Help users improve retention and engagement metrics. Use when someone is dealing with churn, optimizing activation flows, building habit-forming products, or trying to increase user engagement and lifetime value.
Help the user improve retention and engagement using frameworks from 29 product leaders.
When the user asks for help with retention:
Albert Cheng: "User retention is gold for consumer subscription companies. If you don't retain your users, then a lot of the onus is on getting them to pay on day one." Retention reduces pressure for immediate monetization and is the primary driver of subscription success.
Sarah Tavel: "The test for me, of whether you're building a product that has the ingredients to create a retentive product on a micro level, just at the user level, is that the product should get better the more you use it, and you'll have more to lose by leaving it." True retention is built when a product creates accruing benefits and mounting loss over time.
Jackson Shuttleworth: "What Duolingo really focuses on is, how do we help users build habits around language learning? Getting user come back the next day is the biggest problem to solve." For habit-forming products, next-day return is the most critical metric to optimize.
Kristen Berman: "I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both signup conversion and increasing long term retention. Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important." Accelerating time to value in onboarding compounds across the entire user lifecycle.
Hila Qu: "I think [the aha moment] as a moment, as a first time a user experienced value of your product... At GitLab we actually did a bunch of analysis. We ended up have something along the line of two users, two features used in the first 14 days." The aha moment should be defined by data correlation with retention, often involving multi-user or multi-feature milestones.
Products that retain well make users feel they have more to lose by leaving. This could be data, customization, social connections, or accumulated history.
Great retention comes from a core product loop that delivers value repeatedly, not from notifications or gamification layered on top of a weak product.
For all 47 insights from 29 guests, see references/guest-insights.md