Casey Winters: evaluation

Transcript context

…Speaking of spending more time, another topic that you shared with me that you're thinking a lot about as a CPO is keeping the Eventbrite product simple while adding more and more functionality to make it more usable by more people and more use cases. And so I'd love to hear how you're approaching that because I know that's something every single product faces eventually assuming they keep growing, and survive, and keep adding more power. Yeah, Scott Belsky who's the chief product officer of Adobe. He has this concept of the product life cycle you're probably familiar with, but I'll explain it to your listeners, which is users flock to a simple product. The product takes users for granted and adds more features for power users and then users flock to the next simple product as a result. And I've done a lot of research and work on this problem. And I found that there are a few different design hacks, essentially that companies use to try to avoid this cycle. One is okay if you build out more complex functionality, un-bundle it over time, like Facebook Messenger, Uber Eats have done, right? At Pinterest, we did a heavy investment in progressive disclosure, which is let's hide a lot of the more complex functionality until we make sure our users learn the really critical functionality. And then we can open up more of the full suite of the product. Then there's just proactive training. You can get on a video call with your customers or a phone call, much more common in enterprise, obviously, or you might have a custom UI that goes away over time. That's giving you the training wheels. You can also segment experiences based on different user types, so certain users might get a very simple user experience and then some users might get the more complex one, and there's different packages and interfaces that cleanly separate the two, maybe that more complex experience also bundles in training. What I found is that just none of these really worked that well for the Eventbrite scenario, because we have different types of event creators across every possible level of complexity and sophistication. We have people that are putting on their first event and they expect five people to show up. We have people putting on a hundred events per year that really know what they're doing. And then users also shift from one of those categories to another over time. They can get more sophisticated as they build up their business, so segmentation doesn't really work that well. Progressive disclosure doesn't work that well either because in many of these cases, we never want certain types of users to find the more advanced stuff, it's just going to confuse them. We strive for this concept of what we call perceived simplicity, which is there are advanced features in the product and they are easily discoverable when you look for them, but they're effectively hidden if you're not looking for them. And of course the majority of users aren't going to ever look for them, so the advanced more complex areas of the product don't make the product harder to use for the majority who will never need that level of complexity. And there are areas where we do this well and areas where we're still working on getting better, but that's really our aspiration. The company that I feel like has always done the best job of this is WhatsApp, where at its core, it's a chat app and it's really good at being a chat app. ng better, but that's really our aspiration. The company that I feel like has always done the best job of this is WhatsApp, where at its core, it's a chat app and it's really good at being a chat app. But I remember when I went to Brazil, all of a sudden I started receiving voice messages and it was really easy to figure out how to use them and how to do them myself. When I needed to learn how to do video calls or phone calls, it would take less than a second to figure out how to use the more advanced stuff, but it's effectively kind of hidden if you're not looking for it. That's what we aspire to at Eventbrite. And in some cases we're doing well. And in some cases, we definitely have some work to do.…

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