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Ramli John:
All right. Welcome everybody to another live session Q&A. I have two amazing experts here today. I have Joseph, he is the Director of Market consulting, is that right? I am so sorry, Joseph.
Joseph Karim:
Growth consulting, no problem.
Ramli John:
Growth consulting. You got it. We got it. Director of Growth Consulting at Market 8, as well as Claudiu, he is the Co-founder and CEO at InnerTrends. They're going to be talking about how to get actual metrics. This is so, so important for ProductLed companies. By the way, let me introduce myself, my name is Ramli John. I'm managing director here at ProductLed and what I'm saying about data is, it is the heart of ProductLed. If you get this wrong, I cannot see how you can employ a Product-Led Growth strategy because it empowers product qualified leads and improving your onboarding and it goes across all teams from sales, customer success and everything else. I'm excited about this presentation, as well as the Q&A. I'm going to pass it off to Joseph and Claudiu, who will just walk us through some of the ways to really figure out the right kind of metrics to measure and how to set that up.
Joseph Karim:
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Ramli and we're really excited to be talking with your group here, ProductLed, and you are 100% correct, actionable metrics, having the data correct is absolutely key to implementing a proper ProductLed strategy. Just a little bit of my background, I am Head of Growth Consulting at Market 8. I work directly with a lot of SaaS companies who are trying to implement ProductLed strategies, using data to inform their decisions. I work with them in order to uncover these opportunities. I worked very closely with Claudiu here at InnerTrends, who really helps us actually understand the data, set it up with them properly so that we can track it for other engagements. If you'd to elaborate that a little bit more, Claudiu.
Claudiu Murariu:
Definitely. Thank you, Joseph. Thank you, Ramli for this opportunity. Indeed, you're 100% right. You need to have a good data set up in order to get to any kind of insights because otherwise, you just get to the wrong insights. We have this saying, garbage in, garbage out. Nobody likes garbage in any kind of way. It's very important to define everything from the very beginning, because that's actually probably more than 50%, 60% of your work in data. That's what we've seen what most companies struggle with. This presentation is and this discussion, where it will be also very much of a discussion, is very much around how do we define the right metrics? How do we make sure we defined them correctly? How do we track them and so on?
Joseph Karim:
Thank you so much, Claudiu. First, I also wanted to discuss Inturact as well. We formed a partnership with them and they do what we do as well for SaaS consulting. The first quote that you see here is from the CEO of Inturact and a partner with Claudiu as well. There's a main idea that I want to introduce here. Spelled out in this quote and I'll just read it out for the benefit of anyone who's listening through audio, "After working with hundreds of B2B SaaS clients, I realized how rare it is to find a company that's actually tracking what matters most to their own growth and acting upon it.
Joseph Karim:
In fact, more often than not, businesses are tracking a whole slew of other metrics and the actionable ones simply get lost in the mix. Without the actionable metrics being the primary focus, the business then starts down a cloudy journey of sales, marketing, and product development based on their own assumptions. However, many of these assumed efforts don't attribute to growth. They don't attribute to growth, and they aren't even relevant for the particular stage of their company. This might be a bold statement, but we have yet to see a SaaS company fail that focuses on the three keys to data-led success.
Joseph Karim:
Here are the three keys to data-led success. First, as Claudiu is mentioning, number one, defining and tracking those actionable metrics correctly. Number two, solving a value, identifying and solving a valuable problem. Number three, effectively executing to improve the actionable metrics. The purpose of this presentation is to focus in on key one and discuss how key two and key three draft-off of this proper setup and definition.
Joseph Karim:
You may be wondering, what are actionable metrics, anyways? I'm sure a lot of the ProductLed community knows about this, but it's actually based off of Dave McClure's pirate metrics, Dave McClure of 500 startups it's called pirate metrics because it spells out, AARRR. That's acquisition activation retention, referral and revenue. You can see how each of those basic of those buckets are going to be attributing to different potential metrics. Even though those are the broad categorizations, acquisition, how do customers find you, in order to make it actionable, you need to further break this down.
