Have you ever spent money on something you knew was stupid, silly, or ill-advised? Have you ever known what you “should” do with your money, and then not done it? Do you procrastinate about important financial decisions, afraid you’ll make the wrong move? And then beat yourself up about it?Here are two pieces of good news. You’re normal. And these are issues that can be solved.We all have beliefs about money. Many of those beliefs were formed when we were young, maybe before we even knew what money really was. Sometimes those beliefs get in the way of our financial peace of mind.

Psychology of Money: Your Beliefs About Money Can Impact how you Manage it

<ul><li>Many of the attitudes we’ve internalized come from our childhood. Even when we don’t realize it, things our parents said and things we saw them do shaped our attitudes about life in general and our financial lives in particular.</li><li>Culture and religion play a role, too, teaching us additional lessons about earning, spending, saving, and giving. Everything from “the stock market is a gamble” to “donate a percentage of your income to those less fortunate” are lessons we absorbed. </li></ul>If those beliefs help us make the financial decisions that are best for us, great. But all too often they may get in the wa<warningtag>y.</warningtag>

Where Our Beliefs Come From

Chances are, your path to financial health involves several major questions. Should you invest more or pay down your mortgage? Should you save more for retirement or for your child’s dream college? The right answers aren’t about how well a given investment performs. The answers that are best for you, and only you, need to include your attitudes toward debt, your feelings about risk, and the value you place on your financial goals. How important is it to you to be debt-free? To own a home? To pay for your child’s education?

Working With A Financial Planner

Psychology of Money: how to have a better relationship with money and to make smarter financial decisions

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Understand yourself and those around you.

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Psychology

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The Psychology of Money

Reframe your thinking about money and work with a financial planner to achieve healthier finances.

What Does Psychology Have to do With Financial Planning? | Facet Wealth

The Psychology of Money: What Does Psychology Have to do With Financial Planning?

For a company created in 2017, ClickUp has enjoyed remarkable success in the project management space — one of the most competitive software markets in the world.Let’s look at the numbers.<ul><li>Over 4 million users</li><li>85K paying customers</li><li>$4B valuation for a private company</li><li>$20M ARR within two years while bootstrapped</li></ul>How did ClickUp achieve this? By following these strategies:<ul><li>Achieves natural product fit.</li><li>Executes a product-lead content strategy.</li><li>Drives brand awareness through social media and videos.</li><li>Uses feedback to create a better product.</li><li>Handles shipping new features and bug fixes.</li></ul>

ClickUp: The Numbers

The first step to achieving product-market fit is to find out who you want to serve with your product. ClickUp seems to have found its ideal target customer early on, considering that the tool was created in the first place to help the founder’s team internally manage their responsibilities and projects.So ClickUp’s target customer was really anyone who wanted to be more productive or efficient at managing their project — literally anyone.

Finding Natural Product-Market Fit: Determine Your Target Customer

After identifying your target customer, the next step is to uncover the unmet or unsatisfied needs of said customer.In 2017, the project management space was already overflowing with tools, but most of them did only one thing really well, making people have to use different tools for their needs.ClickUp was created to eliminate the pain of managing different tools and save even more time.

Identify Customer Needs that Current Products Don’t Satisfy

How do you make your audience see that you offer a new solution in the market? First, create and define your value proposition.Your value proposition is expected to set you apart from your competitors and highlight your product’s benefits.For ClickUp, their value proposition was simple — one app to replace them all and help you save one day every week. Simple, yet efficient.

Define Your Value Proposition

A minimum viable product (MVP) is the barest or most basic version of a new product used to test the market and gain the attention of potential customers.The idea at this stage is to collect enough feedback from your target audience to understand your product’s strengths and weaknesses to improve it or double down on what works.

Specify Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Feature Set

Once you’ve decided on your MVP’s feature set, it’s now time to create a prototype. The prototype helps you picture how you expect people to use the features you just created. And it is primarily used to access design flaws in your product’s usability.It is also what brings the MVP feature set to life and presents a way for people to test your product.

