Mastering Digital Product Management: Part 2

Welcome, Housekeeping & Series Context

Roger Snyder | 00:00:00–00:03:30
good morning everyone and welcome my name is roger snyder i’m the vice president of marketing at Productside thank you for joining us this morning for part two of our mastering digital product management series onboarding and gamification i’m joined this morning by david nash who will be presenting our main body of content david good morning

David Nash | 00:03:30–00:04:00
good morning everybody glad to be here with you and really glad to be back for part two

Roger Snyder | 00:04:00–00:06:00
david is our principal consultant and trainer at Productside and a recognized expert in product management product marketing entrepreneurship and team development he has delivered generations of successful technology products across multiple domains hardware software sas systems and services and is an expert in b2b sas pricing user experience and in-app user engagement he’s repeatedly built pm best practices and high-performing teams at multiple companies and has held leadership roles such as vice president and senior vice president of product management he’s also recognized as a community builder coach and his own expression bar raiser and is the founder of product camp portland held annually since 2012 thank you for joining us today david

i’m really glad to have you here and i know our audience is going to get a lot out of this session

let’s get to some housekeeping items first off i want to encourage you to join our linkedin group where you can track lots of different great articles and posts not just by us but also by community members this is a group that allows you to collaborate with others learn from each other share best practices and network with peers i’m going to copy this link into the chat box for you so it makes it easy for you to join our group and become a part of the experience

Roger Snyder | 00:06:00–00:07:30
all right let’s get into more of this admin activity we definitely want you to ask questions today we want your help to make this an exciting conversation not just a talk not just david going over slides with you we will provide plenty of time at the end of the webinar for q&a so see that questions box over there please enter your questions into that questions box so that we’ve got lots of good topics and questions to discuss during the q&a session i would very much appreciate it

now the number one question we often get is can you watch this webinar later and the answer is yes you’ll all receive an email post-webinar with a link to the recording you’ll also find a link to this recording that i’ll be sending in a few minutes that provides you part one of the webinar so if you missed part one we’ll be providing you a link for that as well

all right let’s keep going

About Productside & Leadership Series

Roger Snyder | 00:07:30–00:09:30
so briefly about Productside is all things product management and product marketing our mission is to help companies and individuals do great product management and product marketing using our optimal product process and we offer a number of different services i’m not going to read them all to you but there’s plenty of them and i encourage you to visit Productside.com to learn more about the services that we offer

all right so this is part of our ongoing product management leadership series and today our topic our theme is focused on professional development as a product management leader you’ll see that in coming months we’re going to continue to be offering content on digital product management in particular but we will go back to some of these other themes over time how do i transform and upgrade my team as a product management leader how do i develop my team in terms of people process and tools and we will also talk about the implications of change we have had a couple of “ask me anything” and earlier webinar series on what’s been going on as a result of the pandemic so i encourage you to visit our website and watch some of the earlier recordings in the leadership series

okay so let’s learn a little bit more david about who is attending we have over 50 percent product management and product marketing managers today in the audience we’ve got about 15 percent of folks that have either a director or a vp title 10 percent product owners as well so that’s very encouraging and then a mix of folks from other disciplines as well

Series Recap & Today’s Focus

Roger Snyder | 00:09:30–00:11:00
all right so that’s a little bit about us this is the second part in our series for digital product management as i mentioned before and if you want to go back and watch the first part of this series i will paste this link into the chat box as well to allow you to go back and watch that last month we talked about the benefits of user engagement dimensions of engagement and understanding your users and taking action and i will let david take over from here to talk about what we’re going to do today take it away

David Nash | 00:11:00–00:13:00
all right thanks roger and welcome back everybody whether you were able to join us last month or not this is a topic as roger said we’re going to spend a lot of time on as a company and as a community with product practitioners and leaders for some time to come

last month for those of you who were here just a super-fast recap we spoke about the dimensions of user engagement i won’t read this all to you again but please do download the video and watch from the link that roger just provided we really wanted to convey that there are several different lenses to look through and so you should be dissatisfied when someone asks you “what does usage look like for your product” because usage is a very broad ambiguous and often unhelpful term drilling down one level into these dimensions is much more useful

and building on that today we’re going to dig into the early experience with products and more advanced experience with products in onboarding and gamification respectively