Claudiu Murariu:
I just add a little bit here to your point, pretty much everyone in the industry knows about the pirate metrics. Everyone heard about acquisition, activation, revenue, retention and referral. We are yet to find a company that has been defined really well. What's the metric that should be followed for each one of them and why? Have a framework that is well set up and the whole company aligned around. That's what Inturact started working with. That's when we joined with InnerTrends and market it as well to develop and explore a framework where we make it very easy for companies to define each of these metrics.
Joseph Karim:
As you can see on the screen here, for anyone who has the visuals, we actually have put together a sort of wizard that will include as resources for you to go through. It's free and available online. Anyone can copy the spreadsheet that we have to help you put together what those individual metrics would be. As an example, how do users find you an acquisition? If you say, have a freemium product as the initial step, you'd have to see the frame signups. You'd also look at other things if there's going to be a possibly a demo or a free trial, that might be the primary acquisition metric, which is the end path of it. You want to look at everything that ladders up from visitors, to sign up intent, to possibly actually filling out a particular form, if that's required. That's the process you go about starting to break down each of these broad categories into individual examples for your particular company.
Claudiu Murariu:
Let me take another one. Of course, I'm very fond of the activation one, which I find one of the most difficult one to be. I find that companies have struggled to define this one often. Activation doesn't end when you finish an email sequence or a product guide. We consider all these activations to be completed when people, when users, your users or your account experience the promise of your product for the first time. We'll just go through this question through this interview with the companies we work with and we ask them, what are you promising to your customers? Sometimes companies struggle to answer this question, but it is very important to define that promise really well and then go and ask yourself, when is it the first time that somebody that creates an account experiences the promise of what we are building?
Claudiu Murariu:
That event becomes the metric, the defining metric of your activation. That your primary metric, primary activation metric. Then you go and you ask the question, what are the technical requirements that somebody needs to go through in order to reach that promise for the first time? That's how you define the onboarding funnel and the steps becoming the secondary metrics of activation. This is just an example on how you get to define one section. Once you have that defined, and your whole team aligned around it, you'll see that it will be much, much easier for the company to improve that onboarding process.
Joseph Karim:
Excellent. That's a very good point, Claudiu. I actually want to use that understanding of activation in mind when we look at revenue. It's actually a good illustration of how perhaps when you have the proper tracking in place, you can start to see where your product might not be fulfilling the needs, or you might be missing out an opportunity, which is how you make money. Very often, it's the case that people are like, "Okay, let's have a monthly subscription in place when someone upgrades." That's how we weight make money. We're just going to look at when that initial upgrade happens. It's helpful to understand revenue in terms of being tied to the value of something that can actually create the purchase upselling cross-sell.
Joseph Karim:
A great example of a company that would do this right would be something, like having Twilio where they are actually, every time a message is sent out via SMS, there's a small charge for it. That's another example as opposed to having a pure subscription play. Being able to track that for making the huff for improving your revenue targets is great, because you need to look at that in relation to the other metrics that are being achieved there. Would you to expand upon retention a little bit, Claudiu?
Claudiu Murariu:
Definitely. Retention, we can look at it in two different ways. We look at retention as the typical retention curves. We want to see how many of our users return after one week, two weeks, three weeks and so on. When we do it like that, we want to know what's the first week retention and where does the retention become stable? That defines our growth pattern, if you want. Retention doesn't just happen out of the blue, it's very linked to engagement. When we define retention metrics, we look at engagement metrics.
Claudiu Murariu:
Basically, we go back again and we say, "Well, what was the promise of your product when it was experienced for the first time, that when people were activated?" When it gets experienced multiple times, that's when people are being retained. Again, we get back to that core functionality that defines the promise of your product, which is very much linked into their retention as well. We don't just measure retention in terms of how people come back. We also measure engagement and see how engaged they are when they come back. We use that promise in the same way. Then the second question we use when we define engagement events is, what are the actions that people need to do inside your product in order to experience that promise even more?
Claudiu Murariu:
What are those features that you developed basically to help your people get more value than just simply doing one thing? Again, when you define it like that, you have a very clear framework, which tells you, already answers the question, should we develop this feature or not? Because the answer to that is, does it help people get more engagement with our platform or was it just a random request from a user that we would think we would lose if we don't implement? That's how we define retention, getting back to that promise and all the actions or the features that you develop to get people to experience that promise even more.
