
What brings them to the app?
Are they completing onboarding or dropping in between?
Is there any technical reason or any other reason for the drop?
What features are they immediately going for after onboarding?
Test out UI/UX so that everything looks perfect
Understand user journey
Calculate user time to value
In-product experience - engagement
Your marketing might be putting a lot of effort into bringing new users but is your product ready to convert them to paying and retain them?
Just building a great product and depending on marketing isn’t enough.
Your marketing team will bring insights from customers and the product team will check the behaviour of the users in-product experience.
It’s like knowing what goes inside the customer’s life, designing the product that fits their lifestyle and then communicating through the means they understand and resonate with the product. With the slightest changes within the Canbble app (one of my clients), we saw a 40% increase in retention and engagement in a month:
Easy cancellation or downgrade/upgrade of the product.
Quick responses by the customer service team.
Overlapping UI/UX.
Not being able to upload or update information because of some error.
these are just some of the frustrations the users face.
Thanks for reading! Until next time!
Ritika 👋
Additional Reading 🔗
Freemium or Free Trial: What's for your SaaS?
Should you hire a CMO or growth marketer?
What it takes to get paying users?
Specify solution based group persona.
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