Audience Poll: B2B vs B2C Products

David Nash | 00:13:00–00:13:45
we’d like to open up this morning with the first of a couple of polls to get to know our audience that roger just overviewed with you a little bit better so roger is going to launch the poll and let us know if you’re working mainly on b2c or consumer-facing products business-facing products or if indeed you’re working on both at the same time we’ll take a minute and wait for those results to come in

Roger Snyder | 00:13:45–00:15:30
yep i’ve got the poll started and we are seeing responses coming in now i like to wait until we have about 50 percent at least of our audience responding to the poll we don’t want to take too much time away from our discussion either but poll responses are coming in pretty quickly so far david the responses are definitely skewed more towards b2b but i will give us a couple more seconds on the poll and then we’ll close it and here are the results

all right thanks for letting us hear from you folks it really helps us be more relevant for the discussion topics

David Nash | 00:15:30–00:16:30
absolutely so today here are the results 16 percent of folks have got consumer products 50 percent business products and this is kind of surprising to me 34 percent have both so quite a large part of the audience has got products aimed at both the consumer as well as the business space that’s fascinating thank you i think we’ll have something for everybody over the next few minutes

the reason we asked by the way was not just academic there’s been this constant transformation over the last decade and maybe even a little longer between two spaces that at one time were very different but have been converging

Consumer vs Business UX Expectations

David Nash | 00:16:30–00:19:30
it wasn’t so long ago when a consumer app and a business app had very different user personas and buyer personas for all those apps that you have on your iphone or on your android phone we are the consumer the user and the buyer nearly always generally for a lot of these products we’re using free versions of them and we don’t necessarily buy them before we use them for the first time in fact only if we have a good experience with the product and it provides value do we allow it to stay on our phone because being on your phone is a precious accommodation that you provide only for things that add value and if it provides enough value to stay on your phone you’re going to buy it and if it doesn’t you’re going to get rid of it and probably never put it on your phone again at least that’s how i’ve worked with consumer apps

in the business world and this is still largely the case often the users and buyer personas are very different if you are using an hr application for example some senior manager from hr has chosen that application or that service and everybody in the company has to use it likewise for a financial app an expense reporting app or travel app someone makes that purchase decision has your proxy and you’re kind of stuck with it often the contracts are signed the money’s changed hands and an implementation team has rolled in and rolled out before you get to use it and even if it’s a profoundly horrible app and we’ve all used them you’re kind of stuck with it

the leading companies are realizing that the patterns and expectations are really converging and these days some of the real benchmark companies and we’ll share a couple of them later on recognize that even though we wear a t-shirt on the weekends and maybe a collared shirt to work during the week we’re the same people we have a lot of the same expectations and we’ve brought those to the workplace with us so there’s increased bleeding between the worlds and all that consumer-grade stuff turns out to be table stakes for the workplace as well

Roger Snyder | 00:19:30–00:21:00
yeah i think the point you made too is important that with the consumer they have a choice and so product managers that are building apps for consumers have a built-in motivation to make the app awesome and easy to use sometimes with b2b apps there may be a tendency to think user experience is not as important because the buyer is the one paying the bills and if the users don’t like it as much maybe it’s not as big a deal and i’m hoping that as we discuss this topic today we’re going to emphasize the point that that’s not really true anymore

David Nash | 00:21:00–00:22:00
very very true and because half of you are doing b2b stuff which is where i spent the bulk of my career these are some very important portable things we need to bring into our business apps

Survey Data: Consumer Expectations for Apps

David Nash | 00:22:00–00:24:00
so what do we mean by consumer-grade expectations well this is a quick summary of a survey that was done by clutch a couple of years ago and look at this almost three-quarters of the respondents thought that app onboarding and even if they don’t know what onboarding means yet just getting your feet wet and being productive in your app should take less than a minute that was impossible for old-school business apps almost half downloaded an app just to check it out with no commitment to use it and more than 80 percent of them said if you’re asking me for information it better not be stuff you already know about me and you shouldn’t have to ask again and i’d like to know why you’re asking and what you’re going to do with it

really fascinating this expectation has now moved firmly into the business space as well and the basic idea from this survey i’m summarizing a pretty comprehensive survey on one slide is that the more time participants had to spend just putting stuff into the system before getting value out the more frustrated they got and that’s not a good day for any of us

