Crafting the World's Easiest E-Signature Product: Our Collaborative Journey with?Users

If you were to develop a product with over 400 competitors globally, and one of your competitors holds about 70% market share, what would be your first step? (Are you suggesting not to develop it?)

A journey that began almost 2.5 years ago: Jotform Sign. And in my product management career, it’s the biggest product I’ve been involved in from conception to delivery then growth, full of excitement and stress but also encompassing significant goals.

To provide a realistic answer to the first question, I dedicated about 3–4 months solely to working on, thinking about, and researching this topic. I conducted competitor analyses, market analyses, interview sessions, and many more activities. Then, by consolidating all my answers, I wrote on the whiteboard the thing I needed to look back at throughout the entire journey: “User-Driven Approach.”

When conducting market and competitor analyses or planning an investment in a product, the first thing you need to do is assess exactly what ingredients you have in the kitchen. Because making the best dish also depends on how you use the ingredients at your disposal.

From my experiences in starting several startups in the past, I have some insights into what can be achieved even with just “passion” in the kitchen.

Now, in my kitchen, I have all the resources of a large company like Jotform.

When starting a startup, one often wonders how to compete with such big competitors. The answer is generally simple: if I respond to their sluggishness with agility, then I can generate value for the users.

In another blog post, I talked about how product management and entrepreneurship are very similar and that the main difference is the comfort of not having some significant challenges to deal with in product management compared to entrepreneurship.

If you have more than 400 competitors in the market, and some of them are large companies with significant market shares, the most important strength to bring with you is “users”.

“User-driven methodology” is not a concept I invented, but it’s a fact that the weakest point of large companies is often this, and they tend to move away from it as they grow.

Knowing who you are competing with, understanding their weaknesses, and developing your muscles there can be your biggest competitive advantage in the product development process.

Developing a product solely with traditional methods may not be sufficient in such scenarios, and you may need to invent more unique methods.

I can say very clearly that our biggest strength during this time has been knowing very well the deficiencies in our competitors’ eyes from the “users’ perspective.”

We achieved this by listening to users almost every day. Most companies at the holding level have pre-made plans and a somewhat cumbersome workflow. The biggest problem this creates is not being able to listen to users enough and not being able to respond to their changing needs.

If you are developing a product from scratch, your biggest strength is listening to users, whether you have 1 user or 100, or even if you know who your user candidates are.

The users who use a product create its value, so a product developed collaboratively with users usually does not contain excess and focuses only on meeting users’ needs.

You may have heard of the Maximum Viable Product concept. Here, instead of adding thousands of features that are not needed, the idea is to create a product that will actually be used.

Design Philosophy

When developing Jotform Sign, we repeatedly shaped almost all UI and UX with user feedback. The most important rule for us was that a feature should be intuitively usable when we put it in.

After about a year of development, when we opened the product to beta testing, in addition to all my other tasks, I spent nearly 15–20 hours a week analyzing user behaviors, conducting user interviews, and thinking about how to interact more with users.

To be honest, one of the most important things that a large company cannot do is to read every user’s feedback, take notes, and try to understand when necessary. This was a process I had experienced before.

When developing my E-Procurement startup, before the product was launched, we met with different procurement professionals face-to-face or online every week, and we wanted them to use the product. We took notes while using the product and learned the users’ ideas. So, we were able to create an incredibly intuitive product there as well.

Frankly, many of the products developed now are made almost the same by referencing the largest product in the market. Although this may be considered an advantage, I actually think it ultimately leads to dozens of products failing from the user’s perspective.

Because the biggest players don’t always make the best product, sometimes the product is developed without prioritizing the user experience due to the size of the company. And then a user base is created with large marketing budgets. So, in fact, the biggest player in the market may not have done everything right, and the mainstream might be very wrong.

When developing Jotform Sign, we were surprised by every idea we learned from users. In fact, we saw that some crucial points of user experience that our competitors in the market had either done wrong or not done at all.

During this process, we learned a lot about how to develop a product with users and tried many new methods. I won’t go into all these methods, but I think the summary could be “everything that can be done to get to know the user.”

Now we are celebrating the 1st anniversary of the launch of Jotform Sign, and according to G2, we are among the top 5 products in our first year.

We continue to receive dozens of feedback daily, and among tens of thousands of feedback, our CSAT score is almost 4.5/5.

You can also try Jotform Sign from here.

Finally, I need to express my gratitude to all the colleagues working in every department at Jotform for their contributions to developing such a successful product in its first year. Great teams make great things possible.