Hey folks! 👋

Welcome to a revamped Product-Led Geek! I’m buzzing about the shiny new look and feel - hope you love it as much as I do! (Check out my new website too!)

Here’s what you’ll find in today’s edition of the Product-Led Geek:

• Why 'Rush-To-Value' can sabotage long-term user retention and growth

• The critical difference between Time-To-First-Value and Time-To-Activation

• The counterintuitive reason why slowing down can accelerate your product's growth

• Why your activation metric might be lying to you

Shortcuts:

GEEK LINKS | GEEK OUT | GEEK OF THE WEEK

Total reading time: 7 minutes

Let’s go!

TOGETHER WITH DOVETAIL

Dovetail’s biggest launch is coming in October - and you’re invited!

Get ready for the next generation of customer insights. Dovetail is launching tons of new features and THREE new products that each leverage AI to its cutting-edge capacity. To celebrate this momentous milestone, you’re invited to:

• Exclusive in-person and online launch events

• Sneak peeks and early access to the new products

• Q&As with our product team and founder

Plus special promotions and premium content. If you want to know what the future of AI-powered customer insights looks like - sign up to our waitlist and we’ll keep you in the loop for our events and more!

Please support our sponsors!

GEEK LINKS

5 bookmark-worthy links:

• Annual Planning CAC Ratio Masterclass

• From PLG to PLG+SLG – How Lucid Scaled to 70M+ Users

• Should Your New Feature be Free or Paid?

• John Cutlers’ Roadmapping Miro Board

• Why Founder Mode is Dangerous

Also something to check out tomorrow: My friends at Pocus are launching their free AI account plan generator on Product Hunt. It reads 10ks, websites, news, listens to podcasts, and more to generate robust account plans. It’s slick. Get notified when they launch here.

GEEK OUT

The TTV Paradox: Why Slower Onboarding Can Lead to Faster Growth

Time-To-Value (TTV) is king in PLG, right?

Get users experiencing the good stuff – fast – and watch your growth soar.

It's a seductive idea for sure.

A short TTV promises more activated and engaged users, fewer cancellations and a whole lot more revenue.

But there’s a hidden truth here.

Trying to force value delivery in as short a time as possible isn’t always a good thing.

It’s a bit like trying to cram for a final exam.

Sure, you might pass the test, but did you really learn anything?

Are you set up for long-term success?

It’s not as clear an answer as you might think.

The Upside of Urgency

Don't get me wrong, a short Time-To-First-Value (TTFV) - or the time to the first Aha moment (of which there may be several) - is important>

In a world overflowing with distractions, grabbing a user's attention and demonstrating value quickly can be crucial.

Nobody's got time for a product that feels like a chore to figure out.

Think about the products that have just immediately grabbed you and pulled you in. For me Dropbox and Canva come to mind:

• Dropbox: They nailed it by focusing on one simple, irresistible promise: your files, everywhere you need them. Sign up, upload, boom – value delivered.

• Canva: Canva changed the game by making it ridiculously easy to whip up professional-looking designs in minutes. That's a powerful TTFV story.

When you nail that initial value exchange, good things happen:

1. Users Stick Around: When people quickly see the benefit of your product, they're more likely to keep exploring and using it. That means more activated users/teams, higher engagement and lower churn.

2. They Tell Other People: Fast TTV wrapped in a magical first experience increases the odds of users becoming raving fans who spread the word on your behalf.

All good then?

Not always.

Avoid the Rush-To-Value

Here's the catch: not all products are created equal.

The likes of Dropbox and Canva are relatively simple products.

For complex products and domains - dev tools included - it’s possible to get users to value TOO quickly.

I call this ‘Rush-To-Value’, and it’s not a good thing.

When new users and teams sign up for our products, we’re trying to get them to habitual usage.

That means:

• Getting them through the things they absolutely must do before they can realise value (Setup)

• Getting them to experience value (Aha)

• Getting them to a milestone demonstrative that they’ve built (or are building) a habit around using the product (Habit / Activation)

But here’s the thing.

Habit formation depends upon understanding.

And depending on the complexity of the product and domain - along with users prior knowledge and experience - developing that understanding might be a shorter or a longer process.

Developers and folks in other technical fields typically want to understand things more deeply.

They want to know what’s under the bonnet 🇬🇧 (hood for my US geeks).

They want to know how the sausage is made.

Magic isn’t a good thing if it’s a black box.

In most cases it’s not possible for us to measure or know the level of understanding a user has gained, so our activation metric (i.e. the habit moment) gives us a proxy to that.

The best activation metrics will also be strong indicators that users ‘get it’.

If your activation metric doesn’t reflect that level of strong user comprehension and understanding then it won’t have strong correlation with downstream retention and monetisation.

