User Engagement BlueprintGet the free ebook

Learn the framework that will point your team at the things that will actually drive growth

I offer consulting and training from a half day to a full engagement, where we apply the User Engagement Blueprint on your product and your data.

  • 15 years in process improvement and analytics
  • 4 years building this on a live product
  • independent consultant
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Is my consulting offer right for you?

If your app or platform is dependent on users coming back time after time, on building relationships with your users, rather than transacting with them - you are in the right place.

If your KPIs and dashboards are showing you numbers, but not diagnosing the underlying issue and not prescribing the next steps - I can help.

If development resources are following a roadmap that doesn't integrate the insights coming from the users' behaviour - cultural change is possible.

Your KPIs are hiding churn

You are looking at MAU.
The chart goes up and to the right, and so far nobody is taking a deeper look.
Under the surface each cohort is churning and acquisition is holding up the total.

Now, do any of these sound familiar:

  • Your dashboards answer how many, but they don't answer which of them came back, or what features are driving engagement.
  • You ask the PM and your analyst why last month's cohort churned, and you get two plausible answers that don't actually agree.
  • The development roadmap is already set, and none of the actions in the sprint plan trace back to a retention number.

If any of them sound familiar, the impact to your growth is real.

Ask yourself, how many of the features shipped in the last months actually provided enough value to the userbase to drive return visits?

Whatever that number is, the rest of the effort went somewhere else. There is a real cost to shipping features that don't generate repeated use, and that cost is invoiced in wasted engineering time.

Meanwhile, each new user you buy replaces one who left. Your acquisition budget is holding your engaged users steady, instead of growing them.

Then, next quarter's roadmap gets planned based on the same data (or lack thereof), by the same logic, on the same hunch.

How many more quarters can you keep spending money on that?

Now here's where you stand.

You present the roadmap and dashboards to the board, they land well. But you know it is not the whole story, and you cannot say so without undermining your own presentation.

In the next roadmap meeting you will defend a set of priorities. You have reasons. You do not have evidence, and everyone in the room is in the same position, so nobody calls it.

Nothing is going to force this into the open. The MAU chart keeps going up. You find out you were wrong two years from now, at a scale where fixing it can mean the worst case scenario, I've been there.

If you knew which two features were carrying return visits, what would you stop doing?

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Services offered

  • Independent walk-through of app as a new user
  • Half a day training on the User Engagement Blueprint, on site or online
  • Reframing conversion for engagement apps
  • Start-Stay-Stick framework taught with the findings behind it
  • Written follow-up report; where you are, short- and long-term plan, pitfalls
  • Start-Stay-Stick KPI framework built on your data
  • Business questions defined and KPIs to answer them
  • Retention metrics sized against acquisition spend
  • Dashboard plan defined one-on-one with analyst
  • One-on-one support defining event schema
  • Testing framework: hypothesis structure, eligibility rules etc.
  • Review of progress (ongoing service)
  • Challenge on sequencing (ongoing service)
  • Audit of testing process (ongoing service)
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Q&A

Will a few points on retention really move our numbers enough to justify the upheaval?
Yes, if the number you move is churn. Say you acquire 5,000 users a month and 20% of your actives leave. You settle at around 25k MAU, and every cent of acquisition spend buys you the same position. Get churn to 10% and the same spend settles you at 50,000. You doubled the business without buying a single extra user.
We haven't found product-market fit yet. Shouldn't we wait until we do?
It sounds reasonable but it justifies waiting indefinitely, you will not wake up one morning to find that fit has arrived. A strong KPI framework will identify what users keep coming back to, you adapt your product to the needs and behaviour of your users, you are creating your own PMF from the users that stick around in your app.
We've already paid behavioural economists and UX consultants. Why would this be different?
My User Engagement Blueprint implements a measurement framework and a test-and-learn layer that intends to embed itself into your product's development cycle. Think of it as a cultural shift.
Who else have you done this for?
Four years at LiveWell, where I built the framework and corrected it against a live product. The numbers in the eBook come from there. LiveWell shuttered after the parent company Zurich Insurance changed its venture strategy.
Our user base is small. Will we get anything useful out of this?
The theory applies to digital products of all sizes. Within the User Engagement Blueprint the KPI Framework works at any size and a trend is readable well below a thousand users. Product experimentation (A/B testing) needs user volume, but you can target selective directional bets from as little as 500 users.
How soon will we have something to show for it?
You come out of the first session with a shared definition of what engagement means for your product and a means to diagnose where it is failing. The User Engagement Blueprint's frameworks will define decision making going forward. The numbers follow at their own pace depending on what you're measuring and what data you already hold.
My team already has a roadmap. How disruptive is this?
The setup cost exists, your developers may need to instrument an analytics SDK and analytics events, and your analyst needs time to keep the layer running. The product roadmap work will get re-sequenced based on the data findings, things are reordered around the places where the KPIs show users are not getting value enough to return.
We haven't finished implementing our SDK and we don't really know what analytics events track. Is that a problem?
That is common, and not a problem. I do not do the instrumentation and implementation myself as it is not my expertise.

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What you measure now, and whether your product should have an engagement loop. No commitment necessary.

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