David Nash | 00:24:00–00:25:00
how many of you have ever used an app at work where you felt like that child on the slide with a long march ahead of you i know i have and you can tell by the way which apps kind of grew up as digital natives because you typically won’t see this type of onboarding hurdle or long stairway to climb if an app grew up as a sas or consumer app but you can still see companies that were b2b enterprise on-prem apps that are still around from decades ago where there’s still just a high hurdle and so it’s a quick cheat sheet to determine is this company been around a while or are they kind of the new digital natives

the older school apps demanded a lot of you a lot of setup configuration and learning before you could actually do the first useful thing

Mario, Fireballs & “Throwing the First Fireball”

David Nash | 00:25:00–00:27:00
i love this slide this slide is like a good song it was written once and then replayed and covered by a lot of people the slide is by a guy named sam hulick who basically is a ux visionary leader here in portland but this slide has been used so many times over the last few years even if you’re not of the vintage where you know who mario and luigi are you’ll get the point we have to recognize very quickly what a product really is the product isn’t the flower in this case this is not what your business makes this is not what you should focus on what you really want to focus on is turning mario into super mario and giving him superpowers that is the purpose of our product

throwing fireballs may not be the most immediate obvious thing to you but think of it this way throwing a fireball for a b2b app might be something like doing an expense report really quickly knocking out a bunch of approvals very quickly going through your benefits enrollment form your claims form your travel itinerary all those things that we have to do all day every day you want to just throw a fireball move on to the next level and not get blocked

Roger Snyder | 00:27:00–00:28:30
absolutely the example that comes to mind right away from the last couple years for me is the new wave of expense tools on mobile this whole approach of using spreadsheets or i would just take photos and then i upgraded to just taking pictures with my phone but then apps like expensify and there are plenty of others that allow you to actually take the picture and then it does the ocr reading of the receipt for you and fills out most of the data for you that’s a delighter right we’re talking about an expense report tool folks this is not like the most exciting thing in the world and yet that delighter definitely brought a smile to my face and it saves time to your point it made me happier as a user

yeah and in the early days of the model 3 tesla i had a few things to learn and they had a bunch of 30- to 60-second videos i didn’t have to read a manual if i was really completely lost on something i clicked on one link i watched an under-60-second video and i knew enough to go throw my first fireball

Rules of Engagement & KISMF

David Nash | 00:28:30–00:31:00
exactly so let me toss out just a couple of rules of user engagement again making a really positive and productive first impression you only get one chance to do it right the first time don’t overwhelm new users with a lot of things they have to enter or learn you want to engage with them in-app if at all possible to pre-empt them getting stuck and calling support or needing help you want to find their motivation we’re going to come back to that in just a couple of minutes but find what’s in it for them the so-called “with-them”

over time as you learn you can probably cut a lot of fat out of your product and if you’ve never heard the term kis-mf i use this in the boy scouts for many years as a scout leader what it simply means is keep it simple make it fun there’s no reason why you can’t do both

Roger Snyder | 00:31:00–00:32:00
as we go through this i just wanted to share one of the questions we’ve already heard just to put that in your mind as you’re thinking about things giorgio asked what about b2b2c now we talked about b2b and b2c but i think much of what you’re going to talk about applies to both cases in my experience though there can be conflicts right so when i was in the mobile industry my customer was t-mobile they were the one paying the bills but the real customers were the sidekick users i worked on the t-mobile sidekick for a number of years and there were times where we would have a conflict where the buyer t-mobile didn’t want to offer a feature that was going to consume more bandwidth on their network yet we knew it would be a feature that the users were going to love so there are times where especially as we’re talking about gamification and onboarding you need to make choices that are going to try to satisfy both constituencies as best as possible so there is some tension there sometimes and i think we’ll talk about that more as we go through these two topics but i wanted to plant that seed

Poll: How You Onboard Today

David Nash | 00:32:00–00:33:00
thanks giorgio for the question and thanks roger for the answer with this notion of onboarding roger if you would kindly open the poll we’d like to hear from you on what if any approach you take to onboarding today

the choices are you do it formally through for example a training class maybe you have a professional services team come in optionally or included in your product and train your users how to do this that will apply nearly exclusively to our b2b product managers or you have some other deliberate onboarding workflow perhaps in the product maybe your product does not require any training hooray for you or other and if there are other cases we’d love to hear from you in the chat

