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The Science of Small Wins

The 35 Best Productivity Software Tools of 2019

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Productivity apps continue to pop up right, left, and center. If you’re trying to stay up-to-date, it can quickly begin to feel like you’re wasting time looking for the perfect software rather than actually working efficiently. At I Done This, we continue to improve our done lists and integrations to eliminate the need for meetings — but we realize that there are many more ways that you and your team can get more done in less time.

To spare you hours of Internet sifting, we’ve updated our collection of the 35 best productivity software tools for the New Year.

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How to Do a Time and Motion Study to Make Real Change

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The famous management thinker Socrates once said: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

As 2019 approaches, everyone is making resolutions. Most people do this without data, hypotheses or any idea of what they’re going to do differently. It’s usually a combination of regrets over bets that didn’t pan out, thoughts about what they feel they should improve, and inspiration from others. And they wonder why nothing really changes.

Intention without information is powerless. To misquote great management thinker, Albert Einstein, doing the same thing and hoping for a different result is the definition of inefficiency.

This is where the personal time and motion study can help.

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20 Vetted Tools and Tips for Managing Time Zone Differences

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[Image Source: Unsplash]

 

If you work on a remote team, there’s a good chance you’ve struggled with managing time zones.

With co-workers and subscribers spread all over the world, it can be hard to keep track of what time it is where your colleagues are. Even if you’re not working remote, it’s easier than ever to end up doing business with someone in a different time zone. As our world becomes more connected, discovering a good time zone meeting planner becomes more important than ever.

Here at I Done This, we face this challenge daily. We’re a small team dispersed across three continents. The work day is finishing up for some of us just as it’s getting started for others, which is why asynchronous communication is so important. There’s only a short window of time for us to communicate in real time, and that window is critical to our productivity.

Here’s a look at some of our favorite time zone apps and strategies for managing our workflow.

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Why Jeff Bezos’ Two-Pizza Team Rule Still Holds True in 2018

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[Source: Amazon]

 

Jeff Bezos is prolific. In 21 letters to his investors over the years, he has delivered dozens of nuggets of wisdom ranging from prioritizing long-term outcomes over short-term results to embedding R&D in every single department.

He also has a unique take on company communication.

Bezos believes that no matter how large your company gets, individual teams shouldn’t be larger than what two pizzas can feed.

Think of it this way: at a large party, it’s hard to connect with people. You’re overwhelmed by the number of guests you could possibly meet and converse with. You end up with more — yet more shallow — interactions. If the host is trying to project a message to the crowd, he or she might have trouble shouting over the din. In contrast, at a small party, you might talk to the people sitting next to you for hours. You can develop more meaningful relationships and maybe come away with new ideas and inspiration.

Although Bezos first declared the “two-pizza” rule in Amazon’s early days, it continues to resonate in 2018. As the pace of venture capital accelerates, and more and more companies enter hypergrowth, figuring out how and when to design teams for effective communication becomes critical.

Not convinced? Here’s the hard evidence behind why the two-pizza team rule holds true.

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How to Leverage Psychology to Provide Better Customer Support

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Despite the growing popularity of instant-messaging support and “conversational agents”—better known as chatbots—actually talking to a customer on the phone is one of the best ways to engage in a real conversation and learn more about a customer’s problems.


Done right, such conversations can be helpful, valuable, and even fun. But we don’t tend to hear about those interactions. Instead, we usually hear horror stories of automated switchboards, interminable wait times, and disinterested customer support staff.

Everybody has a terrible story about customer support. Whether it’s waiting on hold for three hours to speak with someone at the IRS, having to explain a problem repeatedly to one support rep after another, or dealing with random disconnections in the middle of crucial support calls, we’ve been conditioned to accept that customer support is a uniquely terrible experience to be endured rather than a satisfying, rewarding part of patronizing a business.

According to data from GetApp Lab, all that most customers want from a support experience is to speak with a real live human being. That’s it.

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It’s no secret why a majority of customers want to speak with a real person during support calls. It’s one of the best channels for quickly identifying and solving complex customer problems. When we really understand where our customers are coming from, it’s much easier to solve their problems and build trust.

Why Customers Dread Calling Customer Support Numbers

If speaking with a customer support rep is so effective, then why do so many people dread the thought of picking up the phone and calling an 800 number to speak with one?

On average, American consumers spend around 30 hours every year on the phone with customer support personnel. Because we spend so much time on these calls, we already have preconceived notions about how the entire experience will play out. We’re already on the defensive before we even finish dialing, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.


Although many consumers have legitimate grievances with telephone-based customer support, most of the negativity surrounding these calls is rooted in the perception that companies don’t respect customers’ time. Calling a customer support line isn’t just a pain in the ass—it’s often a considerable investment of time that prevents customers from doing other things. Even if there’s a very good reason for a lengthy wait to speak with a support rep, every minute a customer wastes waiting on hold damages that company’s brand. It creates negative perceptions about that company that can be very difficult to undo, even if the actual support call goes well.

