I'm Stuck In Product Prison

It's nearly impossible to escape product engagement nudges in consumer and enterprise tools.

Dec 05, 2024

Thursday :: December 5th, 2024 :: Approx. 9 min read

👋 Hi, this is Chris with another issue of The Teardown. In every issue, I cover how we interact with technology that powers our day-to-day lives.

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Basic Life Distractions

What happens when you read a book? One possible route: the story wraps its fingers around your brain, keeping you hooked.

You voraciously turn pages, maybe laugh, maybe cry, and feel an uncontrolled urge to tell someone else about the words on those pages.

Another possible route: you read a page or two and something distracts you. Maybe it’s a grinder at a coffee shop.

Maybe it is your spouse or your kid(s) surprising you. Or, maybe it’s your phone.

You hear or imagine a notification that must be addressed. Something happened, I must know.

A book, for the most part and unlike a phone, can’t react to you in real-time. A book’s plentiful smelly pages don’t show icons, notifications, alerts, or other distracting digital objects.

A phone - a modern cellphone - is the opposite. It is exists to keep you connected. And that means you’re connected to everything you want to see and know. Also, lots of other things that distract you.

Magazines are similar to books with different intentions. A magazine is part a publication meant to share stories, scoops, investigations, and analyses. But it’s also a vehicle for ads. Cosmopolitan magazine, in print, shows you full-page Chanel ads. The New Yorker, in its high-gloss physical form, shows you full-page Allbirds ads.

Unlike books - again in general - magazines now exist online. I just checked The New Yorker website and clicked away an AllBirds ad. A magazine’s online infrastructure provides it with something that print distribution and consumption does not: lots of data.

There’s data about who reads what. There’s data about the popularity of posts and articles over time. There’s an understanding of how much time one spends on the website, where they came from, what they clicked, and how they accessed the site.

And, there’s advertising. Ad placements are sophisticated data collection agents. You might be served an ad based on your profile - your data - and then if you click that ad, you unload another dump truck of data. A cross-site tracker weaves together a comprehensive trove of your entire day of activity to anyone or any entity that knows how to get to it.

But advertisers and their peers aren’t the only folks using data. So are companies, product leaders, and data scientists. People embedded in businesses of all kinds use data to manage and grow their businesses.

Usage measurement is ubiquitous today. I’ll reframe usage as engagement. Warby Parker wants to know when you sign into the website, if you have an account. Easy.

But what if you don’t? Perhaps Warby Parker will prompt you to create one. Need an incentive to do it? Cool, here’s a 20% off coupon on your first purchase as a new user.

Would it help you to speak to a specialist as new user?

If so, look in the right-bottom corner. Engage the customer service (possibly AI or AI-assisted) team to help you.

Did you try a pair of glasses, drop them in your cart, and then forget to donate your hard-earned dollars? No problem. Look in the top-left corner for the notification that reminds you to pick up your buying process where you tragically left it.

Also don’t forget that you’ve got an email or text message reminding you to come back. Pretty please!

Let’s Convince You To Pay For Things

Much of this engagement falls under a simple term: growth. One popular phrase and professional discipline is Product-Led Growth (PLG). PLG helps a company grab attention, keep it, and boost all sort of metrics - ideally revenue - with behavioral product engineering.

The practical things you see as result of PLG are everywhere. I’m giggling as I write this post because:

I just received a text message from a company called Ohai, a AI-powered digital assistant that regularly pesters me with calendar texts. To be fair, I asked for that (created an account). But now Ohai’s PLG overlord is begging me to come back. My engagement level is trending lower.
I’m creating a PLG example you’ll see in a moment, but in attempting with Canva, I’m encountering a direct PLG product lever:

If I want to make a little website button graphic to illustrate PLG tactics, I have to upgrade Canva to access a pro feature.

What else might I get? I can click and whisk myself to a benefits and pricing page.

Most if not all of my post-button actions are measurable and actionable.

Let’s dive into the example that I hinted at earlier.

Let’s say you are a business-to-business (B2B) software company that provides secure data rooms to customers. Those customers exchange sensitive and confidential information with others.

Those customers might want file uploads, downloads, easy (but secure) access, file previews, in-app file manipulation, etc. Each data room acts as the wrapper around the features.