Roger Snyder | 00:33:00–00:35:00
absolutely and answers are coming in so oftentimes this “formal training” can be a class another way of doing that is say an intro video right where your interactive email invites someone to watch a tutorial video for example so there are other choices that can fit in that category as well

as we’re collecting poll responses i also just want to say folks keep the questions coming we’ve had a couple of good ones already but we want to accumulate a good set of these that we’ll be able to use for the q&a session all right let’s see i want to get a few more answers in here i’m really curious about this one yeah okay so we can’t get to everybody but when we get to about 70 percent of folks responding we’ll close the poll all right there we go

so now let me share the results so david 34 percent of folks provide or facilitate a formal training of some sort 14 percent offer training as an optional professional service 30 percent do have a deliberate onboarding workflow so that’s really encouraging 10 percent say our product does not require training hopefully that’s true and then 11 percent said “other” and i don’t see any comments in the chat window yet on what those were

David Nash | 00:35:00–00:36:00
terrific thanks for the input everybody and thanks for the recap roger this is really fascinating as we get on through the rest of our time together i’d love to see some chat and some kind of peer-to-peer best practices that’s what this community can do for itself

The Onboarding Continuum & Workflow

David Nash | 00:36:00–00:38:30
all right so let’s move into onboarding this is a generic onboarding workflow and i say generic because given not just our b2b versus b2c divide that we spoke about earlier but even within the b2b space it varies wildly

there are a couple of quick things to call out again i’m going to reference more than once a fabulous book that i can’t recommend enough that you all should read it’s called “the elements of user onboarding” it’s written by sam hulick he has a great website called useronboard.com go there i’m not getting paid to talk about his stuff it’s just a great resource i’ve used it over the years and i love to acknowledge great work when i see it out there

here’s a generic workflow for onboarding and you’ll see that in some companies and some b2b companies sometimes there’s a marketing organization that covers the early part of the customer journey just having the positioning of the product help the product be located by the would-be customer sometimes there’s a sales team involved sometimes marketing and sales have to be complete and have gone through their various phases in the conversion funnel before someone’s given the keys to the product and then you start shifting responsibility again for the in-product journey like we spoke about last month and then often when you want to unlock advanced use or advanced features you have your support team involved

these are today still very prevalent i think there’s a better way and we’ll talk about product-led growth a little later on where you don’t necessarily have to have all these formal group handoffs the idea though is that they were once very different but are really converging now

David Nash | 00:38:30–00:40:00
we mentioned a couple of products early on whether it’s expensify or concur and you can see a lot of these steps may be skipped and the key takeaway for now is that these are all deliberate steps sometimes you can skip a step and sometimes you can reverse steps the most common version being that again for a consumer-ized product you will often be getting value before paying for it and the converse happening in the business-to-business space

no matter how users make it into your pipeline from looking at your product to evaluating it to buying it and using it our job is to move them forward move them get to pay-off land the promised land so to speak very very quickly

A Simple Onboarding Plan Template

David Nash | 00:40:00–00:42:30
here’s a very simple prescriptive flow that we must ensure we want to get to a first quick win whatever it is i mentioned the “with-them” before the what’s in it for me whatever the customer or user needs to get done let them get there quickly preload content wherever possible for example if you’re onboarding them you already ought to know if you are onboarding them for an expense reporting app you should know either because you’ve migrated from a prior system or because when the product was installed it ingested a lot of this information you should know their logins their single sign-on information the user repository you should know their signature authority you should know what department they work in you should know what the management workflow is all that stuff don’t ask for things you already know

get some early use activities so they can get through what they need to get through to get to value and incentivize them and we’ll talk more about this in just a minute but give them a carrot which will pull them forward

so here’s a plan do a screenshot of this this is a very simple grid for you to make up and here’s just a quick fill-in-the-blanks kind of rubric you can do super simple and almost always you will notice a number of gaps as you go through this you’ll want to understand what the recommended or required user action is why it’s important not just to you but why it’s important to them what’s the preload of content you should avoid asking them again and how you’re going to celebrate a quick win so they can move on and have some closure