Joseph Karim:
That's a very good point, Claudiu. A lot of people might assume retention is revenue retention, meaning are they continuing to pay you? As you alluded to, in fact, if you look at customer engagement first, seeing if they're getting the value from the firsthand, it's often a leading indicator for someone to churn. By the time they've canceled your their plan, there's a good chance that it's too late.
Claudiu Murariu:
That's a great point, Joseph. Thank you for pointing that out. Indeed, we don't even look at revenue retention that much. Because somebody that uses your product a lot and is very engaged, they won't churn unless they have to. They simply don't have the budget anymore, it's out of your control. If they don't use your product, yes, they will churn and they'll probably go to another product on the market, or very simply stop using that category of product. You cannot control that, you can control engagement inside the platform, and you can engage people more. Yes, we don't look at revenue retention, we look at activity retention. Because we know that's a very strong predictor for revenue retention and that's one that you can actually impact.
Joseph Karim:
Absolutely. When we look at the final part of the actual metrics referral, this, I think in particular appeals to the ProductLed audience. Because that's using the product itself to help add additional users share it with their friends and colleagues. That's where you put in the viral loops that makes it more valuable using network effects and using the product to sell the product and as a way to continuously build the advocacy. Of course, when you look at who is likely to refer, looking at the previous question of who's engaged, who's retained, is often going to be highly correlated.
Claudiu Murariu:
100%. I would to add something here, but maybe not a lot of people realize. A lot of product managers think that referral is something more into the B2C market. Something more to the consumer applications where you go and you share a coupon, or you share links to get other people to create their own accounts. We actually use this more into the B2B space where the main goal of referral is to have a second member of your team to join the product. Yes, it's not creating a new account to generate revenue, but the more people you get from teams to be part of the product, some of those people will leave the company and guess what, will go and recommend your product to use there as well. Yes, we don't need to have that viral component, simply having multiple user accounts should have you track referrals as a goal, because it is important.
Joseph Karim:
Amazing. The last slide that we have here, and then we'll open it up to Q&A, is that I want to highlight what is some of the key outputs of actually having this, taking this careful definition of understanding where your product metrics or your individual metrics line up to these five growth pillars. It drives alignment, and this is the last little bit of statistics that we want to throw out there to really bring the point home. Report from Forrester Research supports by concluding that businesses proper alignment see a 32% increase in revenue growth for other organizations with less alignment, see a 7% decrease. Only 8% of companies say that their marketing and sales teams are aligned according to Forrester Research, which is really sad, of course.
Claudiu Murariu:
That only means that product and marketing are typically when less aligned, because marketing and sales are typically closer to one another. Yes, it is a sad statistic, but we do see, thanks to the ProductLed communities, and the community we see an increase in the interest in this area. Hopefully, this statistic will increase significantly.
Joseph Karim:
Now, Claudiu, can we think of any examples where having this alignment really changed the outcomes for a company and set them on the proper growth trajectory?
Claudiu Murariu:
Yes. There was this interesting entry exercise I was doing at InnerTrends when we were just at the beginning and that was to attend board meetings of our customers. We'd ask them, "Is it possible to get into that meeting, to see what you discuss and how we discuss it?" It was amazing how people would get into those meetings. Typically, we would report like, "Hey, this is what we've done this quarter. This is how we reached, we improved activation, or we improved onboarding or the conversion to paid." All of them report everything, all the performance, the metrics that they touched and the performance that they reached.
Claudiu Murariu:
At the end, the CEO would come in and say, "Everybody did great, but the company didn't grow." Then they started getting into arguments, basically, and I think, almost fighting. After getting to this first meeting where I just listened, I asked them if it's possible to have a follow-up meeting where I'd get to present to them, how they should look at their metrics and how should we find them. Yes, we went through the exercise of defining activation. We settled on that promise. We stayed more than half an hour debating on what that promise is. It was a form builder, a simple product, but still, it took a very long time to define what are we promising our users.
