Growth Products: Create Empathy By Listening

Slack Product Lead on Growth Products (Part 2)

You can use data to track growth, but data on its own will never explain why you are growing. Data does not tell you why people are using your product or why they choose to stop using your product. In order to build growth products, you need to talk to people. This is the first principle of using empathy to better understand the dynamics of your product.

Growing with empathy is about identifying the problem that they are hoping to solve by using your product. In theory, the value of a product should be very obvious to customers. However, there are many factors that prevent users from understanding the complete value of a product. This is especially true when product managers have not collected feedback from users.

Using an example from my time at Slack, I started talking to our users and was surprised at how many people did not understand the product. This occurred even after going through the on-boarding process. As a result, we realized that people were skipping the step to invite co-workers to join Slack and prevented people from engaging with the app.

When we built the next version of the app, we added a video link in the registration that explained Slack’s features. We also added an “invite people” button to give users a second chance in using the app. These changes were very small experiments, but the results were huge and our engagement increased.

These insights came simply from talking to our users, not from data or analytics. In the process, we developed relevant solutions that solved problems for our customers and improved our engagement.

Looking for Part 1? Click here to view

Looking for Part 3? Click here to view