To you, with love, the PM
One of the few delightful moments of being a PM is to be able to create customer delight. As PMs, we regularly solve burning problems decently well for customers. But when was the last time you shipped something that caused delight, something that was able to sing to the user’s soul and create an unforgettable experience? When was the last time you experienced delight from using a product? You probably appreciate these products more now because you know exactly how difficult it is to get this done!
Why creating customer delight is hard..
If you’ve shipped a feature, then you know shipping it on time itself is pretty difficult. How do we create customer delight on top of that, with all the deadlines and resource crunches in place? It seems impossible.
Now if you do get courageous enough to try, there are some other obstacles that will block you such as
The culture of your organization - does your organization want PMs to be scrappy and quickly get things out the door? Or do they want PMs to perfect the product and ensure there aren’t too many changes?
The criticality of your feature - Has this feature been committed to GTM teams or customers to be released at a certain date?
The maturity of your product - Has your product found product/market fit yet?
Questions from stakeholders - “Is this really needed right now? It seems like a nice to have”, “What’s the point of doing this now really?”
Today’s post is an ode to products that have managed to do this despite the odds. For, it is great experiences that make users fall in love with the product and want to use it again and again (hello, retention 🤑). We thought this might serve as inspiration for all PMs out there and also as a reminder that great experiences can come from the tiniest of things 🙌
Some products that made us fall in love with them 😍
Gmail - We absolutely love the attachment suggestion in Gmail. If you write an email that has the word “attach” but don’t actually include an attachment, Gmail will remind you to include it 🧠 This creates delight as well as saves the sender from embarrassment.
Dropbox Paper - Everything about Dropbox paper is great (if you haven’t used it yet, what are you waiting for?) but we especially love this interaction, when you hit ctrl or cmd + S on a doc
Here’s what happens when you try to do it the next time
This definitely classifies as a good to have but it creates an unforgettable experience for users of Dropbox Paper. (It made it’s way into this article!)
Twitter - Twitter’s primary objective is to increase conversations (and thereby engagement on the app). There is one minute interaction that does this really well. Let’s say you’re scrolling through Twitter and see a tweet you want to reply to, from person X, who you don’t know. But this tweet is on your feed because someone you follow (let’s say Y) has retweeted it. When you hit reply, Twitter tags both X and Y to increase the probability of them replying to your comment which would in turn, lead to more conversation.
While this creates delight, it also makes users engage more on twitter and drives up adoption.
Slack - What’s not to love about Slack? It has the most delightful and fun copy we have seen. While everyone has their favorite Slack experiences, here are a few of ours
Timezones - It can be quite daunting to receive slack messages all day and even worse when you receive it at a really odd time. But if you work with people all over the world, this is highly likely to happen. This little cue here is super thoughtful and makes the sender pause before sending a message.
Release notes - This is a great example of how delight can still be achieved without any effort from engineering, especially if engineers are strapped for time.
Slack is a great example of making the entire ecosystem have one voice - the website, the apps, the release notes, their interaction on twitter, etc. This creates not just power users but brand champions which is every company’s dream.
Clubhouse - Clubhouse is the first of its kind audio only social network. Its unique advantage is the kind of users that are present on the app. More and more users will start to use Clubhouse based on the number of talented people that are already conducting sessions on the app. Clubhouse celebrates its users and differentiates itself by featuring the headshot of a user with incredible contributions to the community as the app icon, which changes every few weeks. This increases the curiosity of everyone who has installed the app and they will use Clubhouse to learn more about this person.
The app icon not only creates delight but also gets users to keep using Clubhouse.
Freshworks - It’s not just B2C products that can create customer delight, B2B products can too! Here are some fun examples from Freshworks
The dreaded 503 error - It is super frustrating when the product you paid for is experiencing downtime. But why not give the error page some personality and a course of action while this happens? This page redirects the user to subscribe to uptime status updates, so they don’t have to keep checking.
Why not get entertained while you wait? Freshdesk (customer support software) has these super fun loading messages that not only try to delight support agents but also give them quick tips on features that increase their productivity. This is brilliant because this shows Freshdesk completely understands its users while increasing awareness for its features.
As with everything product management, there is a need to strike a balance. Will creating customer delight single handedly change the adoption of a product overnight? Obviously not. The most important aspect is the core problem the product is trying to solve and as PMs we need to ensure that users are resonating with that. But once we do have that confirmation, creating customer delight goes a long way in creating sticky users.
We hope you enjoyed these insights and keep them in mind (or use them as fodder to rally your team :P) while crafting delightful experiences for your users✨
