Sarah Tavel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Awesome. I want to come back to how to apply it, in maybe some examples, after we go through the three levels so I'll turn it back to you. Perfect. Let's say you're building your product and you're starting to see that you have users completing the core action. Then, the next challenge you have, and I've seen this many times before, is that then you have to figure out how to get those users to stick around. You want to retain those users. Obviously, if they do the core action once or twice, and then they run out of steam, you're going to be in a really challenged position to build something that endures. The test for me, of whether you're building a product that has the ingredients to create a retentive product on a micro level, just at the user level, is that the product should get better the more you use it, and you'll have more to lose by leaving it. I'll give you a couple examples there, a couple of my favorite products. Obviously, Pinterest. One of the features that I worked on when I was at Pinterest and we shipped was this idea of a picked for you feed. The idea was every time you pinned something to a board, we would take that information that the user gave us and use it to create recommendations in their home feed. It may have been the first algorithmic feed that was in a social product because, suddenly your home feed wasn't just things and people that you followed. The truth is, people weren't really following other people on Pinterest so we needed a way to make the experience get better the more you used it, so we started to do these recommendations in your home feed. It was this experience that, the more you pinned, the more personalized your home feed got for you. Then, the more you pinned, you also had more to lose by leaving Pinterest because, all of a sudden, you had all your favorite books, articles you wanted to remember, the recipes that you were planning on cooking one day, the holiday planning that you were doing. So you wouldn't abandon Pinterest because Pinterest was this repository for these different expressions of your identity, or these different bookmarks that you wanted to back to. That was this idea. It's very important that the core action is the thing that you use as the product to make the experience better over time. Evernote, another example. I don't know if you're an Evernote user. No. I tried it once and it was way too complicated, and I gave up quickly.…

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