"Sh** breaks constantly" ?? Offsetting the negative effects of scale

When I worked at PayPal (over 10 years ago?), I once reported a bug to my manager.?

"We don't fix bugs unless they affect at least 20,000 users." - he said. I was shocked. It didn't make any sense to me. But at 109 million users (at that time - it's apparently 435 million now according to?Statista ) - it totally made sense to PayPal.?

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Leah Tharin was a PM at SmallPDF as they went from?2 million to 30 million ARR in 2 years?

This is what she learned:?

Things break all the time, so unfortunately - at this scale,?you can't get sidetracked by every bug?your customer or employee reports - you need to prioritize.?

As you scale, it's not only your revenue that grows - and often the problems grow faster...

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So what can you do to offset the negative impact of scaling fast, both on your customers and your?team??

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1. Make sure you don't get...bloated?& run discovery on autopilot?

Read this post on scope bloat by Susan Stavitzsky.

When you're growing fast, it's only so tempting to add?yet another feature to your roadmap...to catch up with that competitor...and to?one-up that competitor...

Before you know it, your product has become a chonk, your maintenance and engineering costs have skyrocketed, but?without any hint of ROI in terms of product adoption or expansion revenue.? Here are some ways to avoid scope bloat:

1. Define the problem clearly:

• Understand customer impact and business impact
• Use a well-defined problem as a project's?North Star

2. Document other ideas separately:

• Keep discovery notes or a backlog for future work
• Don't lose good ideas, but don't let them distract from original scope

3. Revisit scope often:

• Encourage team members to question if new additions solve the original problem
• Have open conversations about revising scope if needed

4. Run a?continuous discovery process ?and recruit your users to?discovery ?interview on autopilot - by showing selected user segments in-app slideouts with embedded Calendly (yes, you can build one in?Userpilot ?). Watch?Teresa Torres' talk ?from Product Drive about it:?

Essentially, continuous discovery is the?habit?of keeping tabs on your users needs' regardless of the stage of your product's maturity.?Simple, right??

And yet - how many product teams do you know that?actually?do it??

Again, I need to quote?Leah Tharin's?recent ProductTea ?on this:?

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"While B2C was the core market of Smallpdf it turned out that a ton of people are using the product while being in a micro business (1-20 people). Those are extremely hard to identify and just as Grammarly B2B started to intermix with B2C. But how is this relevant?

It gives you a solid data basis to pivot your business towards team use cases and broader collaboration features. It’s not difficult to imagine why people might want to collaborate around documents but… do you know? And how many?

The difficulty is not finding things that make sense.?It is to identify what makes?the most sense.?At the point of strategy creation, we ended up with 100s of ideas. Defining and simplifying it into a one-pager feels like magic.

It’s what matters in the end. All the other problems we had over the years seem insignificant. I feel like that is one of those things that we got right without a doubt."

2.?Automate support as much as you can?

Harvard Business Review actually found that?81% of users ?try to solve their software issues before seeking help, so giving them the opportunity to find answers as the ticket volume inevitably grows with scale will both offload your team and improve their experience. Btw. if you wondered what "good?customer experience" means for your users:?

Well, I know I previously talked about how AI is going to take that off us...well, not just yet.?

But there are a already few?self-service support ideas ?you can implement as you're scaling:?

• In-app help centers (e.g.?Userpilot's ?Resource Center)?-??provide immediate support from within the app itself, making it more convenient for users to access help.

• Contextual interactive walkthroughs?-?a more effective method of user onboarding ("learning by doing") - help users retain information while familiarizing themselves with the product?at their own pace.

• Chatbots?- ideally with AI/ML technology and natural language processing to understand and respond to user queries effectively in real time.

• Communities and company forums?- help users find solutions to their problems but also cultivate customer relationships and a sense of community, which is great for user retention and generating helpful content for future reference.

• In-app notifications?- native tooltips, banners, hotspots - effectively promote premium features in a non-salesy way and keep users informed about product updates. They not only improve self-service support but also drive account expansion.?

3.?Collect user insights at scale & implement?churn prevention measures

Finally - if you're scaling too fast, and your product is becoming misaligned with the customers' needs, your customer satisfaction rates will start dropping and your churn rate will be on a hike.?

Solution? Well, there are a few:?

• Run?product evaluations surveys ?- learn how your users feel about different aspects of your product experience - right when after having engaged with e.g. a specific feature of your product (by using event-based triggering in Userpilot)

• Run?NPS ?and CSAT surveys inside your product to gauge overall user sentiment between different segments (and the reasons why it's lower in some) - and yes, you can already use a lot of AI tools to analyse your user sentiment at scale (again, I didn't say anything, but watch this space for updates?).?
• Monitor your users activity and detect early churn signals (fewer logins, less engagement) and proactively reach out to the?customers that may be slipping away. See how Osano managed to?significantly reduce their churn with Userpilot.?

One reason why your new users churn before they've even activated is poor onboarding.?Product Tours are the definition of poor onboarding. So we're hosting a funeral for them today. Wanna join??

Last chance to join our?Product Tours are Dead ?webinar today!

See you next week!