November 18, 2012
Mouse Tracking: Why Mouseflow didn’t work for me

There are a lot of solutions our there that allow us to track users behavior through heatmaps and session recordings. If I had an unlimited budget, I would go with Clicktale without much hesitations but guess what, I don’t have an unlimited budget, so I went out to look for a cheaper alternative. (To give you an idea of the cost, Clicktale was around $250/month with a yearly subscription).

After some trials, I’ve decided to pick Mouseflow and their 49 Euros monthly plan. For that price, you get to record 10’000 sessions with heatmaps, scrolling maps and the likes. It seemed good enough for what I wanted to do, which is tracking the impact of UI changes on users.

I was wrong, for a simple reason: Tracking customers on your site without the ability to segment by goals (conversions) is pretty much useless. There are only so many recordings you can watch before going crazy and I realized that what I really wanted to understand was how clicks were linked to each others, the flow on the site, rather than which buttons were clicked upon on a given page. 

Questions I want to answer are:

  • Are there links that are not used?
  • Are there parts of the site that are not read?
  • Where do people give up (funnel)?
  • What path do people who are converting take? 
  • Do people come several time before converting?
  • Do people coming from different channels behave differently?

Mouseflow helps with the first two questions but it is not built to answer the others (as of end of 2012). That’s why I find its value to be rather limited. 

So if you’re really on a budget, this kind of solution and Google analytics is a good start but get your expectations right, you’ll get what you pay for.  This will only give you a partial view of what needs to be improved in order to convert more customers. I’ll soon put more money for a more complete solution.

10:52am
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October 14, 2012
Product Roadmap: How far into the future?

An important part of product management is maintaining a product roadmap. When it comes to startups, I’m not a big fan of long product roadmaps, as things will change quickly anyway. Sure, as a team grows, needs for planification increases accordingly. I like that image I’ve found on blog.brainscape.com, it tells a good story about how much should go into the product roadmap and what needs to stay into the company’s vision:

In my opinion, any attempt to go any further as a startup is just wishful thinking. The time required to maintain the roadmap will explode as changes keep coming in, creating more confusion and frustration than clarity and focus.

This being said, it seems I’m still in the minority when saying this. A very short, unscientific survey I made asking people in startups around me about their product roadmap seems to indicate that most of them still have a year long or more roadmap. I wonder what goes into it… It might just be that we have different understanding of what a product roadmap is and how we use it. That’s for another post.

9:03am
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October 4, 2012
An interesting case study: How we use Trello & Google Docs to make UserVoice better every day

3:15am
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October 1, 2012
The billion dollar wrong question

Everybody these days talk about how education is being disrupted by sites like Udacity or Coursera. I had never spent any significant time on any of those but I’m now taking one class in each, respectively The Lean Launchpad and Human-Computer Interaction. And so far, I’m having a really good time (with a preference for the Lean Launchpad).

Both classes are taught by Standford professors and both look at the same issue from different perspectives: How do you learn from customers as quickly as possible, in order to build a product they’ll really use. Their common ground is that you need to go listen to customers, spend time with them if possible, and then show them something rather than just ask questions.

I find questionnaires great for feedback but I’m more and more reluctant to use them to understand customer needs. Take this example from the HCI course, where things didn’t exactly go as planned after a customer survey (hint: the company lost a billion dollar in the process). If you want to skip to the moral of the story: the hardest thing to achieve when asking questions is to keep an open mind and not to build a question around the answer you like.

It sounds obvious enough but I’ve done the same kind of mistake when launching Vocalytics by asking people: “Would you like to use a mobile solution that would help you improve how you deliver your presentations?” What on earth was I expecting? The feedback was a tsunami of definite “Yes”. It felt incredibly good.

Now, as you’ve guessed, this enthusiasm didn’t transform into massive downloads of our first prototype. That was disappointing to say the least but it was the price to pay for asking the wrong question. Starting with the prototype and just observing interaction with the device would definitely have put us quicker on the right path.

7:56am
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September 27, 2012
As a follow up to this first post (and as JCal would say…)

As a follow up to this first post (and as JCal would say…)

2:30pm
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September 27, 2012
A journey into product development

As I’m starting in my new position as the product guy at Koemei, I think it’s a good time to also start a journal about this role and log what works and what fails along the way. 

Product development in a technology company, especially one that has a strong research background such as Koemei, is a fascinating challenge. What’s nice about research is that it is growing by failing, so there’s no need to bring the love of testing different approaches to the DNA of such a startup. The importance of good metrics is also something a research-heavy startup get easily. But as we all know, startups are not about technology, they are first and foremost about customers. So the way I see my job in this setting is to foster a spirit where we use these habits of testing and measuring for customer development.

So that’s the theory. How do I plan to apply it on the job? The very first things I’ve asked my new team and our CEO are the following:

1) Prepare for a Business Model Generation session that we’ll do together.

This is absolutely crucial. It will give me the elements I’ll test and measure in the coming weeks. It’s something well worth spending half a day on.

2) Answer those 4 questions in a couple of sentences:

  • What business are we really in? (vs what technology are we developing) 
  • Who do we want our customers to be ?
  • What do our current customers/prospects really want ?
  • What feeling(s) do we want people to associate with our company?

The last question is about the personality of the company. We need people to feel strongly about us. A good follow-up question is: What would haters say about us that we wouldn’t mind. Are we nerdy, obsessed, unstable (because ever evolving)? 

I believe with those 2 elements, before even diving into the technology, I have everything I need for a good first day. I’ll tell you if it’s true ;)

3:34am
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