David Nash | 00:42:30–00:45:00
i filled in an example for you from real life let’s say that you are working on an expense report b2b app here’s the initial user action it might be to complete their registration they’re probably already in your system because your user list of authorized users was ingested when the product was implemented

here’s the reason why this early step is important they need to unlock the initial approval workflows and set up for any built-in training for example if it’s necessary they probably have a bunch of unapproved expense reports that are sitting in their backlog that they haven’t gotten to or in the old app that you’re migrating away from you’re going to have to verify the often polluted customer data when you first go into a new app every company has it because the last product they used maybe didn’t have input validation didn’t enforce data input so there will be some verification of their initial data load especially for important stuff like signature authority and approvals

you’re going to want to set up some initial dashboards and notifications to them not everybody cares about the same things some people are really going to want to have xyz in their dashboard some may want to have abc and they want to have different sets of notifications and the other reason it’s important is that it can show your finance department that you’re open for business the “open for business” sign has been turned on you’re ready to accept expense reports and can move off the “to migrate” list into the “using” list

Roger Snyder | 00:45:00–00:46:30
that’s a really good point a couple of thoughts come to mind here this can actually even these quick-win celebrations these notifications can even be sent to the buyer to give the buyer a sense of how quickly this app is being adopted and it gives them data to then act upon if i’m finding that maybe the finance department’s not onboarding as quickly as the marketing department is is there something i need to do to help the finance department move along in their journey and that’s a good thing to be passing along to the buyer as well

you also talked about verifying and correcting data right i really hate it when an app requires me to re-enter data that i already know it knows but you make a good point that you do want to at least say you know “do you want us to use this name this is the name we had for you is that the name you really want us to use” so that verify step can actually be a delighter too because it actually puts it in front of the user “i know who you are i’ve got it but i just want to make sure that you get a chance to have input”

Using Data Verification as a Delighter

David Nash | 00:46:30–00:47:45
yeah that’s a great technique borrowed from consumer apps great technique and so that’s a quick down-and-dirty super fast cheat sheet to build out an effective onboarding plan and you could sit down by the way with your implementation team your support team and probably fill out one of these for your product over a couple of pizzas at lunch very very handy thing to do

Personalization at Scale (Using In-App Analytics)

David Nash | 00:47:45–00:49:30
the next thing you need to do — and I’m going to flash back for just a minute to last month — here’s a place again where if you’re using any kind of in-product analytics, and this quick table is from my friends at Pendo, but whether you’re using Pendo or a number of other products in this space, we talked about it a little bit last month:

you really want to segment.

because if you’re bringing on a customer with a thousand users, those users will have different job roles, different workflows, very different user personas even though they may be in the same customer segment you sold the product to.

for example, there will be people who never approve expense reports but create them constantly. there will be people who only do approvals. there will be escalation workflows.

if there are 10,000 users coming in, you can’t deal with all of them individually — it’s impossible.

but with in-product analytics you can segment, you can give everybody the optimal experience for their persona and workflows, and it feels very much like a concierge experience.
and they’ll think:

“wow, this product is built for me.”

even though of course you can’t onboard everyone individually.

Roger Snyder | 00:49:30–00:50:10
I love this idea. this has worked really well and it creates that feeling of a personalized experience “at scale” — which is exactly what so many of our users now expect because of consumer products.

Introducing Gamification

David Nash | 00:50:10–00:51:45
all right so let’s move into the next section and our second topic for this morning around gamification.

before we talk about what gamification is, I want to do a quick exploration of what makes us tick on the inside.

there are different things that motivate different people.
some of us are triggered by having goals.
some aren’t.

a system that helps us get through our to-do list every day, that allows us to see measurable progress toward a goal — that’s especially important in the workplace because deadlines and compliance matter.

you may or may not be triggered by increased status when you reach that goal.
and there should be some meaningful reward — and when I say meaningful reward, rewards come in many flavors.

these intrinsic and extrinsic motivators are what we tap into when we design gamification well.

Dan Pink’s Autonomy–Mastery–Purpose Framework

David Nash | 00:51:45–00:53:15
I want to call out an awesome video by Dan Pink — actually it’s one of several great videos — this one was excerpted from a TED talk he did years ago.

this video is not new, but I watch it once a year just to recharge my batteries.

Pink talks about the surprising things that motivate us, and he describes three durable human motivators:

Autonomy — I’d like to be able to do my job without being micromanaged.

Mastery — I’d like to get good at something.

Purpose — I’d like to know that my work matters.

these traits apply whether it’s home or work, weekend or weekday, and when you design onboarding and gamification with these three in mind, everything becomes more powerful.

Audience Question: Does Gamification Work for Desktop Apps?

Roger Snyder | 00:53:15–00:53:55
we have a question related to what you’re talking about as we head into gamification. nishant asks:
“can you talk about how gamification works with desktop apps? it seems easier in apps and websites.”

just wanted to put that in your ear for when we dive deeper.