Develop Your MVP Prototype

The final step to achieving product-market fit is to test your MVP with real customers. These customers typically leave feedback concerning the user experience, messaging, and functionality of the tool.But how did ClickUp find its first customers to help complete the final step to achieving a natural product-market fit?The answer: Through organic content and word of mouth.

Test your MVP with Customers

Every month, over 767K people find ClickUp through organic search. A significant percentage comes from specific long-tail terms people are looking for. And these long-tail keywords usually get thousands of searches every month.ClickUp has other articles that target and rank for long-tail keywords like:<ul><li>Free management software</li><li>Free Gantt chart</li><li>Project management tools</li><li>How to create a timesheet in Excel</li><li>Agile project management certification</li><li>And many others closely related to project management.</li></ul>

How ClickUp Attracts Users Through Long-tail Keywords

Since the landing page is tailored to a Team Manager's specific needs, they’ll immediately feel like ClickUp is the tool for them. That’s the power use-case-driven content holds.Although the template page and landing pages aren’t performing so well in terms of organic traffic (yet), they still target long-tail keywords that ClickUp knows its audience would be searching online. And it’s only a matter of time before they start attracting a lot more potential users.

Tailored For Team Management Projects

Product-led content isn’t just another buzzword that founders and marketers throw around to make themselves sound smart. On the contrary, it’s a proven method to create content that quickly differentiates you from the competition and highlights your unique value to existing and potential customers.If you’re not already familiar with the term, product-led content is any piece of content created to address the pain points of an audience while showing how a product (typically your product) solves the audience’s problems.

Solving Audience Problems Through Product-Led Content

We’ve already established that ClickUp is in a tough industry with many competitors fighting for some share in the same market. People want to know how ClickUp and other project management tools compare to each other.It’s evident that the people performing these searches are way past the awareness stage of their buyers’ journey. Instead, they’re at the consideration or decision stage, and that’s why they’re searching with a commercial or investigation intent.To match their audience’s search intent, ClickUp created comparison pages.

Building Competitor Comparison Pages

Now that ClickUp had achieved a natural product-market fit thanks to its organic users, it was only a matter of time before they started advertising the living daylights out of their tool. After all, they’re in a competitive landscape.Aside from the search engine ads we just covered, ClickUp also uses social media to reach a wider audience.

Driving Growth Through Paid Efforts and Social Media

<ul><li>They create behind-the-scenes content around how business is done at ClickUp. This, in a way, helps the company become more relatable to its audience.</li><li>They show off their employees. Doing so helps people see ClickUp as a company that values its employees and helps them take a peek at the company’s culture.</li><li>They share inspirational content. People love to be inspired, and who better to inspire people than a company that makes productivity tools?</li></ul>

How ClickUp Utilizes Instagram

Ears that do not listen to advice accompany the head when it is chopped off.

ClickUp undoubtedly had some ground to cover considering when they entered the market, and they covered said ground by shipping new features and fixing bugs as fast as possible.In fact, for more than two years now, ClickUp has shipped a new product release every Friday. As expected, these launches are not always perfect, but as Zeb puts it, “what matters most is progress over perfection.”

First-Movers Advantage and Why You Should Ship as Fast as Possible

For ClickUp, the product-market fit was what mattered the most. Achieving this first allowed them to knock every other thing they did out of the park.And it’s safe to say that their method works, considering how far they’ve come in a really tough space.

