Product Habits - The #1 way to increase retention

The #1 Way to Increase Retention

Here's the one thing I wish everyone who builds products understood: onboarding is the best way to increase retention. Every step of a product's new user experience should be weighed against the retention improvement it can produce. It's not about adding or removing steps from onboarding, or even using it to drive activation. Once you start thinking about how your onboarding flow impacts long-term engagement, then you'll know you're on the right track. 

Building Resilient Organizations With Chaos Theory

This is a super interesting read that explains how the concept of a "career path" turned workers into performers, unintentionally causing organizations to become more complicated (different from complex). Here's how Chaos Theory fits in—and how it might just be the framework leaders need to explore new ways of leading and managing. 

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield on the Future of Work

Slack is at the forefront of the dramatic, universal shift to remote work right now. In this interview, CEO Stewart Butterfield talks about what the future of work might look like for companies—including Slack itself. He also talks about competing with Microsoft, how to use Slack more productively, and what feature he thinks ultimately made the product so sticky. . 

How Habits and Anxieties Keep People From Using Your Product

If you've got a strong product that addresses a real need but people aren't using it, you might not be taking their habits and fears into account. It's not enough just to understand your users' jobs to be done; you also have to think about the anxiety they might have when making the decision to switch to your product, as well as the habits they have to overcome to use it regularly. This is a good reminder to build your product around people's habits, and address switching costs up front. 

How to Build a B2B SaaS Brand

Over the past few years, Lattice's VP of Marketing Alex Kracov helped scale his company's marketing program from 0 to more than 1,800 customers, like Slack and Postmates. This is his in-depth guide to B2B brand building, which covers where to start with brand activities, how to build a brand touchpoint engine, and how to back up your brand's promise with social proof. . 

Growth and Innovation: A Q&A With Andy Johns of Unusual Ventures

Andy Johns formed part of Twitter's first growth team, and then went on to lead growth at both Quora and Wealthfront. Now a partner at VC firm Unusual Ventures, he's sharing how COVID-19 has changed his investing thesis, why it's important to be a storytelling entrepreneur, and why he thinks it's time for true innovation. . 

How Drift, Hootsuite, and Zoom Framed Their Products for Exponential Growth

You could have an amazing product, but if you aren't framing it correctly, it'll be much harder for people to find it. This is a great article about how several wildly successful companies entered established markets or created brand new market categories to find their customers. Read this as a gut check to make sure your are placing your product in the right market category. 

The Founder's Framework for Emotional Fitness

Dr. Emily Anhalt has made it her mission to help executives and founders work through their emotions. This article really spoke to me—especially given the climate we all find ourselves in with the pandemic. It's never been more important for leaders to get formal support around developing emotional fitness. She interviewed more than 100 entrepreneurs and psychologists to determine what makes a founder emotionally fit. It comes down to these seven factors. How many of them do you embody?