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Chapter 5: Understand Your New Users
CHAPTER 6: Understand Your New Users
Make the customer the hero of your story.
- Ann Handley
There’s a saying that “hope is not a strategy.”
It’s actually unclear where this phrase originated, but it’s been popularly exclaimed by leaders such as Barack Obama, James Cameron, Vince Lombardi, and many others.
Regardless, if you’re like me, then this feels pretty intuitive. Well-planned and thought-out action is often the best strategy… not hope.
When you hope for something, it feels like unfounded wishful thinking, with no action or a plan to back it up. Any of the following sound familiar?
Hope is not a strategy.
But, it’s such a powerful force to bring about change. Hope is a belief that your current situation can get better, no matter how big or small.
This is the reason why signing up for a new product is an expression of hope. When users sign up, they’re opening themselves up to the possibility that things could be better.
Whether that hope ends in disappointment or excitement ultimately boils down to how well you understand what exactly they’re hoping for: what is it about their current situation that motivated them to sign up for your product? What were they hoping to achieve with your product that they couldn’t already do?
If you fail to realize this, that sense of hope can result in disappointment. You’ve lost a potential user. With each churned signup, your overall CAC increases. And for users, they’ve just wasted their time and effort trying out your product.
For this reason, it’s critical your onboarding team has a crystal-clear picture of what exactly your users’ desired outcomes are. This is the second step in the EUREKA framework.
If you get this step wrong, everything else will fail. Because once you’re able to fully understand what users truly want, you can design a reliable onboarding flow that turns hope into excitement.
Before you think about an onboarding redesign by adding another product tour or rewriting your onboarding emails, you need to first understand your users.
A Better Life
When you boil it down, onboarding is really about changing someone's behavior so that they can experience a better life. Users are frustrated or annoyed with something, and they sign up for a product to make their lives easier.
Remember, the primary goal of user onboarding is to help users become better versions of themselves. If we go back to the Super Mario analogy, onboarding shouldn’t focus on the product (the fire flower) or its characteristics (green stem and easy to pick up), even though they are important. It should focus on creating a better life.
It doesn’t matter if you sell lip gloss, copywriting services, or software; people are buying a better version of themselves.
Let’s say your phone is a distraction during the day, to the point work is placed on the back-burner. To combat the intrusion on your productivity, you buy a timed lockbox to keep the phone hidden. What you’re really buying is a better way to avoid distractions from your mobile phone during work hours.
Another way to put it:
Upgrade your user, not your product. Don’t build better cameras – build better photographers.
- Kathy Sierra
Your Product’s “Job Interview”
The idea of “upgrading” a user’s life is at the core of the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory by Clay Christensen, innovation expert and bestselling author of The Innovator’s Dilemma. JTBD is the process consumers go through whenever they aim to transform their existing life-situation. To enable a life transformation, customers “hire” products to solve a problem or to satisfy a need. This is known as a Customer Job.
For example, a Customer Job could be: “When I’m hungry, I want to cook raw chicken so I can eat it and satisfy my hunger.” So, you could “hire” a stove to make fried chicken or a grill to barbecue it. Or you could “hire” an oven to bake it.
There are three implications of the JTBD framework.
1. Customer Jobs are solution agnostic.
Notice how with cooking raw chicken, the Customer Job is independent of the solution (the stove, grill, or oven).
When thinking about a product’s Customer Job, make sure it focuses on users’ needs and problems instead of the solution. You can’t start by looking at the product or what they’re currently using. You have to dig to the root of the problem that caused them to start looking for a solution in the first place.
What were the circumstances around a person’s life that led them to start looking for a solution?
2. The circumstances in people’s lives lead to “job openings.”
In the JTBD framework, understanding the circumstances and pain points in users’ lives are more important than the product features and customer characteristics.
For example, after several comments from my wife that I looked like a high school student with my current laptop bag, it was time for an upgrade. So, I bought a professional bag to bring to conferences and client meetings.