Think about observability tools like Honeycomb or DataDog for example.

• There’s a world of difference between being able to create basic dashboards and being able to define meaningful alerts, troubleshoot complex performance bottlenecks, and use the platform proactively to identify and address issues before they impact users.

• Superficial understanding leads to alert fatigue and ignoring important signals amidst the noise (I’ve seen it), inability to diagnose and resolve performance issues effectively, and ultimately, a negative impact on application reliability and user experience.

So can you see the trap here with focusing on shortening those funnels?

You get a solid retention predicting activation metric in place.

You work hard to get people to your activation milestone as quickly as you can.

You strip ‘unnecessary’ steps out of your onboarding flow.

You condense your new user nurture sequences.

On the surface things look good.

New users are activating faster.

You might even see MORE new users activating.

But in doing so, you diminish the effectiveness of the journey on learning.

New users still reach that milestone, but they aren’t retaining as well as they were.

And they’re not converting as well either.

Your activation metric is no longer as strong a predictor of growth as it once was.

Rush-To-Value came back to bite you.

It worked better before because the journey you took new users / teams on to activate involved you connecting a bunch of neurons in their brains.

And in B2B there’s another aspect to consider - the multiplayer journey.

In B2B your activation metric should be team / account based.

It should be defined around aggregate behaviour across the account.

That means there could be multiple people involved in the activation journey.

• Collaboration-heavy products might only gain traction when multiple people in the account are engaging

• An admin might need to approve or configure some part of the setup

• Decision makers may have intermittent usage patterns

There’s a bunch of reasons why lots in there is beyond your control.

Trying to force it to be done faster can result in a whole lot of effort for very little gain.

That’s why Snyk’s activation metric had a 30 day window.

The reality is that for some products, a longer, more gradual approach to value delivery is the right thing to do.

Recognise that:

1. True Mastery Takes Time: For some domains (e.g. dev tools) trying to rush or circumvent the learning process can lead to frustration and abandonment. Embrace the learning curve and design experiences that celebrate incremental progress.

2. Delayed Gratification is Powerful: The satisfaction of conquering a challenge, of achieving mastery over a complex tool or skill, is deeply rewarding. Don't deprive users of that experience by oversimplifying or rushing the journey.

3. Meaningful Habits Take Root Slowly: For products designed to foster long-term engagement and habit formation, a slow and steady approach often yields the best results. Focus on educating users, building their confidence, and empowering them to take ownership of their learning process.

Faster is not always better.

Finding the Sweet Spot

What should you take from all this?

Context matters, but here’s some guidelines.

• Always aim for fast TTFV (initial Aha moment)

• If your tool is simple and solves problems in a simple domain, by all means consider ways to get users / teams to activate faster

• If your tool is complex or within a complex domain, tread carefully and get users to activate at the right tempo, not the fastest.

For complex products you need to find the sweet spot where speed and substance intersect – where users quickly grasp the core value while feeling supported and empowered to explore at their own pace and in a timeframe that makes sense for adoption that sticks.

Here's how to get it right:

• Fixate on Efficacy of NUX: Focus on efficacy of you new user/team experience. Time is a lever that may or may not be important for you.

• Ditch the One-Size-Fits-All Onboarding: Embrace personalisation. Use user data, in-app behaviour and a bit of common sense to tailor the onboarding experience to different user needs and goals. Guide them towards the features and workflows that make the most sense for them.

• Celebrate Small Wins: Break down complex tasks into manageable steps, and offer clear instructions and encouragement along the way. Celebrate each milestone, no matter how small. Create a sense of progress and motivate users to keep going.

• Empower Exploration: Give users the freedom to learn and explore on their own terms. Provide clear documentation, intuitive help resources, and the ability to easily adjust settings. A sense of configurability ownership over the product is incredibly powerful.

• Stay on Top of The Data: Dive deeper into user behaviour data to understand what's working, what's not, and where you can improve the user experience. Re-evaluate your activation metric periodically to ensure it is still a strong predictor of retention and monetisation.

Faster time to first value is almost always a good thing.

But TTFV isn't the finish line – it's the starting block.

Faster time to activation needs much more careful consideration.

By prioritising a user-centric approach that balances speed with substance, you'll captivate users more effectively and set the stage for long-term, sustainable growth.

And that's what PLG is all about, isn't it?

Building products that people genuinely love to use.

GEEK OF THE WEEK

Share a story about a failed experiment that ultimately led to a valuable insight:

Thanks to Viorel for sharing this story! Lots of lessons there!

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THAT’S A WRAP

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That’s all for today,

If there are any product, growth or leadership topics that you’d like me to write about, just hit reply to this email or leave a comment and let me know!

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Until next time!

— Ben

PS: Thanks again to our sponsor: Dovetail