Expanding your focus beyond in-product user journeys

What Is a User Journey?

A user journey is the path your users take through your product, service, or brand. It’s not just the onboarding or registration process, or the path to conversion. The intersection between your company, product, and brand is what shapes their experience throughout their lifetime as users. The better you understand those journeys, the more effective you’ll be as a product manager — and the more successful your product will be.

Looking beyond your in-product user Journeys

So you have a good handle on common usage patterns and user journeys, but have you had a chance to look beyond your product?

1. What content is usually shared from your app? 
2. Which channels is it shared on?
3. Who shares your insights and with whom?
4. How are your product derivatives used in decision-making?

Let’s take an analytics tool for example, in many cases, you’ll have a few users in the org, especially if it’s a seat-based product, but you might have plenty of people informed by your tool. 

But how can you tell?

Let’s see a classic example of data sharing journey:

User goes into app → Reviews a dashboard → applies filters → gains an insight → wants to share it ASAP → What’s next?

Let’s review some options

Personally, I love Mixpanel and I think they do a great job as an analytics platform. They also have quite a few options to share content from within the app:

Copy URL

A quick option to share a chart with anyone 

The good: You can share a chart in a specific state, and you get full functionality 

The bad: People will need to sign-up or log in, which is quite a bit of friction if you just want to share a data point

Will it help you see beyond your product? Not really, the links are not unique and there’s no way to tell if someone clicked on them.

Share a dashboard

The good old share model- this time with a cool option to make a dashboard public, eliminating sign-up friction, but it will only work if you have no privacy concerns. But let’s assume that is the case and measure it as a sharing option.

The good: People get to see the big picture, and they can revisit to get updates

The bad: It’s not an optimal solution if you only want to share a specific data point. It’s usually too much information.

Will it help you see beyond your product? Partially yes; if you have a public dashboard, you can monitor its visitors. But how will you convert users to users? Or do they join on their own?

Export to PDF/PNG

A fair option, if you don’t know how to take a screenshot (it’s Cmd+Shift+4 on mac)

The good: Simple and easy

The bad: Static and takes longer than just taking a screenshot

Will it help you see beyond your product? No

Conclusion

We understand why in most cases, users will just take a screenshot and send it on Slack/Teams. We’ve done it too! 

What makes in-app comms better than a screenshot?

I am not sure it always is, and we can’t prevent users from taking a screenshot, but we can create a great alternative. Google Docs and Figma had quite a bit of success competing with the good old screenshot. They’ve mostly gained popularity by successfully battling with the “screenshot + send” option by allowing users to interact in the proper context.

Let’s see how that flow will work with in-app comms:

User goes into app → Reviews a dashboard → applies filters → gains an insight → wants to share it ASAP → Clicks on the data point to open a comment box → Mentions a Slack channel → A new message pops up on the channel

The message includes a screenshot (for context), a short message by the user, and a deep link allowing users to navigate to the chart in the specific state.

The screenshot can even be annotated to highlight specific insights. 

But how is it better than taking a screenshot?

From a user perspective, they get it all in one place, an exact screenshot of the element, an interface for short messages, and even annotation capabilities. It’s easier than moving between two or three different tools.

But there’s an even more considerable upside for the product manager and growth leader. Because now, what used to be a one-way funnel is a growth loop.

Let’s see why:

Product growth:

1. Sharing to Slack channels becomes seamless, and since you’ve got your logo next to the image, more people get to know your product (even the executive team on Slack)
2. People can easily use the deep link to go into your product, especially if you let them skip authentication with a magic link (we can do this for you)

Product analytics:

1. Measure unique attribution - The deep link on the slack message is a uniquely attributed link and can tell you whether people used it to go into your app
2. Get to know your crowd - See where your data is shared, with who, and in what context. You might be surprised 
3. See who responds - Replies to the thread in Slack, are updated in the in-app thread. People who never used the analytics tool can now respond, and you can know who commented on your content.

Conclusion

Understanding your users is the only way to succeed as a product manager. The best way to understand your users is to see beyond your product. When you know your customers' needs, the challenges they face, and the problems they are trying to solve, you can create products that not only fill a need but also solve it elegantly. And that is what distinguishes between a good product manager to an exceptional one. 

‍

Ready to go from good to great? Schedule a demo today or contact us for more details.