Claudiu Murariu:
After they got all of that straight, what happened was everybody went back and redid their reports. What was the impact on what they did? Suddenly, things didn't look that good anymore. Especially for the email marketing team where they seem they had a negative impact with their campaigns on the promise of the business. Before this exercise, they would look at how many paid accounts we get from marketing campaigns. They say, "Oh, we got this many paid accounts. We're really happy. We're doing really good." When they switch and aligned, everybody got aligned on what should be measured and how when they got back, they realized that the people that opened emails converted less than the people that didn't open them.
Claudiu Murariu:
That was a big bummer, especially as they worked for many months on that. Anyway, six months fast-forward, email campaigns were bringing positive impact on onboarding and payment. Support was having a positive impact on onboarding, which until then had zero impact. We started seeing numbers going up. It was the same teams, the same people working on the project. The only thing that changed was they all used the same language and follow the exact same metrics and made sure they didn't pick the things that looked good and ignored the ones that looked bad just to go and present to a board meeting. That's an example that I was really happy with how things turned out with that company.
Joseph Karim:
Fantastic example, Claudiu. Actually, I have one that sprung to mind as well. This actually springs to why we decided to use InnerTrends to really dig into the actual metrics and see the opportunities. Since we've worked as a growth partner as marketing agencies for many companies, we've gotten lots of different types of engagements. One of them, which is common is, can you improve my onboarding? You got this app and really need to guide them through how to use it. Because we don't have enough paying customers.
Joseph Karim:
We think it's because they don't understand how to use the product. We actually went through this whole exercise by putting a product tour. We had some emails, we had some tool tips. We drove a lot of educational content. The funny thing is, is when we put your tool, InnerTrends, to actually look behind the hood, what we realized afterwards, once we were directed to start looking at the data, is that onboarding wasn't actually the biggest opportunity, not by a long shot.
Joseph Karim:
They had a significant number of free users who were getting value out of the product, but weren't paying. This completely changed the way that we saw the opportunity in front of us. There's going to be a certain assumption that you have, and you can actually pour a lot of effort and energy towards that. If you see a small uptake from that, if you go say from 25% people on-boarded to 40% on-boarded, but you're staring at a less than 1% conversion to paid, that's your biggest problem.
Joseph Karim:
Once we realized that, we completely changed our course and saw dramatic differences by just putting in some metering as an example, to capture more value. Because there was a lot of free users. They hit a certain limit in that plan, go to upgrade. That was enough to start to see some more incremental revenue. That's another great example of how going in blind and not being aligned on the actual, the truth of what's happening in the product can steer you in the wrong direction.
Claudiu Murariu:
Thank you for sharing that.
Joseph Karim:
We'd like to open it up to questions and answers.
Ramli John:
Thank you for both of you, Joseph and Claudiu for sharing this. Just to everybody who's just tuning in, feel free to drop any questions in the comments or chat. Let me know if you want to unmute yourself and I can get that set up as well. The first question that I get asked a lot is, Ramli, I understand I have to measure this all. I don't have engineering help, help me out, bro. Where do I start? Where do you start if your product or marketing and they know they need this, but the engineering is just like, "We're just way too busy with our product roadmap and we can't help you out." What are some things that you can give in terms of advice in that situation?
Joseph Karim:
Claudiu, I think you probably have an incentive to this.
Claudiu Murariu:
Yeah, definitely. Because we get that a lot. Alignment again is crucial here. You'd be amazed how fast things go when you get the development or the engineers on board with what you want to achieve. Because it actually has a huge impact on them. I won't be building features anymore based on guts. I'll actually build features where I change features based on data and the engineers love that. If you go to engineers and you tell them, we need this because we actually don't want to build any more features that don't make sense to our users.
Claudiu Murariu:
You'll have them right there on the spot. That's not going to be enough because the next step, typically what happens is you go to the engineers and you tell them, "Hey, this is the tool I'm going to use. Take this documentation and implement it." They suddenly need to become data analysts as well to figure out what needs to be tracked and how, and what is this property, or user property, custom property or event property and so on? Yes, do not leave that to the software engineers teams. That's part of your product job. You need a tracking plan, basically. We have a framework for that. In a very quick format, here's how we look at it. There are three types of data that you'll be tracking. The first one is core event.