David Nash | 00:53:55–00:54:20
yes absolutely — that’s a great question — and I’ll come back to it in just a few minutes once we get deeper into the gamification techniques.

Intrinsic vs Extrinsic Motivation

David Nash | 00:54:20–00:56:20
so when we reach into gamification, there’s intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.

I’m not going to read the whole list because you can see it for yourself, but:

intrinsic motivations are who we are — what gets us out of bed in the morning.
extrinsic motivations are incentives, rewards, nudges — the things that help us respond to something outside ourselves.

any one of us has both.

the goal of gamification is to trigger helpful extrinsic behaviors that support — not replace — intrinsic ones.

the intention of gamification is to help people do something that’s in their best interest that they might not otherwise do.

What Gamification Actually Is (and Isn’t)

David Nash | 00:56:20–00:58:00
first: gamification is not just for gamers.

the baseline definition is simple:
“apply game mechanics to a non-game experience.”

that’s it.

and because of that simplicity, it’s extremely powerful.

some business outcomes:
• help people come back to your product more often
• build confidence and mastery
• get them to try advanced features
• increase switching costs
• deepen engagement
• drive renewals

when done well, gamification is a business engine.

Roger Snyder | 00:58:00–00:58:40
yes — these techniques build mutual investment.
and one thing I learned the hard way working with UX designers is:

even if you personally aren’t motivated by badges or competition, your users might be.

you design for them, not for your own biases.

The “Dark Side” of Gamification

David Nash | 00:58:40–00:59:55
gamification is powerful — but it isn’t magic.

you can absolutely overdo it.

you don’t want it to feel cheesy, irrelevant, or condescending.

I think of gamification like Sriracha:
a little goes a long way.

if you add too much, you ruin the dish.

so:
• don’t make rewards gratuitous
• tie them to meaningful progress
• measure impact
• iterate carefully
• don’t turn your enterprise product into a casino

slow, steady, thoughtful implementation always wins.

Expense App Example: Leveling Up

David Nash | 00:59:55–01:02:00
here’s a follow-up example to the earlier onboarding table.

say you want to introduce an “auto-rules generator” for an expense approval app.

here’s why it matters:
• reduces policy violations
• saves managers 20% more approval time
• helps finance tighten compliance
• opens the door for more advanced features later

pre-loaded content might include the last 50 expense reports they approved so the system can suggest “hey, these are the most common problems.”

quick wins:
• notify them when they saved time
• draft an email to their team
• award a “quick approver” badge
• show the sponsor measurable ROI

and now they’re ready for the next level — the next “game.”

Roger Snyder | 01:02:00–01:03:00
I love that because it also gives a reward that has real meaning.
and your point about “mastery” is so important — that’s a big motivator.

Desktop Gamification Examples

David Nash | 01:03:00–01:04:25
now I want to go back to the question that Nishant asked earlier about gamification on desktop apps and enterprise sites.

here are a couple of examples — these are apps I use almost every day.

on the left is an expense app. this one is Paylocity.
you can see a very common gamification technique: a leaderboard.

so even though nobody is literally “competing,” the leaderboard shows things like:
• who’s engaging more
• who’s recognizing coworkers
• who’s contributing the most

and suddenly I’m thinking:
“wow, Cynthia has a ton of badges… am I doing enough?”

and that subtle nudge pulls me back into the system.

on the lower left is one all of you have seen — LinkedIn.
LinkedIn shows you:
• who viewed your profile
• how many searches you appeared in
• how your posts performed

even if you’re not job hunting, these metrics keep you engaged because LinkedIn makes progress visible.

and that’s gamification — even in a desktop, enterprise setting.

Roger Snyder | 01:04:25–01:04:55
yes — and what’s key here is these dashboards and leaderboards don’t feel like games, but they use game mechanics.
and they tap into that recognition loop:
“am I improving? am I visible? am I contributing?”

so the same principles apply across web, desktop, mobile — anywhere your product lives.

Product-Led Growth: Why Onboarding Matters

David Nash | 01:04:55–01:06:25
the last thing I want to share before we move into Q&A is that onboarding and gamification are both absolutely essential for product-led growth (PLG).

PLG basically says:
your product becomes your primary acquisition engine.

your product becomes:
• your marketing
• your sales enablement
• your expansion channel

with proper onboarding and delight, your product starts selling itself.