The Bottom Line

For a company created in 2017, ClickUp has enjoyed remarkable success in the project management space — one of the most competitive software markets in the world. Let’s look at the numbers. Over 4 million users 85K paying customers $4B valuation for a private company $20M ARR within two years while bootstrapped Here’s what ClickUp’s

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An Inside Look Into How ClickUp Went From $0-$20M ARR in Two Years

Cold Wallet: A wallet that stores assets. It is not connected to the internet which adds an additional layer of security.DAO: Decentralized Autonomous OrganizationDefi: Decentralized finance; financial entities that operate using smart contracts on blockchains that do not rely on central financial intermediariesDiamond Hands: Used to describe holding onto assets for the longer term even if there is pressure to sell

Cold Wallet, DAO, Defi and Diamond Hands

ERC 20, ERC 721, ERC 1155: Most common token standards on Ethereum (for things like NFTs)Fiat: Traditional currency like USD or EURFUD: Fear, uncertainty, and doubtFungible: With many goods/assets, it’s not really important which one you have (one US dollar is basically the same as another US dollar). Non-fungible goods/assets mean that every individual good/asset is unique and that some are likely more valuable/different than others

ERCs, Fiat, FUD, Fungible

Gas: Transaction fees to process things on a blockchain. gas fees are often suggested by a wallet or platform depending on the congestion of the network but you can opt to lower or raise them which may influence the speed (or certainty) with which your transaction is processed.GM: Good morning (say it on Twitter or in your Discords for some community love)Gwei: Gigawei (1,000,000,000 Wei). Wei is the smallest unit of ether (similar to what a penny is relative to a dollar). Gas is measured in Gwei.HODL: Hold on for dear life (an apt term for many things in this space)

Gas, GM, Gwei, and HODL

Hot Wallet: An internet-connected wallet that stores digital assets. It’s wise to exercise caution with these and generally avoid holding too much value in them to help mitigate against risk.KYC: Know your customer. Many exchanges/wallets/platforms require you to verify your identity to help fight fraud, money laundering, etc.Minting: The process of creating a new block and recording information on the blockchain. This is a common part of participating in NFT drops. Many projects have a “mint” day where you process a transaction to bring your NFT into your wallet.

Hot Wallet, KYC, and Minting

NFT: Non-fungible token (see fungible above). An NFT can be almost anything from a photo to a video to a song.NGMI: Not gonna make it (often used to refer to individuals that make less-than-ideal decisions to buy/sell in the space)Oracle: A third-party service that allows smart contracts to interface with outside information/data sources Paper Hands: A tendency to flip/sell frequently and/or after small increases or decreases in value

NFT, NGMI, Oracle, and Paper Hands

Proof of Stake: A mining construct that states a miner can mine/validate block transactions based on how many coins they hold.Proof of Work: A mining construct that achieves consensus through solving complex mathematical problems using computation to validate/achieve consensus on transactions.Private Key: Think of this like the key to your house. You should take extreme care to protect these and never give them out to anyone.Public Address: Think of this like your home address. It’s a semi-public record of your location on the blockchain(s).

POS, POW, Private Key, and Public Address

Roadmap: Many NFT projects have a “roadmap” that lays out their plans for a project. It’s helpful to look at these with a critical eye.Smart Contract: A self-executing contract that spells out the terms for buyers and sellers in code that is recorded and distributed on the blockchain. The code of a smart contract controls the execution of transactions. Transactions are trackable, immutable, and irreversible.Sniping: A tactic to identify and quickly scoop up NFT assets that are undervalued/underpriced. There are many tools for this but TraitSniper is a useful starting point.

Roadmap, Smart Contract, and Sniping

Staking: An arrangement where you agree to lock up your assets (cryptocurrency or NFTs) for a period of time in exchange for rewards (usually tokens or cryptocurrency or NFTs). Rewards are similar to interest for keeping money in a savings account.Token: A cryptographic entry that represents an NFT, payment/currency unit, trading asset, information holder, etc.Whitelist / Allow List: A method of access control that’s typically used to grant private access to a platform or experience (it’s often used for minting NFT projects)WGMI: We’re all gonna make it (a supportive rallying cry)

Staking, Token, Whitelist, and WGMI

Web3 is mired in a dizzying array of acronyms that make diving an uphill battle. Here are some which will help you become more familiar with this exciting, dynamic space.