Claudiu Murariu:
Core events are crucial for a business. You need 100% accuracy on them. Nothing less than 100% should satisfy you. That means that most likely it will be server side. For core success events, no business has more than 20 or 40 such events, the most advanced product would have a maximum of 40 such events in their product. To give you an example, for a tool like MailChimp, is upload subscribers, send email campaigns, define lists, define an AB test and publish a campaign or something like that. It's just a couple of them. Again, it's a small list and the developers will always tell you it's easy to implement because they work with those a lot. You just need to tell them it's that list specifically and put it separately.
Claudiu Murariu:
They send that list first, that gets things clear. The second type of data that you need to track is what we call UX interactions. The interactions with the interface, the pages that people see, the buttons they click, the forms they fill. Every interaction that happens inside the product should be tracked. For that, you should go into a dynamic mode. You should make it so easy for the developers that they don't spend a lot of time to do this. You don't want to track every single individual event because you'll drive them nuts. There are methods and I'll gladly share resources on how to do that.
Claudiu Murariu:
The third type of data that need to be tracked. A lot of companies are completely ignoring it is, third-party data. Your data doesn't stay only inside your product. You send emails, marketing automation, CRMs, revenue stripe, revenue platforms, live chats, all of that are interactions with your customers. They influence your customers in how they use your product. You need all of them that data together. Well, that data doesn't come from software engineers, but it comes from integrations. Whenever you are going to select a tool for marketing automation, CRM, or anything else, look first at, do they have web hooks and do they make the data available so I can actually correlate it with customer behavior?
Ramli John:
That is impressive. I've never heard of core events. Second is the UX interaction and third is third-party data. That is a great framework. I love that it's three, because there's the power of three. It's easy to remember.
Claudiu Murariu:
Yes.
Joseph Karim:
I just dropped in a resource that InnerTrends has to fill out this actual metric canvas, which is what we showed you earlier in their own form. I find that actually what saves the most time for any implementation is agreeing on those initial metrics to begin with. Because otherwise, the developers can spend weeks trying to chase down how things are defined.
Claudiu Murariu:
Exactly. That canvas will actually link directly to what are the core events that you need to track, that canvas will define that first list. The UX interactions are kind of generic, like the Google analytics type, put a tracking code and track everything. Then the third-party data comes from the InnerTrends itself. Thank you so much, Joseph, for that.
Ramli John:
Thank you. It's very useful. David says, super-thanks. Super-thanks on my end. In terms of filling this actual metrics out, who should be involved in figuring that out? Obviously, there's a product, and this is what I find, ProductLed teams need to be cross-functional. Marketing should have an input. My question is, who should be involved in filling this format, this canvas so that nothing gets missed?
Claudiu Murariu:
Yes. What I've seen, it's rare, but I do see when different people in the same company will fill the canvas in different ways. That definitely leads to some big alignment problem. For example, one of the questions in the actionable metrics canvas wizard is, what is the core functionality of your product? What does it do? Now, if different people inside your company will answer that differently, you have a problem. They don't really know what the product is doing. When you go and then raise another question, what are the features that you have developed in order to help people get more value out of that core functionality?
Claudiu Murariu:
It's okay to have one or two features missing. It's not necessarily the problem, but you have different sets of features, yes, there is a problem. Most companies we work with don't really have an alignment problem. Even if the CEO or the product manager or a product marketer that fills this, it's pretty much very close. Here and then, we do see companies that are very, very different in their way, one would say, "We are a reporting company." The other would say, "We are a company designed to automate an offline service." Which is it?
Joseph Karim:
I'll say Claudiu, from my side, this is probably the people that when it comes to getting alignment there and defining what someone does, if someone has a fuzzy idea of what that is, it's probably because they're trying to do too many things and their features haven't been fully fleshed out. When we figured who needs to be on the table, I generally categorize that as the revenue team altogether, so marketing sales, product, customer success. All the people who are involved in essentially presenting the face of the company, whether it be through, and mostly of course, through the product itself and the interactions within them.
