But before you build and grow a product-led business, you need to first take a step back to understand your users. Because ultimately, knowing and understanding your users' motivations and anxieties is the foundation of delivering value to your end users.
In this course, you will:
Ramli John:
So the first one is define end user success. I say this is probably the most critical piece of implementing product led growth because really there's only three. If you get those three elements right, this is the key to mastering product led growth. First, you need to understand your value. Second, you need to communicate that perceived value. And third, you need to deliver on that promise. At this very moment, most of you, your business is sales led. So the way that this piece has come together is through a demo or somebody hand-holding a prospect through this experience. To help prospects or potential customers, to understand the buyer, communicate the value and deliver that value with the help of the customer success team or the rest of the team.
Ramli John:
The thing is, as you implement product led growth, this has to evolve so that the whole team is involved in this process. And at some point there's going to be a piece where users will be guiding themselves through that. And if you don't have this standardized idea of what value is, what is end user success is, for the rest of your organization, not just for the sales team. But like, what does it look like for the product, for the sales, for the marketing, with the customer success? Then it's not going to work, this is going to be a team effort. And in finding that now and putting on a piece of paper will help you down the road.
Ramli John:
So really the idea of this is understanding why are your users signing up for your product? Why are they requesting a demo? Think about that for a second. I mean, it sounds so simple, right? Just type it in the comments. Why are people signing up for your product? And it might sounds so simple, but there are nuances to it and it might not be as simple as we think it really is. One of the things, here's an example with Intercom. Intercom is the live chat software, and I'm going to ask you, why do companies sign up for Intercom? If you think it's A, type A, because they want to a live chat software on the website. Type B, if you think it's because they want a faster way to respond to questions from prospects. Type C, if you think it's customer looking for a better way to acquire customers. Type D, if you think it's B and C. And type E, if think it's all of the above.
Ramli John:
Think about that for a second. Before we continue on what is it? Now, it might be tempting to say, "Hey, yeah, they do want the live chat. Hey, they do want to respond to the questions from prospects faster." But really at the core of it, if you keep asking why, the core of why a sales and marketing team might want to sign up for, Intercom is to acquire customers in a better, faster way. It's the reason why they want live chat. There is the reason why they want to respond to questions right away, is that the end of the day, this is a tool to help companies acquire customers faster. And the point of this is that when you think about why people are signing up, there's the surface level response. "Oh, because they want this live chat. They want a virtual document tool like Google Doc. They want an easy way to collaborate." Yeah, but go a step further and ask yourself, what is the why, behind that why, right?
Ramli John:
And really the idea here is that we are in the business of helping users level up. As product strategy, as customer success, as growth people. It's so easy to get caught up with our product. It always, the reason why people want to sign up for my product is because of it, it's cool. And in this analogy with Mario, oh the reason why people want to sign up, buy this, or use this flower from Mario is because the flower is pretty. Really go a step further. It's the reason why you have a product, it's to help users really level up to do amazing things that they didn't before.
Ramli John:
There's this quote from Kathy Sierra. She wrote this book called BadAss: Making Users Awesome. She said that, "Upgrade your users, not your product. Don't build better cameras build better photographers." It really comes back to the idea that the reason why people sign up for products is to level up, to become better versions of themselves. So just think about this as we go through this, I'm going to ask a lot of questions that you can type in the comments. In what ways do you or users level up when they buy your product? Just think about that, just type it in the comments. How did they level up? And if you don't have the answer for now, we're going to go through this. And there's two easy ways that I'm going to go through to define what it means for users to level up. If you're familiar with this, if you own product, or even in sales and marketing, this kind of sounds familiar, right? Because it is.
Ramli John:
This is the jobs-to-be-done framework. And this idea is that once again, we've already chatted it about this, is that jobs to be done process is the idea of the process that consumers go through when they aim to transform their existing life situation into a preferred one. This definition is actually from Alan Clement. He wrote this a book, When Coffee and Kale Compete. The idea that at the core of it, the reason why we buy any products is to change our current situation. It's a great book. Wes and I interviewed Alan for the product podcasts. I would highly suggest if you want to know more about this, as we go forward, that you would check out his book and check out his blog is jtbd.info, jobstobedone.info.
Ramli John:
But at the core of this is this idea called, customer jobs. Customer jobs describe the problem your customers are trying to solve, or the need they're trying to satisfy. Let me give you an example in one of the ways that Alan formats, this idea of customer job, is something called a job story. In this way is when, situation, I want to, motivation, so I can get a desired outcome. Let me give you an example with this fire. So think about fire. One customer job is to cook food, cook meat, let's say. So a job story for this is when I'm hungry and I have a piece of uncooked meat, like uncooked chicken, in the motivation, I want to cook this meat. And the desired outcome, so I can fill my belly and go do my work, right? So the desired outcome at the end of the day of fire to fill my belly and do my work, right?
Ramli John:
The really interesting thing about this is the thing I just said. This job story with fire is actually solution-agnostic. So think about it, let me repeat it. When I'm hungry and I have uncooked meat, uncooked chicken, I want to cook it so I can fill my belly and do my work. What are other ways that you can cook chicken without fire? Just type it in the comments. Yeah, you can microwave it, you can dry it. So my point here is this job story. This customer job is independent of your product. It's independent of the solution. It is the core desire and problem that the customer is looking for. So let me break this down in the next few minutes. Let me focus on the desired outcome. And then the next part is I'm going to focus on the motivation and work backwards from there.
