Business: Product Management

In recent years, the perception of UX design has changed dramatically. In the profession’s early days, less mature organizations frequently treated UX professionals as another type of graphic designer, as though UX designers were synonymous with Web designers. But, in today’s leading organizations, UX design is a strategic capability that drives innovation and enhances competitiveness. Similarly, the role of UX professionals has shifted beyond creating functional—if not delightful—user experiences by applying usability, information architecture, and design principles. Now, UX professionals are applying more of their understanding of psychology and human behavior to devising design principles in the service of persuasion. Read More

The ultimate challenge for any product leader is to ensure that customers not only try, but keep using your product over time. This is the heart of a product-led growth (PLG) strategy. A great product can be a fast path to revenues, brand loyalty, word-of-mouth, and durable business growth.

Product-led growth is a go-to-market (GTM) approach that transforms the way we design products and deliver them to market. PLG is about putting the product at the forefront of the customer journey to drive conversions, retention, adoption, and expansion by delivering an immersive product experience. Plus, in today’s software as a service (SaaS) environment, in which free trials, freemium experiences, and self-service onboarding are quickly becoming increasingly popular, it’s not a question of whether your company will adopt a PLG strategy, but when your company will adopt this model. While PLG is not trivial to implement, it leads to stronger economic units such as net dollar retention (NDR or NRR), gross revenue retention (GRR), and customer acquisition cost (CAC). PLG can help you unlock organic expansion and growth. Read More

As software products have expanded over the decades, companies have had to apply a fair amount of effort to managing their customers’ experience. Since companies have added more and more features and functions to their software products, customer engagement has begun to fluctuate. Managing customers’ expectations had become complicated. These products have continued to grow because customers desired more features and the software companies wanted to offer more value—for a nominal fee, of course. Now, these companies confront the challenge not only of how to design and build the new features but also how to manage and release them.

Several companies—for example, Google—have managed these changes fairly well, but many have a lot of room for improvement. The days are over when we can honestly say, “If we build it, they will come.” We must do the work necessary to truly understand our customers’ needs. If we understood our customers, we would understand that we can’t just jam new features or functions into our software and expect customers joyfully to accept them. Read More