Ramli John:
That makes a lot of sense. Thank you for sharing that. I really love your point Claudiu around, if different teams have different description of what your core product is, then you're not going to be aligned here. I guess the question now is, so the point now is I think you got to get everybody aligned first. Is that what you're saying? The next question to that is, is how? It's a good point for a lot of ProductLed teams is aligning around a strategy or even the description of what your product does. It's pretty core on getting everybody onboard and rallying behind the same metric. How do you align everybody around this? What would be your suggestions without costing any interdepartmental wars, so to speak, or battles?
Joseph Karim:
Well, you know what Ramli, actually, that was one of the keys that we went over in there, but it wasn't fully fleshed out, and that was agreeing to solve a valuable problem. The way that we usually go about it, before we were to even get tracking in place was go through a job speed done exercise. We find that, that's a great methodology for helping you understand the core end-user and what problem they're trying to solve. When you start to break down the problem space, you can then see how your solution fits into it. There's no right or wrong or everyone should be like, let's do a democracy kind of thing. It really does come down to actually having a core understanding of the user and the problem that you're trying to solve, which can take some time to go through. I find when you talk to enough people, do some structured interviews and really understand your customer's current and past and perspective, then it starts to come together.
Claudiu Murariu:
Spot on, Joseph. It's exactly like that. I think it's top to bottom. You need to first communicate to everyone in your team, what is the problem that your product is solving? Then, how are you solving it? Having that discussion in a meeting, I think simply gets everyone aligned. It's what most companies don't know what that problem is. They don't have a tracking problem, they don't have and analytics problem. They have a problem that they don't know what their problem is. They need to focus on finding better.
Ramli John:
It's like that saying, the unknown unknowns, the problem of the problems. You don't know exactly what you're solving. That's interesting. I love what Joseph just said, get together with different department heads, do jobs to be done, get everybody aligned. Listen to customers. That's the core of it. You want to make sure that, I see every company, every department, their role is to make people's lives easier. It's upsetting, figuring out who that is and exactly how you're making it easier is, is really getting everybody rallied around the metrics.
Ramli John:
I love that we're talking about high-strategy, because usually when somebody comes out to Wes or myself, the question is, "What does the tech stack look like? What is the tools, bro? Tell us, that's all we need." You're telling us, "Hey, we're going to figure out exactly, get everybody aligned. We've gotten past this." Is there anything else before we talk about duals? Because I know I'm going to ask that and it's going to be something people ask, is there any other questions or any other topics around the strategy piece before we talk about duals? Am I missing something?
Claudiu Murariu:
Joseph, you want to take this one?
Joseph Karim:
Yeah, absolutely. When it comes to looking at that strategy and solving something valuable, the the most difficult part to understand is that there is no right answer for this, but there is a wrong answer. That is to not really understand a problem and a solution. When people try to become a product that's all things to all people and they don't narrow down the problem space, they get into a situation where they're pulled in so many directions and alignment is practically impossible. That's why going into the high strategy and actually finding the path to solving something useful for your customers is key, because it's really easy to, as you said, get into tactics land where we're trying to do some optimizations for some metrics.
Joseph Karim:
Because you see a number, it's like, "Can I bring that number higher? Can I increase the number of email opens?" The fact is, if you increase the number of email opens but you're using provocative headlines that has nothing to do with the actual product itself, you can see a great spike saying, "Hey, John, your house is on fire." You can get someone to open that email, but how is that going to actually improve their life and make your business and their lives better? It's not going to do anything. It's easy to get caught up in trying to improve individual metrics without having a view of the larger picture.
Claudiu Murariu:
Just going to another quick framework. I'm trying to do inside InnerTrends, inside our company for that. I'm not as good as I would like to because we, as people tend to think in solutions, not in problems. Whenever we see a problem, we see a nail, we first think of a hammer instead of analyzing that nail and what needs to happen there. What I'm trying to do inside InnerTrends is to have people that are focused on solutions and their job is to define a solution, but have people that are focused on problems.
Claudiu Murariu:
They are not allowed to think of solutions, they're only allowed to define problems. I'm trying to put myself into that problem definition persona, if you want, and it's hard for me. It's hard to not to think in terms of solutions, but only to come and describe a problem, but it helps a lot. I have people in my team that are 10 times better than me at finding solutions once the problem is really well-defined. I think my job as a CEO is to define problems really, really well.
