3 product development tips for 2019

Last year I had some good results with some of the (many) product development tactics I  tried, and thought I would share as with CRO tips I shared.

1. With Now Novel we consistently try to understand and test the optimum first user experience, and we spent some time this year trying to perfect our onboarding flow.  One of the first thing we looked at was understanding the product through a Jobs-to-be-done  lens. Intercom have written a lot about this and their book is fairly useful. We undertook more surveys, spoke to customers to understand their motivations and intentions a little better. What we found was that there were three distinct groups:

• people who wanted to start writing
• people who had something and wanted to progress, and
• people who wanted to learn about the craft of writing

Armed with this information we could construct an onboarding flow that catered to our prospective client’s job-to-be done and so improve their satisfaction by exposing them to a relevant part of the product and ultimately increasing conversion. Very useful in this was Samuel Hulick’s onboarding book (you may recognise him from his zany first time onboarding teardown’s).

The above image is a powerful distillation of that book (and the idea of onboarding)

2. Actually asking for the sale is something I have forgotten to do enough of. You think its implicit that your product is for sale and that you would be guiding people to purchase, but with freemium there are a lot of opportunity to reiterate and improve your selling. Reading this article was illuminating in that it showed all of the options for cross selling and a methodical process for achieving it. We’ve started a process of integrating nudges (step 1 is a simple header for encouraging unpaid members to purchase) which has accounted for 13% of all sales since we launched it. We have a few more planned for very soon, the one I am most interested in is the freemium pop-up: as you reach the border of the freemium offering you get a pop-up that outlines the benefits of paid membership. The line that needs to be walked is how many of these can you use that don’t piss your audience off too much, whilst encouraging them to convert (great copy and a clearly communicated value proposition is key here).

3. Pricing is often seen as more art than science, we undertook some research to add some science to it. We asked about the benefits of our product and the pricing that would be:

-too expensive

-getting expensive

-a good deal

-too cheap

and then plotted all of the responses on a graph.

the area between all lines is the range where you can price (in the above example between $27 to $43). This gives you a much more informed perspective about where you can price your product.