Ideas and Insights From Optimization Experts

How to Build a Customer-Led Product Team

Every product team likes to say that they’re customer-driven. Their company’s mission is all about putting the customer first, and their office is decorated with “customers rule everything around me” posters. It’s easy to pay lip service to being customer-led — but being user-oriented is much harder in practice. It doesn’t matter what your decor says — truly building around
From utility to community: unlocking growth in the personalization era

“In my opinion, personalization is the key to success for most products and services.” -Valentine Aseyo, Senior Vice President of Product, Bandsintown Bandsintown is a platform for music fans to discover live music events, new sounds, and opportunities to connect with their favourite artists. Valentine Aseyo is the SVP of Product who firmly believes that the platform’s success can be
Case Study: How Lottery.com Drives Growth with Rapid Experimentation

Lottery.com empowers American lottery players to track their tickets and play on the go using the popular app. The company exhibits an exemplary experimentation culture, which is embodied by a growth team that practices high tempo testing. In their market, it ultimately comes down to who enters first and who offers the best possible user experience. Additionally, companies must be
How Feature Flags Enable a Culture of Continuous Deployment

If you’re building a mobile app, you want to embrace continuous deployment. Releasing small batches of code as soon as they’re ready is much less risky than big feature releases. But achieving the speed needed for CD is tough in mobile. You have to rigorously QA even small changes before fully releasing, or you risk deploying buggy code that breaks.
How to Boost Your App’s User Retention Beyond Onboarding

When people use an app more than once, it’s usually because of great onboarding. They were taught the core value of the app, so they were able to build a habit around using the product. But what happens after users have completed onboarding and understand why they should use your app? You’ve laid the seeds for long-term success within your
Blastoff your Rollouts and Feature Flags with Taplytics Launch Control

3…2…1 … Blast off! Taplytics is excited to release Launch Control as part of the Taplytics Experience Cloud. Launch Control gives companies feature flagging abilities that help control releases and mitigate the risk of every feature launch. What is Feature Flagging? Think of feature flags like a set of switches, one for each of your product features. You can remotely
Just Ship it! Launch early to collect valuable user feedback

“Ship it”, your manager says. “We’ve spent enough time tweaking the product, let’s just put it out there and see what happens”. That thought can be scary, there’s no doubt about it. Releasing a product or feature when you have a full page of edits you could make can be daunting. But what do you really have to lose? Wouldn’t
How Fintech Apps Use UX To Build Trust

You’ll never see a UX blog advocate for more inputs in an app—asking for more work from the user typically means less engagement with the app. But for fintech designers, adding friction is a job requirement. Fintech apps have to ask users for a lot of personal information to meet financial regulations and fulfill their functions. To properly and safely
Really Good UX Decisions from Customer-Centric Teams

People think style is the key to great UX—an app with sleek graphics and elegant design has the “right look,” so it should perform well with users. But prioritizing the aesthetic of your app actually leads to bad UX. You place an unnecessary design element in your app because it has a cool feature, and the fancy addition only leaves
How Retailers Can Use Mobile Apps In a World Dominated By Amazon

Everyone from your boss to your grandma has said it—Amazon is taking over retail. As the company’s market share increases, brick-and-mortar retail sales have steadily decreased. To fight back against Amazon, retailers know that they can’t compete with Amazon on convenience or speed, so they focus their efforts in an area where Amazon can’t make the same kind of improvements:
It’s Time to End the Execute vs Innovate Debate

At the start of the new year, The Hustle’s John Havel reflected on a story from the media company’s early days. CEO Sam Parr told him to stop trying to perfect something and to ship what was ‘good enough’. (Read: John, nobody is going to look twice at that website footer, please stop obsessing over it) Like most people, Sam
What to A/B Test for the Best User Onboarding Results

Take a look at your metrics, and you’ll find that one obvious number that directly correlates with monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is active users. The key time to create active users is during user onboarding; if a user is activated in this time, then they are much more likely to improve MRR. For instance, Airbrake, an error tracking and discovery