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📅GEEKS OF THE WEEK

5 bookmark-worthy links:

• 100 signals for pipeline gen (this is a great spreadsheet)

• Feature launch monetisation framework (simple, concise)

• 9 tactics to boost team expansion

• EBITDA vs FCF (don’t confuse them!)

• Hidden frictions holding back your growth

• BONUS:Holistic growth playbook

🧠GEEK OUT

Creating PLG Impact with Friction Logging

Last weeks post was all about friction logging - an activity that when institutionalised as part of a user-centric culture can lead to radically improved UX and create significant positive impact to your growth through PLG.

You need 3 things to power-up your PLG motion through friction logging.

The first is a systematic approach to creating detailed friction logs.

The second is a regular practice of analysing these logs with your team.

And the third is a commitment to acting on the insights you gain.

If you have those, then improving your product's user experience to boost your PLG success is very realistic.

In last weeks post we covered the basics:

• What friction logs are

• How to create friction logs

• The 3 key sections of a friction log

• How to analyse friction logs

• Common friction patterns

And today I’m continuing with part 2 where I’ll share:

• The power of fresh eyes

• Using friction logs to go beyond usability

• How to drive PLG impact with friction logs

• Friction logging traps

• Measuring the impact of friction logging

• My friction logging Notion database and template, with an example from Snyk

Let’s dig in!

The Power of Fresh Eyes

Fresh eyes are invaluable when it comes to friction logs.

That’s why I advocate for new hires in product, growth and in any roles supporting customers to go through a friction logging exercise as part of their onboarding.

New team members bring a unique perspective that can uncover hidden issues in your product. They haven't developed the same blind spots as long-time users. This makes them ideal for creating friction logs.

Unbiased perspectives lead to honest feedback.

New team members aren't attached to existing features or processes. They can objectively evaluate the user experience without any preconceptions. This fresh outlook often reveals problems that seasoned team members might overlook.

New hires can identify pain points that have become normalised. Long-time users and folks in your org that are intimately familiar with your product will have learned to work around certain issues. But those workarounds can frustrate new users. By documenting their experiences, new team members help expose these hidden friction points.

Encouraging new team members to create friction logs has additional benefits. It helps them learn the product quickly and thoroughly, and simultaneously demonstrates that their input is valued from day one.

Provided you act on the opportunities you identify through friction logging (more on that later), it also clearly emphasises that you promote a culture of continuous improvement.

Kate Syuma had this to say from her time as head of growth design at Miro:

Beyond Usability: Uncovering Deeper Insights

Friction logs reveal more than just usability issues.

They uncover hidden patterns in user behaviour, exposing gaps in design thinking and product architecture.

By analysing these logs, you can identify recurring pain points that users face. This insight helps you understand how people actually use your product, not just how you think they do.

Look for moments where users hesitate or take unexpected actions. These can signal misalignment between your design intent and user expectations. Pay attention to workarounds users create. They often highlight missing features or confusing interfaces.

Friction logs also expose issues in your product's overall structure. You might discover that certain features are hard to find or that the user flow doesn't match real-world tasks.

This information is gold for improving your product's architecture.

How to Drive PLG Impact with Friction Logs

So you know how to create a great friction log, but that alone won’t make a difference to your business.

To do that you need to institutionalise friction logging within your org, and consistently leverage the insights they provide to improve your product UX.

Here are a few things to focus on to make friction logging create an outsized impact to your PLG motion:

1. Develop a standardised template for your friction logs. This ensures consistency and makes it easier to compare issues across different logs.

2. Train new team members on friction logging techniques. Teach them how to spot usability issues and document them effectively. Make this training a be part of your onboarding process, along with the practical exercise of them creating a friction log for a flow within your product, ideally relevant to their area of focus/ownership.

3. Integrate friction logs into your regular workflow. Make it a habit for new hires to create logs during their first couple of weeks. This fresh perspective can uncover hidden issues that long-time team members might overlook.

4. Schedule intensive friction logging activity when you’re shipping major UX changes. When you make significant changes to your UX (in and out of your core app), you introduce usability risk that friction logging can mitigate.

5. Create friction logging champions within your org. They can act as go-to experts, and evangelise the process.

6. Create an overall map of flows across your product experience and cycle through different flows to provide a more complete understanding of UX shortcomings.

7. Prioritise friction logging activity for flows with low conversion. Whether that be activation, adoption of a new feature, or self-service checkout, the understanding that friction logging brings to those flows will be invaluable.

8. Establish a regular review system for friction logs. Set up weekly or bi-weekly meetings to discuss findings and prioritise issues. This keeps the process active and ensures valuable insights don't get lost. Encourage open dialogue and brainstorming to find solutions.

9. Create a flexible and easily searchable research repository to store and analyse friction logs. Starting with something simple like a Google Drive / Dropbox folder is fine, but IME you’ll quickly want to move to something more structured like Notion or Coda. Eventually something more tailor made that helps interpret and derive insights from the data will be beneficial (Zeda, Dovetail etc.)

10. Celebrate wins when improvements are implemented. This reinforces the value of friction logging and motivates the team to continue the practice.

11. Create a feedback loop for continuous improvement. After implementing changes based on friction logs, gather user feedback to measure the impact. Periodically ask yourselves what’s working well and what’s not. Use this data to refine your product and your friction logging process.

12. Diversify perspectives. Combine friction logs from employees from those from new users. They won’t create the friction logs themselves in written form but when you observe their experience and they provide commentary on what they’re doing, thinking and feeling along the way, you have everything you need to create a friction log on their behalf.

13. Ensure that you prioritise and resource UX improvements. You WILL consistently uncover UX issues through the act of friction logging, but you need to commit to improving the UX based on what you find.

14. Make it cross-functional. One of the most common ways to limit the impact of friction logging in your org is to make it a siloed activity. A broad set of stakeholders from functions across the org can contribute to and benefit from friction logging.

The most effective applications of friction logging are where it’s part of the cultural norm of a company.

Friction Logging Traps

Friction logs are a powerful tool, but beware of these common traps and pitfalls.

Measuring the Impact of Friction Logs

Well, I did provocatively title last week’s post to include the phrase ‘power-up your PLG motion’!

And I stand behind that.

UX matters a lot in PLG, and you should ignore it at your peril.

In the long run it will be difficult to attribute overall growth success to friction logging, but you if you tag UX improvements and experiments that originated from a friction log discovery, then you can certainly get quant data on the impact.

All that being said, I’m not convinced it’s worth doing so.

My view is that it’s better to use friction logging as one of the tools in your toolkit that promotes user-centric culture, and a focus on following the users’ path to value ahead of your own goals.

Because when you do that, the path to PLG success becomes significantly more straightforward.

PS: Check out the Notion DB and template below - feel free to copy and use as you wish.

📝GEEK TEMPLATE

Click the image or here to get the Notion template and Snyk example.

😂GEEK GIGGLE

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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!

Until next time!

— Ben

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