You could say the reason I started looking for one was to impress clients and people at conferences. But in actuality, I started to think about leveling up my wardrobe soon after I received a promotion.
While out shopping for it, a lot of information was thrown at me, ranging from the durability of the materials to the ergonomic qualities and features of the bag itself. But what actually sold me was the marketing message. This bag was made for “my grown-up work self.”
So what’s the point here?
To build a great user onboarding experience, it’s important to know:
In other words, people try out products because there is a gap between their current circumstances and their final aspiration. Successful onboarding experiences are like a sturdy bridge between that gap so users can safely cross over to their desired outcome.
3. User onboarding is the Customer Job “interview.”
If users are hiring a product to do a Customer Job, then the user onboarding is the “interview” process. To nail the job interview, you have to first know what job you’re being interviewed to do. Do you think you’d be successful if you prepared yourself for a product management job interview if the job posting was actually for a sales development representative? I think not!
To nail the job interview with users, you must first know what job a product is being hired to do. For that, it’s essential to understand the three interconnected reasons users could be signing up for a product.
The Three Components of Customer Jobs
1. Functional
When someone talks about Customer Jobs, they’re usually referring to the functional component of JTBD. Functional jobs involve specific outcomes the users experience after working with a product.
Back to the example with Super Mario: the functional job of a fire flower is to make it easier for Super Mario to destroy barriers by using a new fire-spitting ability.
Another famous example is from Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” The quarter-inch hole is the functional job the drill must do.
We can take that analogy even further by describing the purpose of the quarter-inch hole. Maybe it’s to hang a photo or build a shelf. That would be the true functional job of the quarter-inch hole.
It’s important to look further than what appears on the surface.
Here’s another example with a SaaS business, Canva, a graphic design platform that's great for making invitations, business cards, Instagram posts, and more. At the surface level, Canva’s functional job is to help people easily create custom designs. At a deeper level, it depends on who is using the product:
Functional jobs are as complex as the number of market segments served. Segmenting and personalizing the user onboarding experience for different customer jobs is one of the low-hanging fruits of improving onboarding. This is exactly why Canva asks new users what they’ll be using the app for during the user onboarding:
Segmentation is an important concept for the remainder of the EUREKA framework. But for now, think about the desired outcomes that users want to receive when they sign up for your product.
2. Emotional
The second component of a Customer Job is emotional: how users feel (or what they want to avoid feeling) after they’ve accomplished their desired outcome. Products meet an emotional need for people who use them, and it’s a big reason why they end up purchasing.
You can see this idea front-and-center in one of Revlon’s breakout magazine advertising campaigns from 1952, Fire and Ice. The brilliant ad campaign makes it clear that Revlon isn’t selling lipstick or nail polish; it’s selling a “better you.”
The ad barely mentions any product. Instead, it prominently features a picture of model Dorian Leigh. You need to look closely to notice lipstick and nail polish, both located near the bottom of the page.
This ad was designed on purpose to amplify the emotional component of Revlon’s Customer Job.
In the factory we make cosmetics; in the drugstore we sell hope.
- Charles Revson, founder of Revlon
When it comes to your product, what emotions do you want your customers to feel or avoid feeling as a result of using it? For Canva users, it could be to stimulate creativity without any design training or natural visual skills.
3. Social
The third component of a Customer Job is social. When we invest time and effort into a product, we do so in a social context, whether that’s at home with family or at work with colleagues. We communicate our values when we make a purchase, but we also signal to others how we want to be perceived.
Once our physiological and safety needs are met, we look for additional ways to feel loved, connected, and accomplished by others.
Take, for instance, one of Canva’s social ads, which reads, “No design experience? No problem. Canva makes it easy for anyone to create professional designs that are sure to get you noticed.”
This ad makes Canva’s social job obvious: it’s to help create professional designs that your boss and co-workers will take notice of, even with zero design training or experience. You might hear them say, “Wow! This design is beautiful. I didn’t know you were so creative. Good job!”
