Building fast growth into your products using data informed design
There’s a thing called “time to value” – it’s how long it takes a team to uncover and actualise value from a product. It’s a hard problem for most software products, because they aren’t architected and designed to solve the “time to value” problem. It’s usually an afterthought.
Building onboarding experiences that may or may not improve the customer experience can be both costly and time consuming, especially in enterprise software solutions – so how do you know that what you build will really add value?
Data, research or just building things in silos won’t solve the problem. Often too much data or research can make things worse by paralysing teams into inaction, or worse they just start building something, anything without understanding the impact it will have to the experience.
Working with large scale enterprise products with millions of customers, and navigating through long roadmaps can be a tough place to try and build fast growth into a product. It is hard to apply startup thinking when you need to care and value the experience that millions of customers have with your software each and everyday. But in order to survive and continually grow, you need to find a way.
Atlassian approached and solved this problem by leveraging a combination of growth hacking, user research, data analytics and A/B testing at scale to dramatically increase customer engagement with our products. I’ll describe the variety of approaches we started with and how we learned which ones to pursue and which ones to discard. The design and growth hacking teams worked together to pull off some pretty amazingly fast ways to modify and test variations of an enterprise product experience — without interfering with the product team. Finally, I’ll show how to design and centralise improved onboarding experiences that can be scaled across all of your products.
Further reading
Data-driven vs. data-informed design in enterprise products
