Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:35:30 · Oji Udezue, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:35:30] S0: Yeah. That's what we did at Calendly. You know? But I I will say... So a couple of caveats. We did that in the community. We had, you know, community.calendly.com. And we understood that that was a self selected group, but it was still important to talk to them because they were still representative. And of course, you you should do it in the product. The challenge of that approach is always, is it the right customer? Right? And, you know, the pro con of that is talking to one customer is useless. Talking to a 100 is super useful. And so the challenge is, are you targeting the right person? So some intelligence upfront and, like, who to show it to and why you're showing it to them so that they can come is interesting. Very particularly effective by the way for growth. Because if people don't activate or churn, they don't wanna talk to you. But if you can present that thing in their activation or conversion journey, they might actually talk to you. And so that's really key. So I a 100% agree with Teresa. That's exactly what you should do for not even... I wouldn't even call it discoveries for listening. Right? And some of it can be discovery. Yeah. I I think that's exactly what you should do. [00:36:45] S1: As you're talking, I'm realizing I'm using most of the products you've helped build. I'm on Twitter a lot. I use Calendly a lot. I use Typeform as my default survey tool. [00:36:55] S0: I saw that. My team is really excited that you're using Typeform. [00:36:58] S1: You're... You've impacted my life in so many ways, Oji.
00:36:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Oji Udezue
[00:36:58] S1: You're... You've impacted my life in so many ways, Oji. [00:37:02] S0: I think you owe me money, Lenny. I think [00:37:04] S1: you money. How much? How much do we... Give me your Venmo QR code. It's on [00:37:08] S0: the You
00:37:11 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:37:11] S1: fell in love with building products for a reason, but sometimes the day to day reality is a little different than you imagine. Instead of dreaming up big ideas, talking to customers, and crafting a strategy, you're drowning in spreadsheets and road map updates, and you're spending your days basically putting out fires. A better way is possible. Introducing Jira Product Discovery, the new prioritization and road mapping tool built for product teams by Atlassian. With Jira Product Discovery, you can gather all your product ideas and insights in one place and prioritize finally replacing those endless spreadsheets. Create and share custom product roadmaps with any stakeholder in seconds. And it's all built on Jira, where your engineering team's already working, so true collaboration is finally possible. Great products are built by great teams, not just engineers. Sales, support, leadership, even Greg from finance. Anyone that you want can contribute ideas, feedback, and insights in Jira product discovery for free. No catch. And it's only $10 a month for you. Say goodbye to your spreadsheets and the never ending alignment efforts. The old way of doing product management is over. Rediscover what's possible with Jira Product Discovery. Try it for free at atlassian.com/lenny. That's atlassian.com/lenny. Getting back on on track, another, important part of the book that you're writing is is around onboarding. And something that I talk lot about on this podcast is just the power of onboarding and how impactful it is to retention and so much of the eventual success of your product and how customers use it. And so I'd love to hear just your advice on what you think is really important. I guess why onboarding is so important in success in PLG, and also just like what tactics have you found to be really effective?
00:38:58 · Oji Udezue
[00:38:58] S0: Let me talk about a few fundamentals. Onboarding is a substitute for sales and, you know, all these account management teams for millions of customers. The task is how do you make it approximate a human and how friendly a human is and how approachable a human is. Because if you can do that, then you can process thousands and thousands of customers very quickly. Onboarding is an exercise in understanding the mindset of a buyer, of an evaluator. It's nothing more than that. Meaning that the province of understanding is social psychology. It's not really product. It's biopsychology. And I guess who knows a lot about this stuff? It's people in the, offline industry, the people who stock shelves, the people who provide inventory online, and so on and so forth, they are extraordinarily good at this. So the reason I say this is to divert people who are gross to really find where to source their inspiration from for onboarding, first of all. If you think about this as intentful in that way, which is people come not knowing anything about you and then they progressively develop confidence that you are the tool of choice, you then have to break it down into how does that journey go through a mind, the average mind anyway, and how do you assist each part? One is value proposition understanding. One is trying to see if it's simple enough and provides enough value. One is kicking tires, and one is making the choice that this is something I'm going to go forward with. How does your onboarding support all of these things? Now, I think there are two parts of onboarding. One is mandatory, the setup. It has to be spare. I try not to make it more than three screens, but it's about how do you say what this does and provide the essential setup that your customer needs to be successful. At Calendly, for example, we ask them about connecting their calendar and setting some defaults. Is it nine to five or whatever that is? Those two things set up all the future success. And if we made it optional, more people would fail. So it's information and the essential setup, and it should be as short as possible. Then there's a whole other set of things that should be optional because they're not necessary for everyone to be successful, but they're beneficial if people are curious.
00:41:31 · Oji Udezue, Lenny Rachitsky
And also, it can be what we call a random access so people can get back to it anytime they want, like if they're feeling help. And so if you divide onboarding into those two things and then figure out what to put in one and what to put in the other, I think you can be quite successful. And this is just the tip of the iceberg that I get into in the book. [00:41:56] S1: Are there any examples of really big onboarding wins, things that really helped with conversion or activation that come to mind?
00:42:01 · Oji Udezue
[00:42:01] S0: Well, I think keep it short is one big win. The fewer things, the better that are central that everyone has to go through. It's unclear if all those click throughs go here, go here, and all those things work. The wizards. Yeah. Yeah. The wizards have had, in my experience, limited benefit so much as just directing people to the one thing that they need to do post mandatory onboarding. Having examples, not 10, one or two of what good looks like is particularly powerful because it's mimetic. People see, oh, okay. This is exactly what I'm shooting for, is very powerful. In terms of trial and conversion, letting people understand and being very clear about where they are in the trial cycle, whether that you want them to pay for it now or they need to pay for it later after seven days. Have... Having them understand that really clearly so they know where they are versus they feel like they're completely at sea, I think is very important for conversion. I think there are a few things like that, but I also wanna mention that it's different for every product. Right? Depending on where you are in the quadrant and the amount of augmentation and problem solving and how sharp the problem is, you might wanna adjust your your approach. And this is the kind of thing that there is no... There are some fundamentals, but it's not necessarily this one size fits all. In fact, at Typeform, we're trying to maybe invent a new twist on freemium just because of some of the things we're seeing for our particular customers. And so, you know, these are, for me, some new learning as well as I go through each different product.