For your product, how does it impact how your customers are perceived by others? Are they seen as more knowledgeable? Do you make them look more professional? Do you help them become the hero in their workplace?
The Progress-Making Forces
Understanding a product’s functional, emotional, and social jobs help produce a clearer picture of what your user’s desired outcomes are. So how do you bridge the gap between their current circumstance to the desired outcome?
For that, you need to recognize the four progress-making forces that influence people to stick with the status quo or take the leap forward with a new solution:
To onboard customers successfully to a complex product, you need to understand the push, strengthen the pull, calm anxiety, and overcome inertia. When we look at Canva, the reason for subscribing could involve the following forces:
The push to find a new solution: “We want to experiment with different types of creatives for our Facebook ads. But we can’t afford to continue hiring a freelancer to update the creatives for our Facebook ads.”
The pull of a new solution: “If we use a tool that provides us with templates for Facebook ads, we can get variations of creatives for our ads without having to deal with finding, hiring, and paying for a freelancer.”
The anxiety of what could happen: “What if Canva doesn’t have any Facebook ad templates that we like? We’ve tried three other tools for this job, and none have been good enough.”
The inertia of not wanting to change: “We’ve already got a good working relationship with one of our freelancers. Sure the cost and availability might be a problem. But will the designs in Canva ever be as good as a qualified designer?”
During user onboarding, Canva’s team needs to amplify the pain of their current situation (the push) while at the same time explaining the benefits of the product (the pull). They need to provide guidance for complicated tasks, which helps calm anxiety while also overcoming the inertia of not wanting to change.
This approach to user onboarding helps new users deeply understand the value a product can provide, while defeating the emotions that stand in the way of moving forward, no matter how complex it is.
JTBD Interviews
So how do you determine a product’s functional, emotional, and social jobs, along with the four progress-making forces?
The best way to uncover valuable insights like this is through user interviews.
It might be tempting to skip this step. After all, 65% of marketing and product teams rarely do audience research.
Some find executing user interviews too time-consuming. For introverts (like myself), it’s a sweat-inducing experience. Whenever the ProductLed team does onboarding workshops, we have at least one person asks, “Do we really have to do user interviews?”
The answer is always, “Yes!”
Companies that invested in customer research grew two to three times faster than companies that didn't!
Understanding your users through customer research is the key to improving user onboarding and retention. Find the patterns in the stories of people who understand your product and understand what got them so excited to continue using it. The main focus should be to attract and create more “core users” who have fallen in love with your solution.
To do this, talk to your most active users and ask them questions:
These useful insights can help the onboarding team deliver a more engaged, relevant, and impactful user onboarding experience. The product team will have a better idea of which features and product actions to direct new users to. The marketing, sales, and support team can better craft messaging and prepare responses to your users’ anxieties and objections.
If you get this step right, you have a higher chance of creating massive improvements in the overall onboarding experience.
On the other hand, if you get this step wrong or skip out on it, it’ll trickle down to the remaining steps in the EUREKA framework. You can’t help new users perceive, experience, and adopt a product’s value if you don’t know what value means to them. Value is not determined by a company and definitely not by the expansiveness of the feature set. Value is determined by users based on their context of use.
Whether you’re a seasoned pro at user interviews or just starting out, the ProductLed team provides a step-by-step guide to help you do them. Just head over to productled.com/user-interviews. There, we provide samples and templates to get you started. We also supply you with strategies to summarize your research into actionable insights that we’ve discussed in this chapter.
What’s Next
When it comes to this EUREKA step, be sure to involve your onboarding team, so everyone is on the same page. Summarize your findings in the User Success Canvas we’ve created for ProductLed clients, which you can download for free at productled.com/user-success.
Next up in the EUREKA framework is refining your onboarding success metric. This is a tangible data point you can use to define what it means to be successfully onboarded. For example, Slack’s onboarding success metric is when teams have sent 2,000 messages because they’re 93% more likely to continue using it moving forward.
I’ll help you identify a similar metric your team can use. It signals when new users have likely adopted your product, and the initial onboarding is complete.
