Built to last: An ex-product leader at LinkedIn, Twitter on the only stickiness metric that matters
In this new era, it’s become even more important to design products that are easy for users to adopt, learn, and extract value from in the future. Below, I’m sharing the qualities that define the products that stick around—and the one metric that will help you predict whether yours will too.
What makes great products stick?
1. Their use cases are deeply understood If I’ve learned anything about the key to building products that last, it’s this: Deeply understanding the individual use cases of everyone who touches the product, and what “success” means for them.
2. They build loyalty at the outset I’ve always believed that the most powerful opportunity to build loyalty with product users is in the onboarding funnel. This is the moment someone is willing to try your product.
You have their attention—don’t waste it.
Here, my advice to product leaders is to think of onboarding as an opportunity to take someone from feeling curious, to possessing core habits. Your goal should be to maximize the predictability that users will want to re-engage with your product.
Onboarding goes beyond the first setup screen, or even the first session—it’s an ongoing process that continues until someone is using the product effectively on their own.
3. They give users a reason to come back Even after loyalty has been established, it’s important to occasionally nudge users to come back. I encourage product builders to harness the right “moments”, or triggers, that can prompt people to return, and engage on their terms. This can take one of two forms:
- Time- or event-based triggers: take advantage of moments in time or events in the real world to remind people your product exists. For example, eCommerce companies may sometimes say, “The holidays are coming up—have you shopped for that special someone yet?”.
- Product-based triggers: sometimes, there’s enough activity happening within the product that you can leverage the information to bring people back. For example, social media apps might say, “Your friends posted 10 new videos—come and check them out!”.
The takeaway? From onboarding to re-engagement, your objective should be to get (and keep) users interested for reasons that align with the intrinsic value of your product.
The only stickiness metric that matters: “how many people are really using my product?”.
“How many times did users perform a core action on the expected cycle?”.
Ask yourself: what’s the most impactful thing you can do to make those people feel compelled to stick around?