An easy-to-read introduction to the major terms and concepts of web3 and NFTs

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Impress Your Friends with these 30 NFT and Web3 Acronyms

Social currency is one way of seeing the value businesses add to customers. Knowing how to build social currency allows brands to drive higher customer loyalty and add to social proof. This leads to more sales and referrals.
It is your influence on social networks, online and offline communities, and the degree to which your business is shared by others. It is the ability of brands to fit into how consumers manage their social lives in today’s digital and mobile age.

Defining Social Currency

People share what they think makes them look good. In other words, they’ll only share what they believe will maintain or boost their reputation in the eyes of their peers.Whenever a person chooses to share information, they place their reputation on the line and “spend” social currency. They don’t want to share boring, irrelevant, or misleading information because they risk losing status among their peers.

Social Currency of Individuals

All brands need social currency. It makes connecting with customers easier. And when you share interesting content with your audience, having social currency means that message will more likely be shared with others.When someone shares your brand, they spend their social currency on you. And if others like what they see, then the social currency of both the sharer and your brand increases.

Social Currency of Brands

Brands with high social currency are also able to command premium prices.Think about Apple. By building its social currency, the company doesn’t just lead smartphone sales by volume. It also commands a premium. Apple is able to charge some of the highest prices for its products, without any dip in its brand loyalty. The majority of Apple customers are loyal to the brand, and are always awaiting the company’s next release.

Social Currency and Brand Loyalty

Building social currency entails providing at least one of the following dimensions (or benefits) to your audience:<ul><li>Affiliation: Offering a sense of community among your customers</li><li>Conversation: Engaging in the conversation around your brand</li><li>Utility: Creating value for customers, while helping them become more socially relevant</li><li>Advocacy: Developing strong brand loyalty, to the point where customers will recommend (and even defend) a brand</li><li>Information: Giving valuable and shareable information</li><li>Identity: Providing customers with their own identity in a group</li></ul>

The Dimensions of Social Currency

Apple makes products like companies, feature-wise. They are more successful because they invest in social currency.
<ul>
<li>Utility: Apple doesn’t only deliver the functionality consumers want. It does so in a way that is easy and seamless for consumers.</li>
<li>Conversation: Apple is known for its legendary product launches and events. At any time of the year, there’s a lot of conversation generated around its products.</li>
<li>Identity: Apple fans rallied around its “Think Different” cry. These days, Apple products represent a certain status or premium.</li>
</ul>

The Social Currency Created By Apple

Building your social currency can also make your referral marketing strategies more effective. Think of social currency as a bank account. If you want to spend your social currency – that is, if you want customers to do something – you have to earn it first. 
If a customer doesn’t see a brand as having social capital (or doesn’t have an existing relationship with them), they are unlikely to advocate it to others.

Building Social Currency

What are ways you can add to your social capital? Be present on social media, share relevant content, and highlight your best features.You don’t have to do everything at once – you can gradually build your customer relationships. Start by being a friend to your customers. Post helpful information about your brand and answer any concerns. And if someone shares a tweet about your product or tags you in a photo, be sure to respond with thanks.

Adding To Your Social Capital

Positive social capital deepens the relationship between your business and your customers. You’ll have a clearer view of what your customers want, what they don’t want, and any gaps in the market you can address. 
You’ll also see how customers perceive your brand, which allows you to manage your brand reputation.

Benefits of Social Currency: Greater Insight Into Your Customers

Social currency helps increase the market value of your brand. When a consumer sees others also enjoying your products and services, they’ll be likely to trust and try what you have to offer.

Benefits of Social Currency: Increased Impact

When a brand earns enough social currency, it becomes an influencer in its industry. It solidifies its position and gains even more leverage with other influencers.

