I’ve written about Product-Led Growth (PLG) and its relevance for EdTech products. There is a lot of useful content about PLG available on the web — including this video from Joe Thomas, the CEO of Loom. The goal of PLG is to make the user experience so easy and rewarding that users refer it to colleagues (known as the “flywheel” effect). The “flywheel” is critical in EdTech because it reduces the costly and time-consuming customer acquisition costs. If you want to design a product to primarily sell itself and reduce friction that might prevent its adoption, what should you do?
User-friendly Design. The product should be extremely easy to use so that educators don’t have to rely on training. The product should be easy so users can onboard themselves. You want users to see the amazing value of your product as quickly as possible. Creating a class, adding students, and creating a sample assignment might be too much friction for a lot of educators. For more complex products, consider a pre-made demonstration account or a “sandbox” to showcase the product’s value. Also, keep in mind that friction isn’t only related to the product. In some cases, there is psychological friction, which is associated with doing a task differently.
Notifications. Use notifications to engage with users. Notifications can be alerts about new features, upcoming PD, or relevant new content. They can also be insights about product usage and updates about the community (i.e., requests from other users, new users from a school, etc.). This is also a good way to communicate about special offers about optional features.
Optional Features. Showing optional features is a bit like negative space in art. Users need to know that there are additional features, so include them in UI (i.e., grayed-out menu or buttons) and the help files.
Feedback. Create a real-time channel between educators and product support. This can be used to collect feedback quickly and easily when it occurs. The feedback could be a complaint about the UI/UX or it could be a feature suggestion. The feature suggestion should also be piped to a product feedback tool. Product feedback tools allow users to track their requests, see other feature requests and upvote requests. Often the software company will communicate the status of feature requests with statuses such as “evaluating”, “in pipeline”, and “completed”
Support. Teachers have precious little time when they aren’t teaching (e.g., prep periods). This makes asynchronous support impractical because when teachers have time to talk, they are not usually in class and experiencing the problem. A synchronous micro-help is preferable.
Build Community. Make it simple for users to contact important resources like their sales representatives and product ambassadors. Include a discussion board for educators to ask questions about how to use the product with a certain grade level or subject.
Sell. The goal of PLG is to make it easy for users to recommend the product to colleagues. It should be easy for a user to refer a friend and potentially get rewarded.
