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Which User Outcomes Power Your Business?

Every time someone uses an app, it's because they're trying to change something about their life OUTSIDE the app. Learn how to better identify and deliver Beneficial Outcomes, so you can create more value for both your users and your business.

Self-Serve PodcastUser Value
•
Table of Contents
Which User Outcomes Power Your Business?
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Sections

Identifying "Beneficial Outcomes" (0:21)

Tactic #1: Ask users to describe their target situations (10:28)

Tactic #2: Ask customer-facing colleagues what healthy customers looks like (18:20)

Tactic #3: Pick up situational clues from app store / aggregator site reviews (24:12)

How Value Paths adds to "User Outcomes" conversation (28:02)

Deciding which Beneficial Outcomes are worth investing in (29:58)

Tracking which Beneficial Outcomes are powering your revenue (38:32)

The essential causes of a Beneficial Outcome (54:22)

Seeing the connection between in-app activity and the Beneficial Outcome (57:24)

Takeaways

Your product is only as valuable as the outcomes it facilitates

People don't go TO your product, they go THROUGH it. They're always arriving at your offering with the intention of using it to get somewhere else. (9:28)
Your product is a bundle of things that help people resolve different outcomes. If you don't have a pulse on which of those outcomes are most meaningfully driving your business, and how well you're performing at delivering those outcomes to the people who desire them, then there's a very good chance that you're wasting time and effort. (39:26)

How to identify beneficial outcomes

To identify the Beneficial Outcomes your users are seeking, ask them this question: "What are you hoping the product will unlock for you?" Pay attention to how they take your high-level value prop and put it in terms that are relevant to their particular situations. (11:01)
What is the bigger change that's happening in the person's life that's causing smaller change of engaging with our product to become relevant? (21:04)

Thematic vs. practical outcomes

Beneficial Outcomes are out-of-app outcomes that you can use to make product/process decisions. For this reason, they can't be articulated in thematic terms. To identify Beneficial outcomes, we're trying to identify those distinct moments in time in which users acknowledge that they're better off. (14:07)

Revenue-creating outcomes

Not all the outcomes your business supports are worth investing in. How do you tell the ones that are worth investing in from the ones that aren't? (31:36)
Some user outcomes drive revenue better than others. Identifying those outcomes and really understanding them inside and out are the keys to improving the user experience and having those improvements results in business value. (1:05:56)

Written by

Yohann Kunders
Yohann Kunders

Co-founder: Self-Serve SaaS, prev Airbase and Chargebee

    Written by

    Samuel Hulick
    Samuel Hulick

    Co-founder: Self-Serve SaaS, prev founder of UserOnboard

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