Great Consumer products follows the stages of the hero's journey.

Understanding the hero's journey can provide insights into building compelling consumer products and engaging user experiences.

Hero's Journey: Introduction

The Hero's Journey is an archetype found in great stories, books, movies & TV shows.

Consumer products also follow the hero's journey structure, involving a protagonist (the product) facing challenges, undergoing transformation, and achieving a goal.

Hero's Journey: Phases

Hero’s Journey goes through 4 phases:

• The Call to Adventure

• Crossing the Threshold

• Road of Trials

• Climax

The Call to Adventure

This phase is about showing the people at first what they are getting into, just like the opening scene of any movie.

Facebook Opening Page

• Tells what you are getting into like posting photos, updates and making friends.

• This Page removes every mental barrier to use the product.

• Asking simple credentials - Name, Phone Number Or Email, Password (No Confirm Password).

Flaw in Twitter's Opening Screen

• Username field made people think, demanding them to be funny, unique and choosy (barrier) —> Less Conversion.

Crossing the Threshold

When the hero can no longer stay in his previous world and sets off for an adventure after getting the calling.

The same dynamic works in Consumer Products where the Users are onboarded to the adventure by making them experiencing “aha” or “magic”moments.

These moments make users hooked and retained to the product.

How Facebook did it?

• Setting goal to get 10 friends in 14 days.

Great consumer companies uses every single lever to get you to that magic moment.

So Facebook did it by suggesting you friends/ people you may know/ mutual friends to let you figure out how they know you.

Possibility is that other person might not know you as well but this is done to get them both to 10 friends and experience aha moment.

Companies prioritise users who haven’t experienced aha moments over their existing users.

This is a way to get new users hooked to the product, which obviously comes with a trade-off with bad experience for existing users.

The Road of Trials

Now you have crossed the threshold, and you’re now in business with your users.

Then comes the road of trials.

First one is:

Tangibles Vs Intangibles

There is the challenge of building systems to capture and understand human behavior within large tech companies like Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter.

These systems often rely on metrics and numbers but struggle to encompass the complexity and messiness of human behavior.

Product Companies holds two types of meetings:

Meeting 1 → discussion around measurable and quantifiable aspects.

• Companies can assess the impact of their actions, such as introducing new features or running ad campaigns, by observing changes in these metrics.

• The measurable aspects, such as active wallets and metrics, offer advantages as they allow for immediate feedback on experiments.

Meeting 2 → discussion regarding the intricate nature of human behaviour, which is more challenging to capture.

• discussion like do people trust us, do they think we are cool.

• exist in the realm of emotion feeling perception

• much harder to track as you can't run an experiment on them

But the real flaw is when you don't know which bucket you are in.

Are you're in the realm of math and metrics or dealing with perceptively emotion related.

Making Things Easy vs Difficult

• Making certain actions in a consumer product harder can increase investment and commitment from users.

• Injecting difficulty in a product can convey the message that it will be hard but ultimately rewarding.

• The game Elden Ring deliberately starts with a challenging enemy that is unbeatable, creating a sense of difficulty and crushing the player's spirit.

• Snapchat's original lens feature was intentionally made difficult to use, creating a sense of exclusivity and encouraging users to figure it out with friends, leading to a moment of mastery and ownership.

Scarcity vs Abundance

Scarcity representing value always attracts and generates the stronger emotion in users which keeps them hooked to the product.

• Crypto and NFTs:
  Scarcity and rarity: Exploring the concept of scarcity and rarity in the context of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and crypto, where limited quantities and uniqueness add value.

• LinkedIn:
  Endorsements: Lack of scarcity in giving endorsements on LinkedIn, where anyone can endorse others freely, diminishing the value and meaning of the endorsements.

• Status and changes:

  • Twitter's blue checks: Twitter faced backlash when they made blue checks paid, as it changed the status associated with the verification badge.

There are two methods to find the product related answers.

• OODA Loop

• Availability Cascades

OODA Loop

The loop stages: observe → orient → decide → act

• Gathering info from data, metrics and users.

• Interpreting and processing the info

• Make a decision regarding next course of action

• Execute the plan

  Then go on again gathering info from now available metrics to quickly make iterations to the product and follow the next steps as usual, this is never ending loop for the great consumer companies.

  The faster the iterations → more ahead the competitors.

Availability Cascades

Availability cascades refer to creating a strong core community of supporters.

The concept is also known as "1000 true fans," popularized by Kevin Kelly. The goal is to find a dedicated group of fans who genuinely love the product.

You can read the renowned research article on the subject here.

• Importance of a Core Community:

  • A core community acts as a shelling point and focus for the product.

  • Discussions and feedback from the core community can guide product development.

• Starting with a Core Community:

  • Encouragement to start by finding a thousand people who love the product.

  • Building a core community allows for the identification of adjacent markets and use cases.

• Leveraging Core Community for Growth:

  • Engaging and obtaining feedback from the core community helps iterate and improve the product.

  • Feedback from the core community is valuable for making informed decisions.

• Importance of Core Engagement:

  • A core community of 1000 true fans is more valuable than having millions of indifferent users.

  • Startups are advised to focus on creating a dedicated base of supporters early on.

Climax

The significance of these scenes lies in the hero's internal transformation rather than their victory over the enemy.

Both scenes emphasise the heroes embracing their true selves and overcoming their inner struggles.

That’s the same case with consumer product companies, after all these trials and iterations, they find their soul purpose and turned into what the people would love to invest in both by time and money.

• Discovering the soul of a company is often the key to becoming a great consumer company.

Twitter Redemption Arc

• Twitter experienced a decline in users from approximately 2016 to 2018.

• This decline is particularly concerning for a consumer company, as the internet user base generally grows over time.

• One of the main challenges was Twitter's lack of clarity regarding its identity and purpose.

• Twitter struggled with deciding whether it should compete with Facebook, focus on teens like Snapchat, or define its own unique niche.

Rediscovering Twitter's Soul

• Twitter's fortunes started to turn around with the arrival of new leadership in 2017-2018.

  1. The company realized it needed to define itself in two fundamental ways:

  2. Emphasizing real-time events: Twitter aimed to be the go-to platform for discussing events as they happened.

  3. Fostering conversations: Twitter sought to provide a space for meaningful conversations and interactions.

• This newfound clarity of purpose and direction helped Twitter redefine its focus and led to its subsequent growth.

• The parallel is drawn between Twitter's realization of its identity and Neo's discovery of his true purpose in The Matrix.

Extra Last Step: Denouncement

Denouement refers to the part of a story where all the pieces come together and find meaning.

• It is an essential element in great storytelling.

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This talk was not solely about consumer products but rather about life and building companies.

Interested individuals in the space should embarked on their own adventure by starting their own company.

Let’s conclude this article. Happy Building and go on to your hero’s journey.