Let’s also suppose that those customers access your platform after introductions from a distribution partner. Example: an insurance broker provides diligence and rep and warranty insurance placement when one company is trying to buy another. They provide your data room product to their clients as part of the transaction. Neither the buyer nor the seller creates the room on their own.

What happens after one company buys the other? The transaction is over.

Suppose the buyer and seller are still using your platform, finding it intuitive and convenient as an ongoing source of transaction truth.

The question you might ask and explore is this: how do we turn those folks into our customers. How do we convince them to pay us for our product?

Your distribution partner used the button on the left to create a data room as they facilitated the aforementioned transaction.

The button on the right lives on the screens of the transaction buyer and seller. Neither is an actual customer, so they can’t (yet) access your room feature on their own.

They are quite similar, of course. But the left button is clickable. The right button is the color of a concrete and uninviting except for one component: the lock.

What’s the lock about? Well, press the button to find out! And, if you do, here’s what you see:

The Learn More button leads to several possible actions:

You book a time with an enterprise account executive (AE)
Redirection to a pricing page showing usage tiers and a sign-up button for each tier.

But, the Not Now button is also intriguing.

Clicking it suggests your customer isn’t yet ready to buy. It doesn’t mean no. That click event is a signal that they’ll entertain the idea at some point. And, that signal is valuable to the business. You can target those folks.

If that buyer or seller eventually pulls the trigger to pay you, your product documents their decision pathway. What did they click? How many times did they click? What is the span of time from first click to dollar exchange?

You’ll collect an analyze this data to drive more decisions toward buy. Maybe the buttons need different wording, colors. Maybe your customer needs other nudges.

Nudge Those Consumers, Too.

That example touches on the B2B market, but many B2C (and D2C) products use nudges too. Humans are almost always involved.

Strava is the platform where cyclists and runners to upload their activities for logging, trends, and, social networking. I talked about it last week.

Some of its features sit behind a subscription wall. Strava nudges you to subscribe depending on what you’re doing on the site.

The home page looks like someone spray-painted PLG nudges all over the place. You see them right away, before you interact with anything else.

The screenshot below shows Strava’s home page after sign-in. I didn’t touch a single button, drop-down, etc, but circled all the engagement bits:

What are the circled components?

The top-right corner has a Start Trial button.
The top-right corner also shows a notification icon in orange. I have one unread notification. Addictive checking anyone?
The middle-left and bottom-left areas show an orange arrow - Strava’s Premium flag - tied to Relative Effort, a premium feature. Strava nudges me to subscribe by providing a peek at my Relative effort. Subscribe to see more.
Finally, smack in the middle and bottom right is the Premium flag on top of a user avatar, letting me know that my friends are Premium subscribers. Commence FOMO.

There’s another that’s not so obvious but still PLG-ish: Strava challenges. Strava places these goals in front of you to reward you for your activity. Rewards are sometimes badges you display on your profile (and in the feed), and sometimes discounts and other goodies offered by brands that partner with the platform.

The rewards keep you coming back for more. Plain and simple. And, you’ll see those nudges more as an active user.

Closing Thoughts

Last week’s Strava post discussed the ongoing uproar over new API restrictions. Multi-device users aren’t getting more from Strava’s free tier. But neither are paid users, for moment.

So, are Strava users stuck in product prison?

It depends.

The Yes Case

Free users that want to keep Strava’s social connections, history, and broad connectivity must deal with Strava’s product nudges. Strava has little incentive to let you migrate those connections somewhere else.
Strava will continue to experiment with free vs. within the wall views. Want to track a weekly run goal today? Subscribe. Sure, you can do that elsewhere (in a spreadsheet) but will you?
Strava comprehensively links data from so many other devices and platforms. There’s no convenience in rewiring those connections elsewhere. You trade convenience for UI distractions. For nudges. As a free user anyways.

The No Case

Lots of people use popular platforms that offer data aggregations and dashboards to their users. Garmin, as an example, provides a comprehensive health and fitness dashboard and software product to compliment its devices. Consumers have choices.
Strava’s API connectivity works without paying, for now. So, simply monitoring activities through other platforms works as-is. Active use within Strava’s UI is not a requirement.

What am I missing?

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