Benefits of Social Currency: A Larger Circle Of Influence

When your social capital reaches a certain level, you experience a snowball effect – all the work you’ve done in the past will compound. Customers are already motivated to share the product or service with others. And if this happens through time at scale, you can expect a boom in customers and advocates for your brand.

Benefits of Social Currency: Organic Growth

Social currency drives the kind of loyalty that catapults you over other brands. 
For example, Target and Walmart offer many of the same products. But because Target has earned social capital through its social channels, the brand has a higher repurchase or loyalty rate over Wal-Mart.

Benefits of Social Currency: Higher Customer Retention

If you’re trying to position your brand at a premium price point, social currency is a big help. Social currency changes the way customers perceive the value of a product, by adding something money can’t buy.

Benefits of Social Currency: Premium Prices

Building a brand your customers are proud to support not only increases social currency, it will also boost your word-of-mouth marketing. Brands with high social capital are more likely to be promoted and recommended by your existing customers.

Benefits of Social Currency: Better Word Of Mouth

All the above benefits add up to this final point – more leads. By now, your customers are primed to refer their friends and family to your business. This drives a steady stream of highly qualified leads, which results in exponential business growth.

Benefits of Social Currency:  Higher Quality Leads

When an influencer or brand ambassador promotes your company, you’re borrowing their social currency. After all, these individuals will only promote a brand they love and think offers value to their followers. Focus on finding representatives who resonate with your audience, and whose fans respect and trust them.Influencer marketing and brand ambassador programs are one of the most effective ways to generate more social currency. Brand ambassador programs have also proven to help you grow your brand 10 times faster.

Increase Referrals: Find Influencers and Brand Ambassadors

One of the most successful social currency strategies is to create communities. This is especially true for your target customers. For example, say your business sells an organic cleaning spray. You might create a Facebook group for people to share natural home cleaning tips. By doing this, you’re offering affiliation and identity to your members. You’re also attracting others with a growing interest in organic cleaners.

Increase Referrals: Create Communities

What sets you apart from your competitors? Do you have a unique selling point? Find what makes you stand out and highlight those features in all of your marketing efforts. This is not only a great selling tactic for your brand, it also helps to drive social capital and sharing.

Increase Referrals: Show Your Uniqueness

It’s every brand’s dream to have the next viral video hit. While it’s hard to predict what will go viral, creating useful video content is a good place to start. A simple explainer or how-to video is always helpful for consumers. As long as you focus on valuable insights or tips, you can be sure your customers will be watching.

Increase Referrals: Create Explainer Videos

The majority of people trust recommendations from their peers, which makes referral programs one of the most effective ways to grow your business. However, referral programs need the right incentives to work.
Consider offering coupons, vouchers, gift cards, or other proven referral rewards for your advocates. You can also give a shout out to your top referrers within your community.

Increase Referrals: Incentivise Your Patrons

It’s always helpful to share key information with your customers. Developing knowledge bases, <a href="https://preply.com/">online learning portals</a>, guidebooks, and other informational resources is a strong way to build your social capital.

Increase Referrals: Launch A Campaign

Consider adding game mechanics or competition structures in your marketing efforts. For example, you can invite customers to complete challenges, progress through levels, and earn points.Gamification can easily be applied to a loyalty program or referral program. It can also be used in a promotional contest to create buzz around your brand (much more interesting than a traditional ad).

Increase Referrals: Gamification

Share exclusive brand “secrets” with your most loyal customers – things that aren’t known by the general public. This can be a secret menu item, a members-only event, or a private sale.No matter what the secret is, the offer of exclusive info raises your social capital among your select customers. This drives them to talk about your brand with their friends so they can all enjoy the same benefits. These friends, in turn, will also share with their friends, which gives your brand’s social currency a huge boost.

Increase Referrals: Create a Sense of Exclusivity

One of the easiest ways to boost your social currency is to create products and content optimized for social media sharing. 
Whether it’s a highly shareable product, an Instagrammable brand experience, a humorous Tweet, an on-trend brand video, this content can quickly boost your social capital. Just make sure to deliver what your audience wants, and stay true to your brand voice and tone.

