Gojko Adzic, author of Impact Mapping and many other classic product, engineering and testing books, recently announced the preview release of Lizard Optimization. His latest book discusses how responding to product-misuse and marginal corner-cases of the few long-tail users helped drive customer retention, and accelerate product growth. Continuous Delivery author, Dave Farley, recently interviewed Adzic for the GOTO Book Club, to discuss how these unusual use-cases can drive delivery of a better product for all customers.
Talking with Farley about feature areas to target for new product growth, Adzic discussed honing in on the curious and hard-to-understand use cases of small groups who appear to be misusing a product. Adzic referred to these use cases as "lizard behaviours." He took the term "lizard" from a 2013 blog by psychologist Scott Alexander about surveying small groups with marginally held beliefs, such as those believing in conspiracies about lizards. Adzic told his own Lizard Optimization story of pivoting Narakeet, a product originally designed to generate narrated videos of PowerPoint presentations. He said:
The tool started as a way to make videos from PowerPoint. There were some people constantly making blank videos and paying me for that. Which made no sense at all … They were going through hoops and extracting videos just to produce an audio track… I simplified the way for those people to create just the audio file… That tiny minority, which was 1%, overtime became more than 99%.
InfoQ’s Ben Linders recently reported on a FlowCon France talk given by Fabrice des Mazery, CPO at TripAdvisor, where he discussed the cost and profitability risks of over-focusing on adding product features "because it’s better for the user." Des Mazery cautioned that it’s important to take a broader ROI-centric focus to product roadmaps, which balance user-centric evolution of the product with longer-term profitability. TripAdvisor achieved this by transforming delivery teams into investors, with caps placed on cost. In Narakeet’s case, Adzic shared that adding support for the marginal use-case of a text-to-speech feature had resulted in improved UX and a significant reduction in operational cost.
Citing The Value of Keeping the Right Customers, a 2014 Harvard Business Review article by Amy Gallo, Adzic expressed the importance of retaining even those customers with marginal use cases, as marginal retention has a "compounding impact" on revenue. Gallo’s original article reported that "increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%." Adzic told Farley that driving product improvements for all users was important for customer retention. He claimed:
If you want to grow a product, you can either go and acquire new users, or increase the retention of your existing users. And retaining users is incredibly more profitable at certain points of the life cycle.
A repeated point made by Adzic in his conversation with Farley was that by targeting marginal-use cases, one can make simplifications and overarching improvements across the product for "all users." Another example he provided was that of a bug report filed about his mind-mapping application, MindMup, not being usable on a smart fridge. While this was not a use case he’d planned for, Adzic shared that by improving the touch capabilities of the application, they delivered usability improvements for all users, and widened the customer base. He explained:
Lizard Optimisation is a systematic way of figuring out how people are misusing a product, and then using those signals to make the product better. By making a product better for people who are misusing it, we can make a product better for everybody.
Within the book itself, Adzic calls out that Lizard Optimization is suited to products "where you want to grow market share, reduce churn or increase revenue." He also explicitly calls out that for a product which is already "very mature," having reached a point where you no longer need to grow it, then it is better to "focus on consolidation, technical scaling and reducing operating costs." Lizard Optimization is in draft and available on LeanPub.