This is post 3 of 6 recapping Reforge’s recent webinars on Leading Growth in Turbulent Times. You can watch all the webinars here.
For reference, here’s the table of contents for the series.
Shifting Product Roadmap in Turbulent Times (this post)
During our session on Leading B2B Growth in Turbulent times, Fareed Mosavat (Reforge EIR and ex-Director of Growth at Slack) provided his thoughts on how to shift your Product and Engineering focus in response to the COVID-19 crisis. (You should really just watch Fareed starting at 50:00 of this webinar).
Long-term experimentation
As Fareed likes to say, “You can only experiment on the users you have today and on how they are behaving today.” Because of the massive disruptions of COVID-19 users for many products are behaving very differently than they were just a few weeks ago and how they are likely to behave over the long term. So running core product optimization experiments now would be like running an experiment over a major holiday, i.e. not a good idea. The data will be so atypical that it won't be valuable beyond the immediate COVID-19 influenced circumstances. So Fareed suggests pulling back from day-to-day optimizations on your core flows. Or if you continue testing, at least be prepared to retest and rollback when we transition to Phases 2 and 3 of the crisis (more on phases in the intro post).
Shorten your investment horizon
Product management and engineering teams are often working on projects that impact the business 12 months in the future. While you don't want to overreact to the crisis, the level of uncertainty implies that you take less risk now by focusing on projects with a shorter investment window. This is especially true if you are cash constrained with limited runway. So what are some short-term areas where you can redeploy resources?
If your demand is spiking, focus on new user experience. You likely have new types of users entering your ecosystem right now with different needs and problems. What can you adjust in your acquisition flows to better speak to these new users? What of your product experience can you adjust to better serve more of these new personas' needs?
If your demand is declining, focus on retention. As we mention in the last post, fixing mechanical churn (which happens when auto-renewal payments are declined typically because of credit card issues) is a good way to quickly improve cash-flow. Most mechanical churn revenue is recoverable.
Make the product a 'Must Have'
If the downturn lasts long enough, every finance department will ask teams for a list of expenses that can be cut. Consumers will start looking to make similar trims to their spending. Your product or service will go into 1 of 2 categories: Must-Have or Nice-to-Have. Nice-to-Have products will be cut. If you don't know which list you will be on, find out ASAP.
Start by watching your leading indicators of churn, like changes in product usage. If you are seeing slowdown in usage, find out why, and invest in building loyalty. If product usage is being driven down by cost cutting or, in the B2B space, by a slowdown in your clients' businesses, be prepared to offer customers promotional terms so they stay with you through the recovery. Product teams may be able to quickly deploy 'pause' features so users can save money now without actually leaving the product for good.
Surfacing churn indicators to the entire company can be an incredibly powerful way to rally an entire company around initiative focused on keeping at-risk customers. Ultimately, your primary goal is to leave the period with as many customers as possible, including free customers that can try to convert during the recovery.
Other posts about Leading Growth in Turbulent Times:
Shifting Product Roadmap in Turbulent Times (this post)
If you have more questions or suggestions, please let us know on Twitter or connect with us on LinkedIn.