What’s Holding Back Higher Usage for Your Product?
Adding more features is hardly the only option and often a bad one to address a usage problem
I’ve really got to get the financing together so we can build the Hall of Fame of underused products. It’ll be amazing. Yuge.
We’ll have all the familiar favorites: gym memberships, language learning apps, bread makers, hardcover encyclopedias, fruit juicers…I imagine the Columbia House/BMG record club exhibit will take up a room or two.
And of course, hot tubs will have their own wing of the building. For my money, hot tubs take win, place, and show in the low-ROI product derby.
Mine came with the house we bought – easily the most defensible reason to own one. We got our money’s worth that first year when the novelty was fresh and maybe broke even in year two. But as I sit here now watching this 600-gallon rice cooker scarfing down its daily ration of electricity and pricey chemicals, there’s no escaping the fact that we’re in the red. If it were a subscription product, we wouldn’t renew.
It’s not that it’s a bad product. Like many underused items, my wife and I enjoy it when we actually use it. But too many stars have to align for us to use it regularly. We need to remember it’s there and have the time on our hands and be excited enough about it to change into bathing suits, find the beach towels, go outside in cold weather, and so on.
Mindshare, value, and effort. They’re the key variables in the usage formula. How often do I remember the product, what benefit do I expect to get from it, and how much friction stands between me and the reward?
The product team’s primary instinct for addressing low usage is usually to increase the product’s value by adding features. Too often, the “value” driver is the only one they focus on, even when it’s the least likely to lead to greater usage and consistent user engagement.
Adding Features Is Not the Only Option
Economists have long used the concept of elasticity to measure how demand for a good goes up or down in response to changes in its price, consumers’ incomes, and the prices of related goods. High price elasticity for a product means that consumer demand is very sensitive to even small changes in its price. (As with most useful economic concepts, elasticity requires a lot of math and prose to describe a phenomenon that the average twelve-year old already understands.)
Applying elasticity to product usage, we have to ask: How sensitive is user engagement is to increasing our mindshare with users, adding more capabilities, and reducing friction in the overall experience?
Let’s go back to the hot tub example to illustrate how I as a product manager would think about driving more frequent usage through this lens:
Mindshare - The hot tub is less than a first down away from my desk, yet I still forget it’s there. From a product management standpoint, that’s a problem. If I had a mobile app connected to the hot tub that notified me when sunset will be that day, or what time the delta between the air temp and water temp will be just right, that might nudge me to use it more often.
Value (Feature Set) - I’m happy with the core functionality, so it’s hard to think of what to add here that would really motivate more usage. The only thing I can think of is adding a waterproof AV system so that when my wife and I are tired at the end of the night, we might choose to watch a show in the hot tub rather than in bed once in a while. Sounds really hard and expensive to build.
Effort - Using the product comes with a lot of overhead: Changing into bathing suits, getting towels, taking that heavy cover off before getting in, and then putting the cover back on, showering the chlorine off, and getting dressed again. Other than adding remote-controlled mechanical cover, I don’t see much opportunity here. However, there have been a couple of times when we’ve gone to use it only to find that the chemicals were way out of whack and we couldn’t go in. Returning to the mobile app idea, if I could check the chemical levels from my phone and maybe adjust the temperature too, that app would really be worth having on my phone, thus securing the channel through which I can get those notifications reminding me to use it.
Creating usage triggers and removing points of friction that are getting in the way of enjoying the product are the more appealing options to me as the product manager.
Jamming in more features in an attempt to prove greater value to customers seems unlikely to succeed. Modest functional improvements like more jets, massaging seats, or plush headrests might make the product “better” but not enough to change my usage habits.
Frequency, Criticality, and Creating User Habits
At this point you might reasonably be thinking that the product manager behind our hot tub doesn’t care much about usage frequency as long as the product is selling well, so let’s get back to SaaS tools.
In his excellent 2013 book Hooked, Nir Eyal explains how products become habit forming by associating themselves with frequent triggers in users’ minds, eliminating any friction for them to act on that trigger, and leaving them wanting more, among other methods. As he’s careful to point out, you need to find a trigger that users both experience frequently (at least 1x per week) and are highly motivated to address to create habit forming usage.
Eyal uses the example of how smartphones have become so addictive because they’re ultra-convenient remedies for all the little moments of boredom we encounter daily. The moment we’re bored, we open our phones to get breaking news, emails, texts, sports scores, TikTok videos or whatever scratches the boredom itch for us. Content feeds are always just a few taps away.
Not being bored may not sound “critical” at first, but when you consider that Americans check their phones 96 times per day on average, the data suggests that not being bored is critical to most of us. If you don’t believe me, go out to lunch by yourself without your phone sometime this week and see how fun that is.
The same principles of habit-forming usage apply to B2B products, but the user dynamics can differ in important ways. A couple of scenarios stand out to me in which you may hit a ceiling with usage that’s difficult to break through:
Users face practical limits to how often they can do the thing they use your product for, no matter how critical
The product supports activities that while important to your users are not the primary focus of their role
For examples of both, the graph below plots some of the activities I perform as a product management leader according to (1) how frequently I do each, and (2) how critical each one is to doing my primary job effectively.
Note: I define ”criticality” as the downside of not doing it. An activity that would be a total dereliction of duty to skip for even one cycle gets a 100, whereas one that could be skipped once without issue would get a 0.
The fact that a critical activity is being done infrequently doesn’t necessarily make it a good opportunity for driving higher usage. There are highly critical activities that I enjoy but don’t (and don’t want to) do very often, like defining product vision or setting long-term strategic objectives. A product designed to support activities like these is more likely to sustain usage and minimize churn by either (a) being a system of record whose value and stickiness compounds as users put more into the system over time, or (b) integrating with or adding functionality that supports adjacent activities that occur frequently like quarterly roadmap prioritization.
On the other hand, there are also activities I consider important, don’t do very often and would do more frequently if I could, like joining sales calls to hear prospects’ feedback on the product. Tools like Gong and Chorus did me one better by making sales call transcripts searchable and allowing me to configure notifications and automatically get clips in my inbox for any calls that mention certain keywords, include certain accounts or reference specific product lines. They’ve massively reduced the effort it takes me to parse feedback from the field, and as a result I do it a lot more now than I did before.
One of my favorite usage increasing success stories actually comes close to a decade ago from Expensify. Outside of the finance team, submitting and approving expenses for reimbursement is an activity with near-zero job importance to most business users. But because the digital receipt scanner on their app worked so well and made filing expenses so much easier, employees did it more often.
Rather than waiting until the end of month or quarter to file all of their expenses, which drove finance teams insane when they were trying to close the books, employees started doing it weekly, sometimes daily. Even though the total dollar amount of expenses filed barely changed, the consistency of usage Expensify enabled helped relieve pressure on finance teams and created loyal customers.
//
I could go on with examples. Suffice to say that differences across user needs and product contexts mean that no two instances of the usage problem are exactly the same, and neither are the solutions. Focus on identifying the most effective usage levers for your situation before anything else.