The Mobile Spoon

  I’ve been preaching a lot lately about the importance of creating a culture of frequent shipping . Whether it’s with my own team or while helping out some early stage startups, I keep finding myself explaining why it’s so important to stop thinking that things are not 100% ready and just ship them. First, let me start by saying this: agile development does not guarantee frequent shipping; a team can work in an agile methodology, run short sprints and still release new versions to the market in a very slow pace. What I'm taking about is the mindset to constantly put your deliverables to the test with real users, in real-world conditions, even when things are not fully ready. It’s the urge to show the world what you’ve created, even if it’s in early stages or provides limited functionality.  Shipping is that moment when the rubber meets the road and interesting things happen.  And yes, working with this mindset requires further effort: you need to break down pieces of functionalit

What's retention rate and what are the best ways to measure it?  What’s a negative churn, and what can you learn from it about the performance of your cohorts and the sustainability of your business? ?How does it all relate to unit economics? Answers below:  We all know the importance of retention for the long-term success of our products. Retention is the key to creating a sustainable business. It shows the long-term engagement of your most loyal users - and that’s a strong sign of a product/market fit. It influences how much revenue will each cohort produce over time and the lifetime value of each user. Higher retention = more recurring paying users. Retention is the key for creating a sustainable business.  And while tweaking your onboarding process and funnels may drive immediate improvements in conversion rates (and produce instant gratification) - retention is a long term process, it often requires some heavy lifting, deeper analysis, but usually makes a big

  What's no-code? Who is it for? How far can you go with it? And Why is there such a hype around it lately? I've tried to answer those questions by talking to one of the best no-code hands-on experts out there: Zoe Chew.  When I was a student (without getting into embarrassing dates), I created a code-free gym management system using MS Access .  Access was a decent database that came with a powerful WYSIWYG UI designer on top. It was pretty good for small local businesses that wanted to manage their records digitally (with lists, lookups, forms, add/update/delete, etc.) and was considered the most widely used desktop database system in 2011 . I'm not sure Access is relevant nowadays (forgive me Microsoft if I'm wrong), but if you're following the tech trends you probably noticed a wide range of new no-code development tools and the huge hype around it.  I decided to ask the expert and contacted  Zoe Chew ( Website , Twitter , LinkedIn ), a product builder at Pro

  Here’s a little thing that sat in my drafts for a while: it’s a simple planning framework that we used to work with, back at ClickSoftware (now Salesforce ).  It focuses on breaking down a big challenge (or a goal) into smaller challenges (or outcomes) before diving into the actual tasks, and it's a pretty good technique when dealing with product roadmaps or strategic plans that spread across multiple teams. The credit goes to Professor Moshe BenBassat , the founder and CEO of the company, and a great innovator. He took the well known  “Stepwise Refinement” problem-solving method  (not to be confused with scrum's product backlog refinement ) and turned it into a useful planning tool, which I still use whenever I need to organize my thoughts and turn a big problem into a concrete plan.  What the heck is Stepwise Refinement?  The original stepwise refinement framework works as follows:  Start with the initial problem statement Break it into a few general steps Take each "

I've been summarizing a lot of tips for improving conversion rates, leveraging cognitive biases in UI design , and UX writing  best practices.  Here are 30 rules for designing high-converting call-to-action buttons.  Included in this guide: general guidelines, design tips, UX Writing, cognitive biases worth knowing, and dark-patterns to avoid. Enjoy!  General tips: 1. Be consistent with your messaging Remember this: conversion rate optimization is not about optimizing a certain step, it's about optimizing the entire funnel.  Be consistent with your messaging and set the right expectations across the entire funnel: your ads, your landing page, your App Store product page , etc.  Without a consistent message, your users will feel misled and bounce.    2. Focus on the user Nobody cares about the internals of your product. Focus on what’s matter the most for the users: the bottom line, the benefits, the outcome.  3. Aim to establish trust  Make sure to address any concerns the user

tl;dr Multiply everything by 3. Last year, when we just started renovating our house, a friend of mine warned me: "Your project will cost you twice as much as your original budget, and will take 3 times longer than expected 😈" Trying to get over the shock, I turned to all-mighty-Google, searching for a more optimistic sign, and ran into this disturbing Murphey's law: "A carelessly planned project takes 3 times longer than expected; a carefully planned project will only take twice as long." Murphey and my friend were pretty close. Now, let's talk about why do we suck so much in time estimations, and what can we do about it? Let's start with the reasons:  Optimism Bias - you know I love cognitive biases . One of them is our tendency to overestimate the odds of our own success: we assume things will go faster and easier than they usually do, and we base our estimation on absolutely nothing. This phenomenon is also kno

When you work at a startup, growth is everyone’s goal: marketing budgets are limited, so growth hacking tactics become a way of life. The product becomes the main channel for user acquisition, and retention through a great product experience is a matter of existence. For the past few years, the notion of placing the product at the center of the business has become very popular among SaaS companies (B2C and B2B), and is known as “product-led growth”.  A recent report from Pendo shows that 89% of product leaders see their companies as product-led . Startups people may feel like it's old news, but for many SaaS companies, and product people specifically, it’s a real revolution that puts their products in the spotlight as the main pillar for the company's growth.  Here’s a handy summary for anyone who hasn't joined the product-led bandwagon yet and wants to catch up quickly.   What's Product-led Growth?  In a nutshell, PLG is a go-to-market