These experiences also play a significant role in whether a customer will even attempt to contact customer support in the first place. It doesn’t matter how skilled, knowledgeable, or friendly your support reps are if your customers don’t even want to pick up the phone.

Customer Support Is a Critical Competitive Advantage

Instead of treating customer support as an afterthought, think of it as a way to further differentiate yourself from the competition. Talking through an issue with a customer over the phone allows you to get to the heart of the problem—and ultimately solve it—much faster, but it’s also a unique opportunity to strengthen the relationship with the customer and create a positive association with your brand.

The better the customer support experience, the more positive the association—a crucial competitive advantage in any industry.

However, before you can deliver a world-class customer support experience, it’s important to understand why your customer chose to call you in the first place. Customers who prefer phone support are often looking for:

  • Quick solutions to complex problems. Voice support allows your support reps to ask detailed, probing questions and guide customers through the support process in real time. Even relatively minor issues like password resets can be solved much faster in a simple phone conversation, as opposed to instant messaging or chatbot support.
  • A more intimate, personal experience. Voice support isn’t just effective; it’s also a way to provide the kind of personalized white-glove service your tired, stressed-out customers crave. The more difficult the problem, the more your customers will appreciate attentive customer support.
  • Difficult conversations. Even customers who are furious still want their problems to be acknowledged. Voice support is ideal for customers who want—or even need—to vent their frustrations. The immediacy of voice support helps the customer feel as though their voice is being heard and gives your reps the opportunity to calmly walk customers through the solution they want.

It’s vital to understand the mindset of the customers who choose voice support over other channels. The needs of a customer who chooses to pick up the phone to speak with a rep are very different from those of a customer who opts to utilize live chat. Similarly, customers who favor email support aren’t likely to need as prompt a response as someone who calls your support team.

Understanding the differences in the needs of customers who choose different support channels is the first step in creating better, more rewarding support experiences. Likewise, considering the frame of mind a customer is likely to be in during a support call allows your reps to preemptively address problems before they arise and alleviate the frustrations of the caller.

The biggest challenge to overcome for voice support personnel is the negativity surrounding perceptions of voice support itself. A little understanding goes a long way, and by demonstrating empathy with customers and proving that you genuinely value their time, you can prove that customer support is a crucial part of your entire business, not merely an afterthought.

Give Your Customers the Support They Deserve

Your customers don’t just expect you to provide best-in-class support experiences when things go wrong—they also need to be understood and met where they are. Voice support is one of the most effective ways to solve your customers’ problems, but only if your reps understand where your customers are coming from long before the phone rings.

Great customer support isn’t just about solving problems; it’s also about building relationships, strengthening your brand, and helping people feel that their time is as valuable to you as their business.

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Scaling Your Business Without Losing Your Culture

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Aside from “innovation,” few buzzwords carry as little real meaning in Silicon Valley and the broader tech sector than “culture.”

While countless startups and established companies alike have seized upon the idea of corporate culture as a vehicle of employee attraction and a way to differentiate themselves in crowded markets, culture remains one of the most crucial aspects of your organization.

So how do you cultivate and maintain a strong, ethical corporate culture when you’re trying to scale?

In this article, we’ll be taking a look at what companies actually mean when they talk about culture, as well as ways to foster your corporate culture as a direct reflection of your company’s brand values.

First, let’s talk about what culture really means.

Healthy, Productive Cultures Don’t Just Happen

Perhaps the most important thing to realize about culture—at least as it pertains to companies and brands—is that, even if you do nothing, a culture will emerge across your organization. Once we understand this, it becomes easier to see that culture is a result of actions, decisions, and direct actions.

Put another way, strong corporate cultures don’t just “happen.” We have to make them happen.

This is surprisingly difficult even in the early stages of small companies. Think about it for a second. If workplace culture is an extension of a company’s brand values, who decides what those values are? Once that’s been figured out, how do you actually disseminate these ideas and values across your organization?

You could be forgiven for thinking that the CEO or founders are responsible for identifying and shaping a company’s values as well as ensuring that every employee understands these principles. The problem with this approach is that it’s up to a single individual to arbitrarily decide what the entire company’s values are and adopt a top-down approach to implementing those values. This is fine if your company aspires to be the personal fiefdom of a control-freak CEO, but for companies that want to cultivate and nurture genuinely meaningful corporate cultures, it’s completely, wildly unrealistic.

What We Really Mean When We Talk About ‘Culture’

One way to think about culture is to see it as “our way of life.” As you can probably imagine, this covers virtually every single aspect of a company and its operations, from large, intangible brand values to how your customer support teams answer the phone or respond to email.