View all episodes
By Ramli JohnCHAPTER 6: Understand Your New Users
Make the customer the hero of your story.
- Ann Handley
There’s a saying that “hope is not a strategy.”
It’s actually unclear where this phrase originated, but it’s been popularly exclaimed by leaders such as Barack Obama, James Cameron, Vince Lombardi, and many others.
Regardless, if you’re like me, then this feels pretty intuitive. Well-planned and thought-out action is often the best strategy… not hope.
When you hope for something, it feels like unfounded wishful thinking, with no action or a plan to back it up. Any of the following sound familiar?
Hope is not a strategy.
But, it’s such a powerful force to bring about change. Hope is a belief that your current situation can get better, no matter how big or small.
This is the reason why signing up for a new product is an expression of hope. When users sign up, they’re opening themselves up to the possibility that things could be better.
Whether that hope ends in disappointment or excitement ultimately boils down to how well you understand what exactly they’re hoping for: what is it about their current situation that motivated them to sign up for your product? What were they hoping to achieve with your product that they couldn’t already do?
If you fail to realize this, that sense of hope can result in disappointment. You’ve lost a potential user. With each churned signup, your overall CAC increases. And for users, they’ve just wasted their time and effort trying out your product.
For this reason, it’s critical your onboarding team has a crystal-clear picture of what exactly your users’ desired outcomes are. This is the second step in the EUREKA framework.
If you get this step wrong, everything else will fail. Because once you’re able to fully understand what users truly want, you can design a reliable onboarding flow that turns hope into excitement.
Before you think about an onboarding redesign by adding another product tour or rewriting your onboarding emails, you need to first understand your users.
A Better Life
When you boil it down, onboarding is really about changing someone's behavior so that they can experience a better life. Users are frustrated or annoyed with something, and they sign up for a product to make their lives easier.
Remember, the primary goal of user onboarding is to help users become better versions of themselves. If we go back to the Super Mario analogy, onboarding shouldn’t focus on the product (the fire flower) or its characteristics (green stem and easy to pick up), even though they are important. It should focus on creating a better life.
It doesn’t matter if you sell lip gloss, copywriting services, or software; people are buying a better version of themselves.
Let’s say your phone is a distraction during the day, to the point work is placed on the back-burner. To combat the intrusion on your productivity, you buy a timed lockbox to keep the phone hidden. What you’re really buying is a better way to avoid distractions from your mobile phone during work hours.
Another way to put it:
Upgrade your user, not your product. Don’t build better cameras – build better photographers.
- Kathy Sierra
Your Product’s “Job Interview”
The idea of “upgrading” a user’s life is at the core of the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory by Clay Christensen, innovation expert and bestselling author of The Innovator’s Dilemma. JTBD is the process consumers go through whenever they aim to transform their existing life-situation. To enable a life transformation, customers “hire” products to solve a problem or to satisfy a need. This is known as a Customer Job.
For example, a Customer Job could be: “When I’m hungry, I want to cook raw chicken so I can eat it and satisfy my hunger.” So, you could “hire” a stove to make fried chicken or a grill to barbecue it. Or you could “hire” an oven to bake it.
There are three implications of the JTBD framework.
1. Customer Jobs are solution agnostic.
Notice how with cooking raw chicken, the Customer Job is independent of the solution (the stove, grill, or oven).
When thinking about a product’s Customer Job, make sure it focuses on users’ needs and problems instead of the solution. You can’t start by looking at the product or what they’re currently using. You have to dig to the root of the problem that caused them to start looking for a solution in the first place.
What were the circumstances around a person’s life that led them to start looking for a solution?
2. The circumstances in people’s lives lead to “job openings.”
In the JTBD framework, understanding the circumstances and pain points in users’ lives are more important than the product features and customer characteristics.
For example, after several comments from my wife that I looked like a high school student with my current laptop bag, it was time for an upgrade. So, I bought a professional bag to bring to conferences and client meetings.