Slack is a perfect example.
Slack didn’t spread through big enterprise deals — it spread department by department, team by team, because the experience was good, friction was low, and onboarding was effortless.

same thing with Notion, Calendly, Figma — these tools didn’t wait for IT to roll them out.

users got value instantly → they stayed → they invited teammates → the company eventually upgraded.

none of this works without superb onboarding and smart gamification.

Roger Snyder | 01:06:25–01:06:45
yeah — and the difference between “you need training to use this” and “I just tried it and it clicked” is the difference between sales-led and product-led growth.
and PLG is where the industry is moving, across B2B and B2C.

Recap & Transition to Q&A

David Nash | 01:06:45–01:08:10
so here’s the wrap-up before we jump to questions:

consumer expectations have fully arrived in B2B.

you get one chance to make a first impression, so onboarding must shine.

reinforcement and encouragement matter — personalize at scale.

gamification is a tool, not a toy — use it intentionally.

onboarding + gamification = the foundation of product-led growth.

on the right side of the slide you’ll see a short list of “do next” items — take a screenshot, share with your team, and use it as a starting point.

all right — Roger, I think we’re ready for Q&A.

Roger Snyder | 01:08:10–01:08:25
perfect. and everyone, keep the questions coming — we’ve already got some great ones lined up.

Q&A: In-Product Polling vs Email Surveys

Roger Snyder | 01:08:25–01:08:45
our first question is from Autumn:
“Do you recommend polling within the platform or externally via email?”

David Nash | 01:08:45–01:09:40
great question.
short answer: in-product polling is generally better.

why?
because:
• it removes friction
• it captures feedback “in the moment of truth”
• it avoids sending users somewhere else
• response rates are dramatically higher

and you don’t need to build this from scratch — there are plenty of tools that let you insert a micro-survey in your UI.

that said, if you don’t yet have in-product polling, email is better than not asking at all.

but yes — ask users where they already are: in your product.

Q&A: Beyond Surveys — Do We Need Human-Centered Design?

Roger Snyder | 01:09:40–01:09:55
Brooke asks:
“Do you recommend going beyond surveys and using human-centered design?”

David Nash | 01:09:55–01:10:40
oh my gosh — yes.
absolutely, yes.

surveys tell you what users think.
human-centered design helps you understand why they think that way.

HCD, user research, observational studies, Design Thinking — this is all foundational.
and it gives you far better insight for onboarding and gamification than analytics alone.

surveys validate.
human-centered design reveals.

Q&A: Badge Framework for Beginners vs Experts

Roger Snyder | 01:10:40–01:11:00
JC asks:
“How do you design badges that distinguish beginners from experts?”

David Nash | 01:11:00–01:12:10
great question.

beginners need:
• confidence
• clarity
• simple steps
• reinforcement

experts need:
• recognition
• mastery challenges
• prestige
• signals for others (“ask me, I can help”)

so beginner badges should be:
“first report submitted,” “first workflow approval,” “profile completed.”

expert badges should signal leadership or mastery:
“10 flawless reports,” “department mentor,” “policy compliance master.”

think of it like Boy Scouts — the early badges build skill, the later ones build prestige.

Roger Snyder | 01:12:10–01:12:35
yes — and your point that advanced badges often serve as inspiration for others is spot-on.
and remember: even if you personally don’t love badges, some of your users will live for them.

Q&A: Measuring Gamification Impact

Roger Snyder | 01:12:35–01:12:50
Perrianne asks:
“How do you measure the impact of gamification? How do you know when you’re ‘done’?”

David Nash | 01:12:50–01:13:55
fantastic question.

the answer is:
you’re never “done.”
you simply choose what to emphasize next.

you measure impact through:
• activation rate
• repeat usage
• time to value
• feature adoption
• retention
• cohort progression
• reduction in support tickets
• customer success metrics

if those are healthy → gamification is working.
then you can shift resources to the next problem area.

gamification is a lever — not a finish line.

Q&A: Decision Makers vs End Users (B2B Challenge)

Roger Snyder | 01:13:55–01:14:15
Anu asks:
“In enterprise products, the buyer is not the user. How do you balance onboarding and gamification?”