Increase Referrals: Social Media Sharing Of Optimized Content

Featuring your best customers is a great way to show them you appreciate their efforts, and helps form key identities within your community. In a referral program, for example, this may include highlighting your top-referring customers and new referrals.

Increase Referrals: Feature Your Customers

Social currency is an effective way to understand the value businesses add to customers. Here are a few benefits of adding to your social currency.

What is Social Currency? Definition, Benefits, and Examples

There is a misconception that ties a QBR to an actual customer meeting that is completely outdated and an unrealistic expectation. Customer Success needs to break away from the traditional 1:1 high touch, account management mindset. The focus is always on the customer and improving the overall experience to meet the demands of the customer and the reality that exists.You need to take the QBR creation out of the hands of CSMs and simplify the process. CSMs will still need to do some slight customizations of the QBR messaging in some cases but the majority of the work should be automated.

Myth #1: QBRs need to be meetings

Think of your QBR as a window display at your favorite store. It’s not enough to have a QBR that demonstrates the value of your product. You need to sell that value. The actual QBR document should be self-explanatory and you should expect that it will be passed around within the customer’s organization.In order for this to happen, the value points in your QBR need to be optimized so that they jump off the page. It should be clear to anyone that picks up the document.

Myth #2: Substance is more important than style for QBRs

As you’re checking your calendar to start the day, you see there is a two hour block for “QBR Prep” at 10:00 am. The room suddenly feels a lot warmer and beads of sweat appear on your forehead. You…

2 Quarterly Business Review Myths that Customer Success Needs to Abandon

<ul><li>The traditional account management method where you meet with your customers regularly and confirm with them directly</li><li>The hands-off method where you monitor usage data as a proxy for business outcome achievement</li><li>Or, a combination of the two.</li></ul>More often than not, there isn't a systematic approach to tracking business outcome achievement that results in a surprise churn but a way to combat this is to create a coordinated and meaningful engagement approach with your customers.

How CS teams track business outcome achievement

<ol><li>Define first what a meaningful engagement is to you. Keep trying and experimenting with different types of communication that can help you define the customer's business outcome. </li><li>Track and report on meaningful engagements. As Peter Drucker once said, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." Aside from your customer’s business outcomes, you can also determine if these defined engagements have improved top-level metrics such as customer retention, expansion, or customer loyalty.</li><li>Review the impact of meaningful engagements to maximize your resources and achieve your business goals.</li></ol>

The 3 components to implementing a meaningful engagement strategy

All too often there isn’t a systematic approach to tracking business outcome achievement in Customer Success. This results in surprise churn or something akin to it. A way to combat this is to create a coordinated engagement approach with your customers that is truly meaningful.

Meaningful Engagements: How to Achieve Your Customer’s Outcomes

Product Data Management (PDM) is the process of collecting, organizing, storing, and sharing data within an organization. You might also have heard that it comes under the umbrella of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and is sometimes referred to in software engineering as version control.&nbsp;A Data Product Manager is like a Product Manager, but who focuses more heavily on Product Data Management. A Product Manager sits at the intersection between technology, design, and business.&nbsp;

What is a Data Product Manager?

<ul><li>A/B Testing is a very important and commonly used way of gathering data for a new feature.&nbsp;</li><li>As a Product Manager, you’ll also be in charge of setting the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for your product.&nbsp;</li><li>Stakeholder Management is the activity of interacting and addressing all stakeholders involved in product management.</li><li>Usage tracking. You need to know how people are using your product.&nbsp;</li></ul>

How do Product Managers Use Data?

