5-Bit Fridays: Power user strategies, the power of 'no' in your next negotiation, losing your competitiveness, and more
Plus two quick-and-easy growth ideas to try
Jaryd here! You’re reading 5-Bit Fridays—your weekly ~5-minute morning roundup of 5 actionable insights that can help you build and grow your product. You can read my main How They Grow deep dives here, or my Why They Died failure breakdowns here.
Happy Friday, everyone!
Hope all of you in the US enjoyed yesterday! With the holiday week and all, just a reminder in case you missed the latest deep dive. It’s shorter than usual, in a new format, and packed with 15 tactical ideas for both PMs and founders. If you read it and have an opinion on the structure—I’d love to hear. 🙏
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The best teams have some ongoing customer discovery process. They’re interviewing people, running surveys, reading through support tickets, and doing usability tests.
And the bigger the team, the more people there are gathering data on their customers.
The problem is this customer data is scattered. At best, there’s a shared Notion page or some Google Drive. The impact of this is that it often takes time to pull insights from places like this, present them, get alignment, and make decision.
And for teams, analyzing all the insights the company has collected across all customer interactions across time is basically impossible.
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5 actionable insights from this week
(I) Do you have a clear power user strategy yet?
The people who engage in some critical path of your product frequently—your power users—are a huge growth opportunity. They’re the people who are getting the most value from your product. But, many teams don’t actually have a defined playbook for tapping this group of users. James Evans, CEO of CommandBar, calls out 4 things you could be doing with these people:
Upsell them: Users who are using your product a lot are great candidates to sell more to.
Retain them: A lot of these users are probably paying you already. You don’t want to neglect them.
Turn them into advocates: The difference between a user who silently uses your product and one who wins you more users by being a vocal advocate is enormous.
Use them for research: Power users can help you find subtle flaws or new use cases.
Your call to action: 🏃
You need to strike the balance of (1) not over-optimizing for power users and neglecting the rest of your user base, and (2) not ignoring the people who are gaining the most value from your product.
The best move is to deeply understand who your power users are, and why, and then incorporate them into your broader product strategy[Go deeper: Why every app needs a power user strategy, by James Evans]
(II) An interesting thought by Aussie blogger, Tim Denning: “You're Not Overwhelmed, You're Just Focused on the Wrong Goals” .
I’ll be the first to admit it—I’ve had the wrong goals before. And by wrong, I mean goals that didn’t energize me.
And this isn’t some older version of me. I still do this. I still fall into the trap of goal setting for external reasons. But, one the best feelings I get is when I delete a goal.
It’s so easy to tack on something else to your list because a friend or peer you admire is doing something cool, and you feel like if you don’t do that thing, you’re not doing enough. I know founders who are building incredibly helpul companies but feel inadequate for not writing a newsletter about it, or hosting a podcast or running a marathon for charity or waking up at 5am for sunrise yoga and daily icebaths.
As Tim says—which I wholeheartedly agree with and think is great advice—”Multiple goals are the fastest way to reach overwhelm and join the average at the bottom of the ladder.” If you feel overwhelm, it’s a sign you have too many goals—goals that often compete for each others time.
Your call to action: 🏃
Nothing beats extreme focus. Take stock of how many goals you have, and considering picking one goal that most aligns with your interests. Then aim to do just one big thing towards that each day. [Go deeper: You're Not Overwhelmed, You're Just Focused on the Wrong Goals, by ]
(III) Ask these more subtle questions to improve your pre-project stakeholder meetings.
Before new projects kickoff and research begins, there’s always some initial meeting(s) where context is given. But people are not always explicit, and your job as a PM is to make sure that all the right context is captured and understood before time is spent moving things forward.
By asking a few targeted questions, you’ll get a more comprehensive understanding of why a stakeholder is asking you to do some project, leading to far more aligned research goals, structure, and ultimately, more actionable insights to make a decision.
Your call to action: 🏃
In your next pre-project meeting, ask these 5 questions that go deeper than surface-level goals.
1) Specific problems to be solved
2) Silent constraints and pressures from higher management
3) Conflicting hypotheses within the team
4) Realistic timelines for decision-making
5) Preferred formats for deliverables
[Go deeper: Five questions to improve your pre-project stakeholder meetings, by Lisa Nguyen]
(IV) One surprising tactic to negotiating is getting to a “No” as fast as possible.