Ramli John:
That makes a ton of sense. Thank you for sharing that, both. The next question I have before, and once again, before we get into the tools, is around, what do you do if your product serves multiple customer jobs? For context, we have people here, Trisha's from DataRobot and that's enabling AI-driven enterprise and just from predictive index. It's a talent optimization platform. Other folks here, you get to the point where you become HubSpot, where you can do every single thing imaginable. In that sense, would you have different metrics for the different customer jobs or would you simplify it and like, "Hey, here's our one unifying thing that we need to tie everybody together, regardless of what customer job our product solves."
Joseph Karim:
I don't to invoke the massive fan companies too much because it's a cheap game, it's like, "Hey, let's look at what Amazon does." I'm going to use Amazon as an example, because they do this really well, is that they define the problem and have smaller teams acting upon that individual problem. In the same way that if you are an expansive company that has a lot of people that you're serving and you're actually in multiple areas of a particular business, it's great to start breaking that down into an individual job map and have that team attack that problem specifically. Because otherwise, it's really easy to just be pulled and pushed in so many directions and not actually gain traction on solving problems for your customers.
Claudiu Murariu:
That's a great point. I'm going to go into the Amazon example and try to give a very exact example of how we address that. We only say link to the promise. Amazon AVS has tens of products, a lot of products inside there. Amazon AVS has one main promise, and that is to help you deploy something to the cloud. Now, that's abstract, deploy something to the cloud, but it's a clear promise. Every time something gets deployed to the cloud, it's what I would consider Amazon as an onboarded account. Now, that could be a compute engine, that could be a Lambda, that could be a different service, but deployed to the cloud is the promise.
Claudiu Murariu:
That's where the onboarding should end. What are the technical requirements to deploy to the cloud? Well, you need to select a service, configure it and deploy it. Basically, I have three steps that I need to get through in order to be onboarded with Amazon. Now, people will go for different products. Well, all of those are segments. Do people that come to compute engine are more likely to be onboarded than people that go to Lambda? Do people that use two services are more likely to be onboarded than those that are only interested in one service?
Claudiu Murariu:
They all become segments, but bottom-line, there's only one promise that you have, and you just need to abstract it and define it in your data. It's really not that complex, but you need to have a discussion up front because otherwise, you just look at your data and say, "Oh, let me define this onboarding this way." You put it like that, "Oh, but I'm missing that event." I put it like that, "Oh, but I'm missing that now." It just becomes chaos. Leave the data beside, focus on defining what's important and then go back to data.
Joseph Karim:
That's a very great point, Claudiu. Because there's a distinction between having different segments within your actual problem space and having a completely different business unit. I'm sure AWS metrics are kept separate from shopping on the Amazon store. That's a very different problem space.
Claudiu Murariu:
Different promise.
Joseph Karim:
Exactly.
Ramli John:
I love that. You keep going back to the promise, the promised land. What does the promised land look like? Defining that and quantifying what the promise, what does it taste like? What does it feel like? How do you know you've gotten there? I might've pushed that a little too far. We've spent, I feel a good chunk on strategy. Let's talk about tools now. What kind of tools would you suggest around tying all of this together across the funnel? Because what happens often, you mentioned about third-party is, the marketing does this, they use this tool and then the product team uses this other tool. Then the engineering team uses this other tool and you get the spaghetti of data and now you have this problem and trying to connect everything. The question is, what do you do when that happens when you have all these tools and now, they might not even talk to each other? What would be your suggestion for both?
Claudiu Murariu:
Well, I'm going to start with that, use InnerTrends. Kidding aside. When you want to look at the tools, a very important aspect is that you are the owner of the data and those tools. You actually have control and access on that data. Ideally, you would have APIs that would make communication of the data easily. Tools like segment, for example, are a great example for that. You control everything that goes into segment, how it goes out full segment. That gives you a lot of freedom on how to use that data. Marketing automation, there again, amazing products out there that have great APIs, great web loops.