There are some basic requirements that you should look for when choosing your PDM tool. It should:<ol><li>Facilitate collaboration easily between teams</li><li>Reduce development errors</li><li>Fit your budget/usage</li><li>Improve productivity</li><li>Help you find the data you need as quickly as possible</li><li>Maintain your company’s security standards.</li></ol>

Choosing the Right Product Data Management Software

Product Data Management (PDM) is the process of collecting, organizing, storing, and sharing data within an organization. You might also have heard that it comes under the umbrella of Product…

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What is Product Data Management?

After spending over 15 years in customer success, I’ve created a comprehensive yet simple approach that you can use to avoid many of the mistakes that I made and double down on the best.

The Cycle of Customer Success: A Blueprint for Customer Success Teams

When you are just joining, rebuilding or forming a Customer Success team, you need to create a common purpose and direction for the team. I recommend that you pull your team (or CS leadership team if you have a large team) and draft out a mission statement. Every CS team needs a purpose — it doesn’t have to be perfect. You can and should refine it over time.

Mission

Defining and refining the customer journey has taken a greater prominence in recent years within Customer Success teams. It’s more than just improving the customer experience. It’s about determining the right customer interactions that will deliver the customer’s desired outcome and ultimately drive the right financial results for your company.

Customer Journey

The “People” section includes the following components:<ul><li>Determine the right CS team structure based on the customer journey.</li><li>Properly define the roles and responsibilities of each CS team within your Customer Success function to support this structure.</li><li>Creating a standardized hiring process for your Customer Success team. </li><li>Creating a standardized onboarding process for new team members that are metrics-driven.</li><li>Compensation.</li><li>Ensuring your team receives ongoing training and enablement.</li><li>Creating formal career paths in and outside of Customer Success and performance management.</li></ul>

People

This is the time to build out and standardize the processes that your team will use to execute on the customer journey. It will include how you coordinate the various transitions within the Customer Success team but also outlines how CS interlocks with the other functions such as Sales on complex upsells or Marketing on customer communications.

Process

Technology can sometimes appear to be that mirage on the horizon when you feel like you’ve been wandering in the desert for days. Don’t go drinking from that water before you pass go! What I mean is that there are no quick fixes. Don’t invest your precious CS budget on any major technology solutions until you’ve gone through the components of the Cycle for Customer Success.

Technology

You should have metrics established for each and every stage and be constantly reviewing them. For example, when we created the mission statement at Bluecore, I grounded ourselves on the Net Promoter Score as I felt I could influence that metric within 6 months based on our direct actions while renewal rates may have longer cycles.

Measurements

I’ve created a comprehensive yet simple approach that you can use for your CS team called “The Cycle of Customer Success”.

It’s the product manager’s responsibility to gather information and make data-driven decisions on the overall look of a product. But they don’t sit down and manually craft the look and feel of a product. That’s firmly in the realm of Product Design, not Product Management.The Product &lt;&gt; Design partnership is all about collaborating to create the best product possible. The Product Manager works on defining the problem, and the designers help to build the solution.&nbsp;

Product Management vs Product Design

While Product people and Design people care about the same thing — shipping great products — they just process information in a different way.Designers typically tend to care less about numbers and data compared to engineers. They want to know more about the user problems from a more human perspective.

Speak Their Language

Design encompasses more than one thing. As such, your designer may be more talented in one area than another. For example, they might be great at interaction design, but they lack a bit of artistic flair when it comes to visual design.It’s important to understand this when interacting with your designer. If one aspect of their work isn’t 100% up to your expectations on their first try — it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a bad designer. It just means that you’ll need to work around their strengths and weaknesses.

Understand Their Individual Strengths and Weaknesses

Because PMs and Designers have a different ways of looking at things, you have to explain the reasons behind your decisions. Saying ‘just get it done’ when questioned won’t only be incredibly unhelpful, but also makes you look pretty unlikeable.Your Design team will care about providing the best experience for users, and will probably also want to maximize the visual appeal. It’s your responsibility to explain why something has been decided a certain way.