Everyday is a day with some negotiating. We negotiate with our partners about what and where to eat, or we negotiate priorities with our team, or we negotiate design choices inside our product, or we’re negotiating for more money. We’re always negotiating to some level, and the folks who’ve perfected the soft-skill of influencing a decision are generally the ones who enjoy the most success.
“In business as in life, you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate.”
— Chester L. Karrass
One strategy proposed by former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss, is to get the other person to a “no” as fast as you can. Odd when you consider you’re trying to get a yes. But “no” doesn’t mean failure, rather, “no” is when the negotiation actually begins. “No” gives you all the information needed to convince your counterpart.
Your call to action: 🏃
In your next negotiation, once you get to the “no,” listen to why. What were the concerns they had? Then use those reasons to chart your path to a “yes.”[Go deeper: 6 Negotiation Tactics for Salespeople From Chris Voss, by Ashitha]
(VI) Are you getting more competitive, or less competitive?
As a company scales, it’s not uncommon for them to get less competitive. As Jason Lemkin says:
Once you really start to scale post $10m-$15m, the “internal” stuff starts taking up a ton of time. Keeping existing customers happy. Fixing long-standing product gaps and technical debt. Scaling DevOps and TechOps and FinOps and AllTheOps and HR and Recruiting and the SKO. Again, you’re finally building a real company. What can happen with all that internal focus is you lose a little focus on remaining ruthlessly competitive.
Your level of competitiveness can be measured by your % of market share. In short, if your market share is growing you’re doing well. But if it’s on the decline, that’s a clear signal of decay in your product.
Be careful not to lose sight of the competition when you enjoy success.
Your call to action: 🏃
Tracking market share can be tricky, but at least defining some process around it and calling out consistent things to look at in order to compare your growth directly to your competitors will keep you honest. [Go deeper: The Top 10 Mistakes Founders Make After $10m ARR, by ]
As you know, there are a lot of product analytics companies out there—many with pricing models that balloon out of control as you scale and are overly complicated.
Well, you should look into June. June is one of the newest kids on the analytics block, and flip, they’re one of the coolest ones I’ve seen. For one, their UI is just beautiful, and they make it so simple to understand your users and figure out what’s causing churn. I also love that June is built just for product teams. Oh, and it’s also free.
One feature that’s super helpful is automated, out the box, reports on the things B2B SaaS companies need to know about their users. If you’re building in this space, check out this really cleverly designed page to show why some of the newest B2B companies are choosing June. Never seen a design pattern like that before. 🔥
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2 tactical ideas worth thinking about
“If your platform has a signup, send an automated text-only (not HTML) email with the subject ‘Your opinion’ and one question (i.e. What their experience has been like so far). If you want to make it even more personal, add "Sent from my iPhone" to the footer. You’ll be amazed by how much great feedback you get to improve and grow your product.”
s/o Manuel Becker, Founder of Locationscout, for this one
Audit your calendar and find one standing meeting that you can handle asynchronously.
Want to share a quick product/growth idea here with everyone and get a shoutout in front of 22K founders/PMs? Drop yours below. 1 How They Grow lesson
In a very unconventional product manager way, consider putting your audience last. This is borrowed from contrarian writing wisdom, but as you read this post, you’ll see how it translates to Arc’s approach to building. If you are building for an ICP like yourself, Arc shows us that sometimes you need to build what’s true to you first and foremost. As with art, that creates soul and craftsmanship that people see and come to love.
From…
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Awesome, have a wonderful weekend everyone.
Until next time.
—Jaryd
Great issue dear Jaryd!
Hi Jaryd!
A belated welcome back from vacation, and thank you for the insights. Regarding the #4 topic:
The "No" negotiating tactic wasn't a Chris Voss idea. This concept came from the "Start with No: The Negotiating Tools that the Pros Don't Want You to Know" by the late Jim Camp. I befriended Jim over the last few years of his life, and he had influenced me hugely. I highly recommend reading the original because it is SO GOOD, and not just for business negotiations. The audio version is also excellent. https://www.amazon.com/Start-No-Negotiating-Tools-that-ebook/dp/B003EY7JEE/