📕 How to measure your Power User Curve; Solving product backlogs; The Chief Customer Officer 2.0...
Howdy folks, and welcome to the end of the week! Today’s playbook takes a focus on customer-centric strategies, from unique methods to measure user engagement, to the best ways to gather and prioritize customer feedback. We also managed to wrap in not one, but two corny car analogies. Please forgive us, it’s the end of the month and we’re behind quota.
Have a great weekend.
💪 Every company has power users: users who frequently use your product and champion your brand. We all want more, but to get them you must be able to measure and identify them in the first place. A straightforward way to do this is by looking at your Power User Curve, a histogram of users’ engagement by the total days they were active in a month. It does a better job of tracking engagement than the classic DAU/MAU ratio because instead of just offering one number, it tells a more complete story about user engagement. You will want to see your Power User Curve “smile” (see below), meaning that you have less involved users spiking your chart on the left side, but a strong group of consistent users on the right which should grow over time.
💰 We know the your list of SaaS metrics to measure can feel endless, but one we think is worth adding to your management dashboard is Zero Cash Date (ZCD). It’s exactly what it sounds like; the day you will run out of cash based on your existing burn rate. The time span from your date of measurement to ZDC will probably change every one or two months based on how your revenue and expenses vary, so when you see that number shortening, it’s a good reminder to cut back on inessential activities which could be driving expenses up.
🚧 Stagnant product backlogs are a consistent problem amongst software companies. There’s really two things to balance – deciding what products to prioritize and then completing the actual work to deliver them on time. We think this take on backlog management could be worth testing because it similarly splits your backlog into two separate sections, the assumed backlog (reserved for features and updates that you have been ideated) and the realized backlog (the actual work that needs to be done by engineering to complete the assumed backlog). It’s not rocket science, but should cut down on misalignment between those tasked with coming up with features and those who will build it.
🏎 Your growth machine is similar to a car (hopefully a racecar) in that it has many moving parts. The complexity of all of these parts can get confusing, but remember, everything starts with the engine, which are core activities that keeps your company moving forward. These will always be self-sustaining growth loops like virality, performance marketing, and content, which can hypothetically stand the test of time. Other supplemental parts like turbo boosts (PR, events, ad buys) and lubricants (conversion optimizations, SEO, brand recognition) will help you drive faster, but should rarely be a focal point of your growth strategy.
🌟 In the Chief Customer Officer 2.0, Jeanne Bliss takes a deep dive in how you can building customer-centric strategies for growth. The book centers on five core competencies for shifting to a customer-centric mindset; one of them being how to incorporate customer listening paths. Most know that creating these feedback loops is a great way to gather intel, but there can still be a disconnect between what customers tell us and how we incorporate that feedback. A solid suggestion is to organize input by customer lifecycle stage. For example, a new customer will have a very different perspective than a legacy customer who has a history with your product, and monetary value each customer brings should tell you where to focus time. With customers, the squeaky wheel is not always the highest paying, and should not always be the one greased!