Explain the Why Behind Your Choices

As a team, you need to find a balance between what looks good, and what functionally achieves your goals. Sometimes you’ll need to be on the other side of compromise when a designer tells you that something just doesn’t look good.This isn’t just because designers are, in a way, artists. Yes, they have a vision, a style of their own, and things they visually prefer. But they’re also educated professionals who know what users want to click on and why.

Respect Their Vision

Getting Design involved from the beginning, rather than building something and passing it along to be ‘prettied up’, greatly improves the quality of your product.Users don’t just want things that work, they want things that work beautifully. Getting your designers involved from the very beginning not only earns you their respect and trust, but also helps you build your product in the right direction.

Get Them Involved from the Beginning

The Product <> Design relationship is one of the most important when it comes to building products without friction. To those outside of tech, and even to some within, the meaning of different job…

Product Managers: Here’s How to Make Your Designers Love You

If you’re someone who builds a product or products, have to make high level strategic product decisions…this is something you need to be thinking about. Are the decisions you make output focused, or outcome focused?<ul><li>What does Outcomes over Outputs mean?</li><li>How can we define an outcome?</li><li>The value of OKRs and what they have to do with the debate</li><li>The Benefits of an outcome-centric approach for product management teams</li><li>Why more businesses aren’t more outcome focused</li><li>What our community of product people has to say</li></ul>

Should Product Managers Focus on Outcomes over Outputs?

In business they are sometimes used Interchangeably, causing a bit of confusion.Let’s imagine you’re on your way to work and feeling exhausted, so you go into the cafe next to the office and buy yourself an enormous coffee to get you through the morning.The outcome is not the coffee. The outcome is that you feel more energized by the caffeine boost and have a more productive morning. The outcome is the way in which your problem was solved by the output; the coffee.

What Does Outcomes over Outputs Mean?

In the knowledge economy, the concept of outcomes in business has changed dramatically. A useful exercise in understanding the outcomes of a Modern-Day business is to examine companies in this way. Spotify doesn’t actually make music. The output is the platform (App and Website), and the outcome is an engaged user base who have shifted their entire music collection over to Spotify. Airbnb doesn’t own properties, instead it has a platform for people to advertise and rent short-term accommodation.

How Can We Define an Outcome?

As a product Manager/Product owner, you are the keeper of the product vision. If you have that, then you already have your outcome. Instead of focusing on how to make a better and better drill, build your product strategy around how to help people achieve that quarter-inch hole. In practice, this might mean dedicating more resources to your Onboarding process to make sure users actually understand how to use your product.

Defining the outcome for your product and implementing it

Okrs are a valuable part of an outcome over output mindset. By using them you’ve already set the tone of focusing on the objective. To focus on outcomes, you should align your Weekly/Monthly/Quarterly Okr objective with your desired outcome.

The Value of OKRs

It ’ s much simpler to focus on what you’re doing day to day, than it is to look to the future. An outcome is less measurable and Quantifiable than the output. The idea of stopping to reflect on ‘ how did we do?’is still a fairly foreign concept, particularly in larger, more traditional companies. The idea of stopping to reflect on ‘ how did we do?’is still fairly foreign concept.

Why Aren’t More Businesses Outcome-Focused?

When you start with the outcome you want first, that gives you a significant amount more freedom and flexibility in your approach to reaching that outcome. As opposed to setting the output first, and hoping that it will lead you to your desired outcome. There’s nothing worse than working incredibly hard on a product or feature, only for it to fail at the last hurdle.

1. Flexibility

What motivates people to come to work every day isn’t the Minute-By-Minute tasks they get to do, it’s what those tasks will lead to. If someone has been staring at Spreadsheets and Dashboards for hours on end, they’re motivated by what that data analysis will lead to; a better product and a better outcome.

2. A clearer, more motivational goal

We all recognize the words ‘outcome’ and ‘output’, and we all think we know what that means. But arrange them into ‘outcomes vs outputs’ and hand them over to the product management community, and…

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