You could say the reason I started looking for one was to impress clients and people at conferences. But in actuality, I started to think about leveling up my wardrobe soon after I received a promotion.
While out shopping for it, a lot of information was thrown at me, ranging from the durability of the materials to the ergonomic qualities and features of the bag itself. But what actually sold me was the marketing message. This bag was made for “my grown-up work self.”
So what’s the point here?
To build a great user onboarding experience, it’s important to know:
In other words, people try out products because there is a gap between their current circumstances and their final aspiration. Successful onboarding experiences are like a sturdy bridge between that gap so users can safely cross over to their desired outcome.
3. User onboarding is the Customer Job “interview.”
If users are hiring a product to do a Customer Job, then the user onboarding is the “interview” process. To nail the job interview, you have to first know what job you’re being interviewed to do. Do you think you’d be successful if you prepared yourself for a product management job interview if the job posting was actually for a sales development representative? I think not!
To nail the job interview with users, you must first know what job a product is being hired to do. For that, it’s essential to understand the three interconnected reasons users could be signing up for a product.
The Three Components of Customer Jobs
1. Functional
When someone talks about Customer Jobs, they’re usually referring to the functional component of JTBD. Functional jobs involve specific outcomes the users experience after working with a product.
Back to the example with Super Mario: the functional job of a fire flower is to make it easier for Super Mario to destroy barriers by using a new fire-spitting ability.
Another famous example is from Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” The quarter-inch hole is the functional job the drill must do.
We can take that analogy even further by describing the purpose of the quarter-inch hole. Maybe it’s to hang a photo or build a shelf. That would be the true functional job of the quarter-inch hole.
It’s important to look further than what appears on the surface.
Here’s another example with a SaaS business, Canva, a graphic design platform that's great for making invitations, business cards, Instagram posts, and more. At the surface level, Canva’s functional job is to help people easily create custom designs. At a deeper level, it depends on who is using the product:
Functional jobs are as complex as the number of market segments served. Segmenting and personalizing the user onboarding experience for different customer jobs is one of the low-hanging fruits of improving onboarding. This is exactly why Canva asks new users what they’ll be using the app for during the user onboarding:
Segmentation is an important concept for the remainder of the EUREKA framework. But for now, think about the desired outcomes that users want to receive when they sign up for your product.
2. Emotional
The second component of a Customer Job is emotional: how users feel (or what they want to avoid feeling) after they’ve accomplished their desired outcome. Products meet an emotional need for people who use them, and it’s a big reason why they end up purchasing.
You can see this idea front-and-center in one of Revlon’s breakout magazine advertising campaigns from 1952, Fire and Ice. The brilliant ad campaign makes it clear that Revlon isn’t selling lipstick or nail polish; it’s selling a “better you.”
The ad barely mentions any product. Instead, it prominently features a picture of model Dorian Leigh. You need to look closely to notice lipstick and nail polish, both located near the bottom of the page.
This ad was designed on purpose to amplify the emotional component of Revlon’s Customer Job.
In the factory we make cosmetics; in the drugstore we sell hope.
- Charles Revson, founder of Revlon
When it comes to your product, what emotions do you want your customers to feel or avoid feeling as a result of using it? For Canva users, it could be to stimulate creativity without any design training or natural visual skills.
3. Social
The third component of a Customer Job is social. When we invest time and effort into a product, we do so in a social context, whether that’s at home with family or at work with colleagues. We communicate our values when we make a purchase, but we also signal to others how we want to be perceived.
Once our physiological and safety needs are met, we look for additional ways to feel loved, connected, and accomplished by others.
Take, for instance, one of Canva’s social ads, which reads, “No design experience? No problem. Canva makes it easy for anyone to create professional designs that are sure to get you noticed.”
This ad makes Canva’s social job obvious: it’s to help create professional designs that your boss and co-workers will take notice of, even with zero design training or experience. You might hear them say, “Wow! This design is beautiful. I didn’t know you were so creative. Good job!”
