Personalization (Growth Design Monthly)

May 2021

Dear Readers,What they don't tell you about being a parent is how much it will wreck your recommendations on streaming services. My top played song on Spotify last year was “Run Baby Run” by Caspar Babypants.We are swimming in personalized experiences as we move through the Internet. But what are the types of personalization features? How does personalization relate to growth? We’ll try to answer these questions in this newsletter while “Baby Shark” plays incessantly in the background. (If you don't know what Baby Shark is, consider yourself lucky.)Personally yours,MollyP.S. We’re talking about product, not ad personalization, but as a public service announcement to the community here’s a reminder to opt-out of every type of ad tracking you can.

Personalization is an umbrella term that encompasses features in categories such as social integration, localization, recommendation engines, or predictive interfaces. And, yes, sometimes these are powered by machine learning, but more often than not, they’re just driven by conditional logic. For example, open Hotels.com and inspect the code. You’ll see dozens of attributes personalizing your experience. This includes your geolocation, device type, referral and remarketing tags, or whether you’ve been put in a business or leisure travel cohort. Almost no one sees the same homepage for Hotels.com.

Personalization and growth

Personalization is about creating shortcuts to the information that people want, even anticipating what they need. In an interview with First Round Review, growth design leader Angel Steger summarizes personalization well by quoting Helen Mirren’s line in the movie Gosford Park. “She says, ‘I'm the perfect servant. I know when they'll be hungry, and the food is ready. I know when they'll be tired, and the bed is turned down. I know it before they know it themselves.’ To me, growth design is exactly that,” says Steger. “It scaffolds the user to success, behind the scenes.” Personalization with a growth focus simplifies products for users but often adds technical complexity for product teams. When successful, a personalization layer speeds up customer activation and improves retention. It makes products easier to use by reducing noise. In today’s market, existing customers don’t just expect personalization they often want it (to a point—let’s not get creepy, y’all!)

Investment

Personalization features require hefty initial investments to train them and get them into production with real user data. Personalization has a high ongoing maintenance cost to manage data inputs and outputs. This is why personalization discussions often end up in an evaluation of data governance and third-party tools. The actual design part of personalization can feel like the last %1 of a project. New products are hitting the market to promise off the shelf personalization engines, but is it hype or high value? Can you really get meaningful personalization without millions of dollars of development costs? The jury is still out on this.

Segmentation

Personalization is a journey with many stepping stones leading towards more individualized experiences. The first steps are generally around putting users into cohorts such a first-time visitors, free trial users, or subscribers to name just a few. I recommend most companies start with just two cohorts with forked user journeys and scale up from there.

Case Study: Vidyard

Vidyard is a B2B Canadian startup that builds video tools for sales and marketing teams. Vidyard was traditionally a sales-led organization for the enterprise that was high-touch point and personal. That personal touch didn’t scale when they expanded use cases and transitioned to a product-led model with a freemium product and a new self-serve buyer experience. For Vidyard, personalization is a strategy for creating an authentically unique experience that leverages the team’s expertise to help sell through video.Whether you’re looking at personalized content on a web page, getting unique onboarding experiences for your use case, or other tailored user journeys based on your behavior, they want you to feel like a Vidyardian has been with you the whole way.

Big Bets

A lot of growth design is about optimization—small tests and interventions that add up over time. We don’t generally get huge spikes in numbers with optimization, but it makes for a steady positive trend line. Incrementalism at its finest.The big bets are when we attempt to do something wildly new to drive exponential gains or virality. We can de-risk these big bets with small tests, but they usually take a major investment to get off the ground. While many big bets require a leap of faith, personalization is not one of them. Personalization is a reliable big bet that enhances the overall growth power of products.

About the Author

Molly Norris Walker is a serial head of design at high-growth startups and author of Design-Driven Growth. Currently, she leads design and user research at InfluxData. She also co-leads the GrowthDesigners.co premium community called Growth Design Fellows.  

Growth Design Fellows can chat about this month's newsletter topic with Molly.

• When: Thursday, May 6 at 12:00 pm PST. 

• What: Agenda

• Where: Find out how to join on Fellows premium community pages

Vidyard is hiring

Product Designer (Remote Canada) 

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