Take 11. Game design UX strategy; health tech’s great unlock; Fortnite’s vs. Apple & Google
Welcome to this week’s Double Take on product, health tech, and digital media.
Adobe’s CPO Scott Belsky shared a presentation about the consumerization of enterprise, worth watching as the best enterprise software companies are also consumer ones.
I recently wrote about a simple system (with template) for PMs to maintain a ritual of talking to users regularly, especially for B2B SaaS products. This is a habit everyone talks about but don’t necessarily follow through. As Intercom’s Paul Adams puts it in his piece about developing product judgement, “Product Judgment is obtained through direct experiences with customers”. What’s your practice of getting direct experience with customers today?
Now onto the regular programming 👇
💻 Product
Beyond generic KPIs. Most companies track usage by DAU and MAU (daily and monthly active users). This gives a general idea of success but it’s not the most helpful in measuring how much value users got. That’s why it’s important to have a North Star metric that’s tied to user’s success. At Amplitude, WLU (weekly learning users) is defined as its North Star metric: “# of Weekly Users who are active and share a learning that is consumed by at least 2 other people in the previous 7 days.” For an analytic tool, value is only delivered when users actually learn insights from the data.
An in-depth primer on the UX strategy that lead to Fortnite’s success. Game UX = usability + Engage-ability. Usability considers human limitations including perception, attention, and memory. More tangibly, the list of heuristics listed ensures the game is intuitive and not frustrating. Engage-ability is the emotional layer to usability. It represents factors that internally motivate gamers to want to engage, trigger an emotion, and keep gamers in the flow. These psychology and UX principles can be applied in any product design in general. For example, Superhuman’s founder Rahul talks about this extensively.
PM templates. Lenny’s newsletter shared a set of PM templates, including product requirement document 1-pagers, strategy docs, and go to market templates. It’s tempting to bookmark something like this and forget to come back, so here’s one (Figma’s PRD) template to check out. It’s structured, concise, and produces tangible artifact.
Nikhil shared his 1-pager memo on the solo investment in Canva. While this is about investment, I thought this format could be quite effective for reverse-thinking about how you would “pitch” the new functionality/product you’re building.
📠 Health Tech
Health technology’s great unlock (video + article). A must-watch/read analysis by a16z about the mass acceleration of opportunities for care delivery. Tailwinds that were thought to take 10 years play out is now anticipated to happen in 3 (eg. direct to consumer GTM, recontouring of provider networks, and interoperability & automation). The new OS for care delivery is moving from system of record to system of interoperability to system of intelligent engagement. Good news is there’s enough demand now to support startups dedicated to building the new infrastructure tools. It’s also exciting to witness the paradigm shift of mindset from intuition to one of engineering, where reusable component lead to efficiency and scale in building new technologies.
Investing in healthcare in 2020 (Podcast) Founder of Redox Niko Skievaski and investor Nikita Singareddy shares what it takes to build a successful health tech company, how recent regulation can change the landscape, and the state of EHRs. “Net neutrality” was brilliantly used as an analogy for the need for interoperability rules to open up the data pipes from EHR platforms. Just like cable companies shouldn’t control what websites you can access, EHRs also need a decoupling of being a “platform” and the “data source of truth”.
Teladoc & Livongo’s merger. The largest virtual care physician provider Teladoc acquired Livongo, a chronic care management provider, for $18.5B. This creates a massive digital health company with combined entity valued at $37B (questionable valuation?). Only 25% of their customers overlap, implying cross-selling synergies in customer acquisition & TAM expansion for both sides. Livongo’s patients need providers in its programs and Teladoc’s patients can enroll in Livongo’s chronic care programs.
📣 Media
Jack Dorsey on Twitter’s early mistakes. With 3 months to the election, Jack Dorsey talked about things they would’ve done differently in this interview with The New York Times. One was having greater discipline in understanding the social implications of seemingly small design choices, like showing the count next to the “like” button.
Twitter built incentives into the app that encouraged users and media outlets to write tweets and headlines that appealed to sensationalism instead of accuracy.
Fortnite’s fight with Apple and Google. Epic games released a Fortnite update that included a new in-app payment system for users to directly buy virtual currency. This circumvents the 30% commission, resulting in Apple and Google both removing Fortnite from their app stores. Fortnite sued both companies and released a mockery video against Apple, aptly named nineteen eighty Fortnite.