Claudiu Murariu:
We rarely look at that when we decide what tool are we going to use? That's a big point I'm making. If you're going to use a marketing automation platform that doesn't make available, who opened and what, so you can actually export that data to another platform to sync to the support or to the revenue or to the customer behavior. That means that you need to trust the reporting of the tool, which is always biased. The tool will always want to make itself look good. That's what I would say. Focus on having access to your data. It's always your data. It cannot be of your tool like GDPR and all the laws that are being given in the world are about that. It's always your data.
Joseph Karim:
Actually, I want to expand upon what Claudiu was saying. You're being a little shy in plugging InnerTrends, but I actually want to push it a little bit more because it's a really fantastic way of putting all these different actual efforts into one context. Because it's really easy to try to say, drive SEO traffic and you're using great tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush and stuff like that. You're like, "Here's some great traffic we can go after. It's really cheap. We're hitting a lot of people." Then you get some people to your website, but it's completely not relevant. It doesn't actually translate into people deciding to use your product. Something that might be, look bad on paper from an optimization point of view.
Joseph Karim:
I was like, "Oh, there's not that much traffic that's coming in from this blog article that we put on HubSpot, but guess what, it's resulted in like, there was 10 people that came through, but they all became enterprise customers." To me, that's a bigger one than having thousands of visitors who bounce shortly after reading it. That's where you start to put things together and drive all of your actions towards the bigger goals of the companies and not just optimizing within the individual silos that you're operating in.
Ramli John:
I really love that. You're talking about all this stuff and I mean, if you guys have any other questions, feel free to drop it in the chat. For both of you, if you can give one, I love this question, and I ask this to all of my guests, if you can give one or two pieces of advice to ProductLed leaders and it could be about data or it could be about marketing and it could be about growth. It could be something we just talked about right now, or it could be something that we haven't talked about yet. For both of you, what would be those one or two pieces of advice you'd to share to folks, the ProductLed leaders, who are pushing ProductLed in their organization and really championing it?
Claudiu Murariu:
I'll start. ProductLed means being data led and being data led means you need to know your data where you need to track it correctly. You need to know how to query it. If you want actually deep insights, you need to have access to algorithms. Queries never give insights. It's always algorithms that give insights. You need to educate yourself around data. You don't need to become a data scientist, not at all, but you do need to understand the difference between causation and correlation, at least. Yes, educate yourself on data.
Joseph Karim:
I love that, Claudiu. For me, I take the data points and I will add on the understanding the core motivations of your customers and overlaying that human understanding. Because I think the trick to product and what makes it so hard is that it's not purely a math problem. The math of it actually illustrates what impact or how important things that you're doing are, but you got to not just understand what are correlated together or what are trends that you find, but what is the why behind it? That is not something that you can see just by looking at numbers. You got to talk to your customers and really know why they're coming back again and again, and putting those into actual features that you're tracking is the difference between having something that's a Product-Led growth, where you have all of your team firing on all cylinders or going in a million different directions. You've got to put the human aspects and the data aspects into one picture of the customer.
Ramli John:
I totally love that. Thank you for sharing that, both. If people do have more questions, what's the best way to reach out to you both? LinkedIn, Twitter, a product like Slack? What is the best way to follow-up if they have questions about data and measurement?
Claudiu Murariu:
Definitely ProductLed Slack for me and Twitter. I'm active on... I start my morning with ProductLed Slack and I mean it. Then Twitter comes next. My handle is Claudiu, my name is double L. I'll just write it.
Joseph Karim:
I'm also in the ProductLed Slack group. In fact, I posted a job for our organization there most recently, which is great, getting some great feedback there. For me, also on top of the ProductLed Slack group, you can find me most often on LinkedIn and that's where you can reach out to me. I'll put that in the chat as well.
Ramli John:
Thank you. I was looking for it. Thank you so much, Joseph and Claudiu. Really do appreciate it. If you do want to reach out there on Slack, I mean, you're all out there. Well, thank you so much for this session. I really do appreciate it for both of you, for everybody else tuning in. Thank you. Have a great rest of your afternoon, everybody.
Claudiu Murariu:
Thank you.
Ramli John:
Thank you so much.
