Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:17:32 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
And I think that one learning, seeing this time and time again across companies, actually the right friction helps and adding more friction usually works if you do it the right way. I think that's something I've consistently seen that we've seen here as well. So to me, I think it's really being able to identify what are the characteristics of a user that allows you to then recommend them to the right feature or product and not being shy about adding friction to do that, I think is probably the single biggest thing that's important here. [00:18:05] S0: When I asked Ben Mann, one of the co-founders, former podcast guest, what to ask you about, and this is what he highlighted, is your experience, especially at Mercury redoing onboarding and making it magical. And basically he's in the same place as you of just how important it is for people to understand what the AI tool is capable of to help people decide to use it and stick with it. Is there an example of something you changed in onboarding that helped significantly improve activation? [00:18:33] S1: Yeah, it's a great question. And I like that it brings up Mercury. I talk about their product a lot. So worked on the growth team at Mercury, I think it's a fantastic product. It's something many people use, and the reason they use it is because the better banking experience than its- [00:18:47] S0: Yeah, I'm a very happy customer just to put that out there. I love it. [00:18:50] S1: It's a great product. Highly recommend it. They have personal banking. Everyone should go and use it.
00:18:50 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:18:50] S1: It's a great product. Highly recommend it. They have personal banking. Everyone should go and use it. [00:18:54] S0: Right. They just launched that.
00:18:57 · Amol Avasare
[00:18:57] S1: And so I think that the interesting thing about Mercury is the core value is that it's a better experience. That's the reason you use it. You're not getting better other things, just it's a better product experience. And so that ethos is very, very deeply held within the company. It comes from a number of the founders. And I think that we had a big push one quarter when I was there on the onboarding flow. So onboarding flows for banking institutions and regulated entities are extremely complex. The amount of time I've spent on the difference between a registered agent address and a legal address and a physical address, these things are very, very complex. And we basically looked at the onboarding flow and we were like, okay, we've invested so much in quality and the rest of the product, but we haven't really done it here. And this is the first experience that people have. And so we said, forget metrics, forget growth, forget everything else. As the growth team on conversion, we're going to spend a whole quarter fixing quality in this flow. And so that's all we did. Forget the metrics. We're just going to make this as good of an experience as we can and fix all these. You go back from one field to the other field and adding in your beneficial ownership details. And it actually ended up being, and probably until I joined here, the single most impactful quarter that I've ever had as a growth PM in terms of the impact that it had. And so we saw a significant uplift on basically our onboarding started to completion from just focusing on quality. And so that to me is a broader learning around quality drives growth that I think I've tried to bring to Anthropic. I think for us at Anthropic, some of the things that we've done in the onboarding flow is basically we ask users questions around who they are, what their interest areas are. And we then use that to recommend different products and features. And number of people look at the flow and they're like, "You have so much friction. It's such a long flow." And I'm like, "We have the data. We're kind of happy with how that's performing."
00:20:57 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:20:57] S0: What is your kind of philosophy on good friction versus bad friction?
00:21:01 · Amol Avasare
[00:21:01] S1: I've just seen time and time again at every job I've been in growth that adding friction and adding the right steps leads to higher conversion and higher funnel completion. So you want to get rid of... And especially if you have high volume, you should test the majority of this and just learn and see, does this apply to your business as well? But you want to get rid of annoying friction that doesn't add value. But I think the most simple understanding people have is just solve time for value, cut all the steps and just get them into the product. And that doesn't work most times. I think if you've really thoroughly tested your flows, I look at the companies I've been at, MasterClass. If you go through MasterClass's purchase flow right now, you'll go through all these steps in this quiz when you land on, when you're trying to buy. And you're like, "I came here to buy and it's taking me through all these questions, what are you here for, et cetera." I think it's easy to look at that and be like, "Why do they have this? This is a terrible thing. Just cut it all." And it's like, no, that's been thoroughly tested. And actually that was a significant revenue driver because it helps users feel that the product is for them by understanding what their interests are and then recommending the content and classes there. One of the growth PMs on our team left to join Calm, Calm.com, the meditation app. If you go to Calm's, their landing page and you go through their purchase flow, their login flow, you'll see a quiz. It's not a coincidence that at Mercury we also tested, I think Immad posted on Twitter, we broke out some steps in onboarding. And just having one screen, if you have five or six different form inputs and you often break that into two screens and reduce the cognitive load to people, that is something that performs well. We added steps into the flow there that actually performed well, same at Anthropic. So I think that the takeaway to me is cut friction when it doesn't add to the experience of helping a user understand why the product is for them. But if you can help users understand a product, why product is for them and how to use it and what's most relevant to them, and it's going to add friction, don't shy away from it. Test it, confirm that it works for you, but I think this is something that most growth practitioners deeply understand.
00:23:28 · Lenny Rachitsky, Amol Avasare
[00:23:28] S0: And for them is really important there, what you described is adding friction to better understand who they are so that you know how to recommend the right thing for them. [00:23:38] S1: Correct. Yes. And that done right, it just flows through. So it helps you with activation, but then it helps you with lifecycle. You know more about those users and why they're here. And most sophisticated businesses, you can then, even if someone drops off, you can do lookalike targeting and you can get them at the ad layer as well. So that initial piece of how you understand who the user is just like it's a juice that just keeps on giving if you then use it right for the down funnel. [00:24:06] S0: Everyone's about to go do a bunch of tear downs of Claude's onboarding, MasterClass onboarding, Mercury onboarding. As a tangent, I was at this PM dinner recently and I was asking all the PMs, how has your role as a PM changed most with AI? Where has AI most impacted what you do? And one of the PM's answer that is actually doing competitive analysis, doing a bunch of teardowns of what other people are doing for pricing pages and onboarding. So it's easy to do now. Just, "Hey, Cowork..." I don't know, would you use Cowork for this or Claude? What would you use for that? Okay, this is good. Help people pick which tool to use. If you want to go do a bunch of teardowns of other competitors' onboarding flows, what would you use?