Three Pillars to make your product stick
Designing a product that retains users is key to MRR/ARR. So, here are three principles to help make things stick.
Introduction
In my previous article, I detailed an ancient Japanese Philosophy that made me a better designer. The philosophy is extremely important, however, it sits on the strategic side of the scale. So, for my next trick, I thought I’d get practical.
Recently I’ve been speaking at length with a family member who has a business idea around marketplaces. As someone who spent over 2 years working for a marketplace product, I had a lot to say. Their idea is great and certainly has legs. However, all conversations came back to the same question “yeah, but how do you keep users coming back?”. I started detailing these principles for them, however, in the spirit of building in the open, I thought I’d share them here too.
Getting Sticky with it
Many things separate a long-lasting product from a one-hit-wonder, but a big one is retention. How do you keep users coming back to your product regularly? What are the specific mechanics that you have built that ensure users return to you, and nobody else? In short, How do you make your product stick?
Now, a lot of you might be thinking that by using the word ‘stick’ I’m talking about designing features that get you hooked, many of which are outlined by Nir Eyal. However, I’m not. I’m not referring to the moral grey area that is addictive retention — products that play with our psychology so that we simply cannot put them down no matter how hard we try. Instead, I’m talking about what I’ll call value retention. Products that provide so much value to their users that leaving seems too steep a hill to climb.
Before we get into the detail, here’s a simple example of a product that sticks based on value. Let’s say you’re using Spotify. As you listen, you start to save songs and organise them into custom playlists. As time passes, Spotify transforms from a simple music player to a curated library. You spend time pruning it into the perfect collection of audio. It becomes an extension of your psyche that powers your work, gym sessions and gatherings with friends. Months later, you see Apple music offering a subscription for 50% less than what you’re paying for Spotify. In theory, you could switch over to Apple Music and save yourself money. However, in reality, switching platforms is not so simple. Switching means abandoning your carefully crafted library and having to rebuild it somewhere new. This is time-consuming and difficult. In this case, despite being half the cost, the price is still too high and Spotify sticks.
This is the difference between a good product and a great product. A good product is something useful and interesting, but a great product is a magnet. It is something that becomes so valuable that going elsewhere just doesn’t make sense. So, let’s learn how to get there.
How do you generate value retention?
In my experience, generating value based retention comes down to building a product rooted in three key pillars:
- Understand the human
- Understand needs over time
- Create value effects
Let’s break them down.
Understand the human
The first pillar is something you’re used to — understanding the human need. Technology is growing at an extremely fast rate and won’t be slowing down any time soon. As more and more shiny toys come out, it’s easy to fall into the trap of building tech for tech’s sake. This is a mistake. Technology is not that important. It is a tool that enables humans to do human things, just a little easier. I don’t want to use Instagram, I want to keep in touch with my friends. Instagram is just the tool that enables me to do that until a better one comes along.
“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”- Theodore Levitt
Let’s look at the recent explosion of NFTs. Countless businesses started to build NFTs into their offering because they felt that this was the secret to success. As we now know, it wasn’t. They simply built tech for tech’s sake and the time invested was futile.
Here’s an example of putting the human first. In 2021, I was working for a freelance marketplace where contractors sign up and find clients. Now, you might be thinking that the need they were serving was the need to find new contracts. However, this is not entirely true. The business had a core insight that going freelance also meant taking on a risk whereby when working as a freelancer there was a very real possibility that you would not get paid on time or not at all in some cases. So, you’d have to spend time chasing clients and fighting for the payment that was rightfully yours. This was the human insight. So, they built a system whereby all freelancers would get paid within 14 days so that they could focus on what counts — doing great work. Freelancers saw the platform as not just a place to find work, but a place to find work safely, so they kept coming back.
To create value retention you cannot build shallow features for the sake of it. You need to understand and serve the people you are designing for at a molecular level. Only when you do this will you begin building something useful and worth coming back to, rather than something that excites people temporarily.
Understand needs over time
Understanding a need is enough to get you in the race, but it’s not enough to win. To start creeping towards the top spot, you need to understand that a person’s needs are not static. Instead, they are in constant motion and your product needs to keep up. This is our second pillar.
