🚀 How to maximize engagement for your product?

3 tactics to maximize product engagement

🎯 Drive users to complete your core action

• Identify the one core action that:

  • Forms the foundation of your product 

  • Scales across your users

  • Clearly shows your product value when completed 

  • Makes users more likely to return after first experience

  • Leaves a gap in user experience if skipped

• Follow the Fogg Behavior Model and guide users towards performing the action through motivation, ability, and triggers. 

• All other features should support the core action. 

🧲 Design for accruing benefits and mounting losses 

• Accruing benefits: 

  • As users contribute more data, the product improves, enhancing the experience over time. (Eg. personalized recommendations)

• Mounting loss:

  • The longer you use the product, the more dependent you become, making it harder to leave due to the value you've accumulated. (Eg. personal data, identity, reputation, valuable content accumulated)

🔄 Create self-perpetuating virtuous loops 

• Virtuous loops are flywheels that convert your users’ engagement into fuel to power your company forward.

• Identify and maximize virtuous loops:

  • Network effects (Eg. More users -> more data -> better recommendations -> more users)

  • Growth loops (Eg. Users create metadata that you can use for SEO or collaborative experiences that pull other people in)

  • Re-engagement loops (Eg. Push notifications for dormant users can reignite interest.)

• Reduce off-ramps (Eg. a successful date in a dating app is an off-ramp)

2 traps to avoid

🚨Chasing growth without core engagement

• MAU, signups, and downloads ≠ real traction.

• What matters is not the growth of users. It's the growth of users completing the core action.

• If users aren’t doing the core action, you’re not building a product that sticks.

🚨Lack of product focus

• Don’t compare yourself to fully developed products and lose focus on what matters. 

• Ensure new users immediately understand the core action to perform and avoid distracting them with too many features.

1 tool to leverage

📖 Best practice on product retention

• Track weekly active users by cohort, focusing on core actions.

• Visualize retention via cohort graphs using this template.

• Aim for a ‘smile’ graph (users become more retained as usage increases) and compare with these benchmarks.

• If cohorts aren’t plateauing, focus on improving retention.