For your product, how does it impact how your customers are perceived by others? Are they seen as more knowledgeable? Do you make them look more professional? Do you help them become the hero in their workplace?
The Progress-Making Forces
Understanding a product’s functional, emotional, and social jobs help produce a clearer picture of what your user’s desired outcomes are. So how do you bridge the gap between their current circumstance to the desired outcome?
For that, you need to recognize the four progress-making forces that influence people to stick with the status quo or take the leap forward with a new solution:
To onboard customers successfully to a complex product, you need to understand the push, strengthen the pull, calm anxiety, and overcome inertia. When we look at Canva, the reason for subscribing could involve the following forces:
The push to find a new solution: “We want to experiment with different types of creatives for our Facebook ads. But we can’t afford to continue hiring a freelancer to update the creatives for our Facebook ads.”
The pull of a new solution: “If we use a tool that provides us with templates for Facebook ads, we can get variations of creatives for our ads without having to deal with finding, hiring, and paying for a freelancer.”
The anxiety of what could happen: “What if Canva doesn’t have any Facebook ad templates that we like? We’ve tried three other tools for this job, and none have been good enough.”
The inertia of not wanting to change: “We’ve already got a good working relationship with one of our freelancers. Sure the cost and availability might be a problem. But will the designs in Canva ever be as good as a qualified designer?”
During user onboarding, Canva’s team needs to amplify the pain of their current situation (the push) while at the same time explaining the benefits of the product (the pull). They need to provide guidance for complicated tasks, which helps calm anxiety while also overcoming the inertia of not wanting to change.
This approach to user onboarding helps new users deeply understand the value a product can provide, while defeating the emotions that stand in the way of moving forward, no matter how complex it is.
JTBD Interviews
So how do you determine a product’s functional, emotional, and social jobs, along with the four progress-making forces?
The best way to uncover valuable insights like this is through user interviews.
It might be tempting to skip this step. After all, 65% of marketing and product teams rarely do audience research.
Some find executing user interviews too time-consuming. For introverts (like myself), it’s a sweat-inducing experience. Whenever the ProductLed team does onboarding workshops, we have at least one person asks, “Do we really have to do user interviews?”
The answer is always, “Yes!”
Companies that invested in customer research grew two to three times faster than companies that didn't!
Understanding your users through customer research is the key to improving user onboarding and retention. Find the patterns in the stories of people who understand your product and understand what got them so excited to continue using it. The main focus should be to attract and create more “core users” who have fallen in love with your solution.
To do this, talk to your most active users and ask them questions:
These useful insights can help the onboarding team deliver a more engaged, relevant, and impactful user onboarding experience. The product team will have a better idea of which features and product actions to direct new users to. The marketing, sales, and support team can better craft messaging and prepare responses to your users’ anxieties and objections.
If you get this step right, you have a higher chance of creating massive improvements in the overall onboarding experience.
On the other hand, if you get this step wrong or skip out on it, it’ll trickle down to the remaining steps in the EUREKA framework. You can’t help new users perceive, experience, and adopt a product’s value if you don’t know what value means to them. Value is not determined by a company and definitely not by the expansiveness of the feature set. Value is determined by users based on their context of use.
Whether you’re a seasoned pro at user interviews or just starting out, the ProductLed team provides a step-by-step guide to help you do them. Just head over to productled.com/user-interviews. There, we provide samples and templates to get you started. We also supply you with strategies to summarize your research into actionable insights that we’ve discussed in this chapter.
What’s Next
When it comes to this EUREKA step, be sure to involve your onboarding team, so everyone is on the same page. Summarize your findings in the User Success Canvas we’ve created for ProductLed clients, which you can download for free at productled.com/user-success.
Next up in the EUREKA framework is refining your onboarding success metric. This is a tangible data point you can use to define what it means to be successfully onboarded. For example, Slack’s onboarding success metric is when teams have sent 2,000 messages because they’re 93% more likely to continue using it moving forward.
I’ll help you identify a similar metric your team can use. It signals when new users have likely adopted your product, and the initial onboarding is complete.