At the same freelance marketplace, I was tasked with re-designing the search experience. Whilst talking to users, I uncovered a huge insight. Oftentimes, hiring managers would be briefed to find very specific freelancers, for example, “Powerpoint designers with government clearance”. They would find 5–10 freelancers, contact them one by one and eventually create a booking. The following month, the same brief would pop up. The hiring manager would have to repeat the process, contacting freelancers one by one and so on. The next month, the same. Each month they were having to repeat the same lengthy workflow.
The problem was that the product did not understand this. It catered only for their initial need but did not consider that after the first use of the platform their need had changed. They did not need to “find a freelancer”. They needed to relocate the same freelancers that they had screened previously, however, there was no easy way to complete this goal.
Understanding this, I designed a saving mechanic so that hiring managers could begin to save similar freelancers to personalised groups, meaning that whenever a repeat brief inevitably popped up, they simply clicked a button to contact them all at once, saving time. With this, the product began to speak to both a hiring manager’s initial needs, as well as how those needs changed the second, third, and fourth times they used the platform; boosting its stickiness as users knew that their needs were always catered for, regardless of the point in time.
From here, you can see that to create something that retains users based on value, you need to understand the perpetual motion of your users’ needs and ensure whichever way the pendulum swings, their needs are catered for. Ask yourself, how do the needs of a first-time user change from the needs of a veteran user; or perhaps even, a user who has not visited your product for one year? Understanding needs over time is key to retention.
Generate value effects
Most of you will be familiar with the term “Network Effects”, where a product’s value increases the greater the number of users on it (LinkedIn, Instagram, Medium etc.). Our last pillar, and arguably the most important, is something similar. It’s what I call “Value Effects”, where the more a person uses a product, the more valuable it becomes. So, finally, you need to figure out how your product’s value can mature the more an individual uses it. Let me explain.
Earlier I shared an example of the saving mechanic I designed for a freelance marketplace. You can now imagine that as a hiring manager is using the platform, they slowly begin to save freelancers to different groups as they go. Maybe they’re not looking for a product designer with government clearance right now, but they stumble across one that looks interesting. They save them to a group for later. They see a french speaking copywriter. They save them for “that brief that is coming up”. This happens again and again and again. As time goes on, the product begins to shape around them, increasing in value every time they save a freelancer. Soon, the time they have spent crafting their groups of freelancers becomes an investment that is valuable to hold on to. Just like the Spotify user with their carefully crafted playlists, when the time comes to consider switching, it becomes difficult as it requires painstakingly re-constructing their collection of neatly organised freelancers. That is difficult, and time-consuming, so, our marketplace sticks.
There are many ways to generate these value effects. Maybe it is a saving feature, or maybe it is a feature for a retailer that consolidates delivery data, helping them to monitor business efficiency. Whatever it may be, to build a product that retains users based on value, you must work towards creating a product that slowly shapes itself around the people that use it. It should increase in value each time they click, swipe, type and save. It is ultimately a question of growing personalisation. So, think to yourself, how can my product become more personalised the more someone uses it? Generating these value effects is another key to keeping users coming back.
Recap
Retention is key to the success of any business, whether it be digital or physical, so it’s important to design for it. As discussed, a lot of the factors come down to ensuring you solve a problem, ease of use and increasing personalisation as a product is used. In this article, we’ve spoken about three pillars to help you do that.
Pillar 1: Understand the human need
Understand the human problem that you are solving. Dig deeper than the surface problem that anyone can solve and instead find the root problem (or problems) that is at the core of the humans you are designing for.
Pillar 2: Understand the needs over time
Understand that a person’s needs are not static. They are constantly changing and evolving, therefore, you need to design a product that can keep up and continue to provide value over time.
Pillar 3: Generate Value effects
Products that stick have value effects. They grow, shrink and shape themselves around the individuals that use them. If you can design a product that’s value matures and becomes more personalised the more someone uses it, then you’re doing something right.
Now, these methods are not foolproof and retention can be tricky. There are plenty of reasons why a product may both stick or become unstuck; some of which are out of our control such as the current economic climate. However, what these pillars will do is provide you with an initial framework that will get you off to a strong start in designing a business that withstands the test of time. Next, I’ll be looking at a specific market and applying these pillars to re-design a product so it well and truly sticks. For the time being, I’d be interested in hearing what you think. What is your process for designing a product that sticks?
Sam Sampson
Product designer @RIVAL
👋 Interested in discussing this article? Say hello!
