If you are building a SaaS product, it’s extremely important to be data-driven. Not only will this give you the confidence to take bold product decisions, but it also relies on the usage of existing customers to make the experience of every customer better.

For the below post you will take the role — Product Manager at Google Meet. And your job is to build a robust upgrade to the Google Meet experience.

Step 1: Track the context of every primary action in your SaaS.

Inside Google meet, primary actions are hypothesized to be the following,

Primary Action 1: Creating non-recurring meetings.

Now it’s also useful to gather more context on the type of customer performing these actions. Google has two kinds of accounts,

• An individual account (free), and a
• Workspace account (paid)

Primary Action 2: Joining meetings.

Step 2: Wait for a while to start crunching numbers.

The step of waiting is crucial because of two reasons —

If the numbers don’t show up, our whole hypothesis was wrong, as we can’t optimize an experience if people aren’t using it.

1. If people aren’t using the feature in the first place, it’s better to make of VVF Framework for SaaS to increase usage.

2. More data gives us a better approach to taking a nuanced decision. Quoting a personal example, I once optimized the experience based on the first 5 users who had tried out the app (who didn’t match the ICP), after a few customer cohorts — people asked the features I had scraped away from the first version.

Hypothetically let’s assume this is how our data results turned out after 2 weeks of usage:

Now just by looking at the graph, certain curves seem to indicate

1. Meeting creations and joinings are down comparatively down during the weekends.

2. Meeting joins seem to peak with URL links and Meeting Creations seem to peak with Google Homepage.

3. Meetings joined using Google Calendar have the lowest count.

Step 3: Run experiments to see if it makes the customer’s life easier.

Although we have very limited data here, the conclusion seems to be a lot of our hypothetical users of Google Meet like creating meetings through the home page, let’s take a look at the current home page experience.

The current experience of creating a new Google Meet event is as follows,

This is great since the friction required to achieve success using Google meet is less than 2 seconds, but here is how we leverage data to make it even better!

The current flow requires 1-page load, 2 taps, and 1 decision-making process (Choosing between, 1. Create a meeting for later / 2. Start an instant meeting / 3. Schedule in Google Calendar).

Considering we know the fact that there lies an existing solution that Google meet already has involving lesser friction for a majority of the users, we can design a workflow for users who only create meetings using the home screen.

Let's create a couple of workflows to educate the user on such a thing exists!

Using this data, we have now educated the user using email / in-app feedback on helping them achieve success. The lesser friction your app has, the more your customers will love it.

From a development standpoint, this cost us nothing. We already had the domain and already pay for it monthly, but now we have a customer’s friction reduced by 2 steps. Sure it has saved the user only 1 or 2 seconds, but in a highly competitive SaaS world, this friction is all it takes. That’s where data and product work together to delight the customer.

More options, always leads to harder decisions. -Hick’s Law

Originally published on Linkedin