David Nash | 01:14:15–01:15:20
this is the classic B2B challenge.

the buyer persona cares about outcomes, ROI, compliance, reporting.
the end user persona cares about ease, speed, clarity, and delight.

so you design for both, but differently:

for users:
• frictionless onboarding
• rewards
• progress markers
• mastery loops

for buyers:
• dashboards showing adoption and engagement
• ROI notifications
• compliance reports
• health scores
• usage summaries

and — critically — your CSM or internal telemetry must connect the user’s success to buyer value.

you solve two problems, then you link them.

Roger Snyder | 01:15:20–01:15:40
yes — and this goes back to Product-Led Growth.
if users love your product, the buyer almost always renews.

Q&A: When Gamification Backfires

Roger Snyder | 01:19:45–01:20:00
there’s another subtle version of this question:
“when does gamification not work — or even backfire?”

David Nash | 01:20:00–01:21:10
yes — excellent topic.

gamification backfires when it becomes:
✘ excessive
✘ irrelevant
✘ distracting
✘ childish
✘ manipulative
✘ disconnected from user value

bad gamification creates friction.
good gamification creates momentum.

examples of backfires:
• badges for trivial actions (“you opened the app!”)
• leaderboards that shame users
• gamification inserted into sensitive workflows (HR, compliance, legal errors)
• rewards that encourage the wrong behavior

the golden rule:
gamification must reinforce the user’s goals — not replace them.

Q&A: How Do You Know What Motivates Users?

Roger Snyder | 01:21:10–01:21:30
a question from Eric:
“how do you know which motivators (intrinsic vs extrinsic) matter for your user base?”

David Nash | 01:21:30–01:22:35
great question.

you learn this through:

1. User research
talk to users, observe workflows, watch them struggle or succeed.

2. Cohort analytics
track how different segments behave after certain nudges.

3. Experimentation
run A/B tests — small, controlled, incremental.

4. Jobs-to-be-Done interviews
ask what progress users are actually trying to make.

5. Persona mapping
map motivations to roles —
approvers, analysts, managers, operators all respond differently.

once you know the motivators →
you design the right triggers →
which produce measurable behavior change.

that’s the heart of effective gamification.

Q&A: Onboarding Cadence for Complex Enterprise Systems

Roger Snyder | 01:22:35–01:22:50
our next question is from Sam:
“what should the cadence be for onboarding in complex enterprise systems?”

David Nash | 01:22:50–01:23:55
excellent point — onboarding is not a single moment.
it’s a continuum.

for complex systems, onboarding should unfold in three phases:

Phase 1: Initial Setup (Day 0–1)
• login
• basic configuration
• first workflow
• one clear success

Phase 2: Habit Formation (Week 1–3)
• reminders
• usage tips
• role-based guides
• celebration moments
• gradual exposure to advanced features

Phase 3: Mastery & Expansion (Month 1+)
• power-user capabilities
• shortcuts
• automation
• cross-team collaboration features
• analytics and dashboards

each user progresses at their own pace —
the system should adapt based on behavior.

this is where segmentation and in-app analytics become indispensable.

Q&A: Product-Led vs. Professional Services

Roger Snyder | 01:23:55–01:24:10
another really good question:
“if we rely heavily on professional services, can we still adopt product-led growth?”

David Nash | 01:24:10–01:25:25
absolutely — PLG and services are not mutually exclusive.
but they serve different roles.

Services are for:
• complex integrations
• custom configuration
• enterprise rollout
• change management

PLG is for:
• user adoption
• retention
• expansion
• product usability
• reducing friction
• scaling growth through the product itself

in fact, well-designed PLG often reduces services load:
less training required →
less manual onboarding →
faster time to value →
happier customers →
more renewals and expansions.

services don’t disappear —
but they stop being the growth engine.
your product becomes the engine.

Closing Comments & Next Webinar

Roger Snyder | 01:25:25–01:26:05
okay — we’ve got many more questions in the queue, but we’re at time.
thank you for the incredible engagement.

before we close, our next webinar is coming up next week —
a joint session with AIPMM on competitive analysis and building a product playbook.

I’ve pasted the registration link in the chat.
please join us — it’s going to be excellent.

David Nash | 01:26:05–01:26:25
thank you everyone — this was a great session.
fantastic questions, and we hope you take these ideas back to your teams.

onboarding and gamification are huge levers — use them wisely.

Roger Snyder | 01:26:25–01:26:40
thanks again for joining us today.
you’ll all receive a recording link by email.

have a great day everyone — see you next time.