Culture encompasses big and small things, such as:

  • The products we build and how we ship them
  • The way we communicate internally and externally
  • The messages we choose not to send—and why
  • The incentives we use to motivate our staff
  • The behaviors we exhibit every day
  • The boundaries that, if crossed, have meaningful consequences
  • The speed at which serious problems are escalated to someone who can solve them
  • The speed at which those problems are acted upon
  • The way we dress and the symbols we display
  • The ways in which we celebrate victories
  • The things that make us proud, and the things that bring us shame
  • The things that upset us, and the things that bring us joy
  • The things we do to grow as individuals and as teams
  • The way we perceive ourselves and our role in a company

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the things that fall under the umbrella of corporate culture. It is, however, a way to start thinking beyond Casual Fridays and ping-pong tables as being representative of the cultures we create.

Our companies—and our people—deserve better.

Action + Communication = Values

One of the major challenges to establishing and maintaining a strong, cohesive corporate culture is the fact that many companies rely on at least partially distributed teams. It’s hard enough to foster and cultivate an inclusive culture at a growing company without tossing remote workers and asynchronous communication into the mix.

That’s what makes understanding that corporate values are the direct result of what we do every day and how we communicate with each other so important.

However, even this is easier said than done. For small teams, it may well be possible to intentionally create a positive culture via Slack. For larger teams or fast-growing companies, it’s completely impossible.

As Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius once said, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” For our purposes, this means that all those negative interactions we try to avoid—angry posts on social, customer support tickets, bad reviews—are actually the most valuable opportunities to identify and cultivate the brand values we want to foster across our companies. A negative tweet, for example, may be a great opportunity to identify a potential feature gap in a product or fix an overlooked bug. A customer support ticket might be a great way to update your internal documentation or develop a new troubleshooting tool.

Put another way, failure is a much better teacher than success.

Values Are Meaningless Until We Act Upon Them

As we mentioned earlier, “culture” has become one of the most overused buzzwords in tech. Many companies talk a good game about their culture and values, but talk is cheap.

Values mean nothing until we act on them. We’re inherently social creatures. We follow the examples set by others, particularly those we admire. It’s easy for a CEO to talk about open-door policies, but their actions are what matter; it doesn’t matter how easy it is for employees to air their grievances with the Executive team if nothing ever comes of it.

There are unique challenges to retaining a strong corporate culture as a company grows. However, it always comes back to the same two things: how we communicate and how we choose to act upon that communication. This applies to the scrappiest underdog startups and to established tech behemoths.

Avoiding Culture Shock

Corporate culture is a lot like a garden. Left alone, it may be fine for a while, but before long, you’ll be confronted with a tangled, overgrown wilderness that bears no resemblance to the garden you originally planted. If, however, you tend that garden carefully and consistently, it will bloom and thrive.

Take a look at the culture of your company and think of it as that garden. How are you nurturing it? When was the last time you got on your hands and knees and weeded it? How often do you water it? Sure, Mother Nature will do most of the work, but we have to get our hands dirty, too.

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3 Ways to Create a Culture of Documentation

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At many companies, documentation isn’t a core part of their internal operations, but a laborious chore to be managed; a way to prove that a meeting or conversation took place, never to be looked at again. However, the most productive, successful teams recognize obsessive documentation for what it truly is—an opportunity to work smarter and help your team focus on solving new problems, not mitigating the impact of old ones.

As valuable and impactful as documentation can be for teams of all sizes, it doesn’t happen by accident. Like any other aspect of managing your team, documentation should be a core facet of your corporate culture and an extension of your brand values. Yes, it takes time and effort to cultivate a culture of documentation, but doing so can have an incredible impact on your productivity and the dynamics of your team itself.

Let’s take a look at how you can start actually building a culture of documentation within your team.

Start with Standardization

One of the main reasons why documentation is so often overlooked is because most teams don’t have a standardized approach to getting it done. Who’s responsible for documenting what, exactly? What should that person do with that documentation, anyway?

When you get down to it, most of the resistance to documenting internal processes is rooted in a fundamental resistance to change. As the old adage says, everybody loves progress but nobody likes change. That’s why standardizing your documentation processes is so critical — by implementing predictable systems for documenting your work, you’re eliminating most of the ambiguity and uncertainty that makes people so resistant to change in the first place.


One of the best ways to start standardizing your documentation workflow is by using templates. Obviously, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for streamlining how and when you document the work your team does, but you can simplify the process by using templates as a starting point.

Standardized document templates reduce the cognitive overhead of actually documenting internal processes, because whoever is responsible for doing the documentation doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel after every meeting; they can adjust an existing template, document the work being done, and get on with their day. This approach is also much less disruptive because it doesn’t require a radical overhaul of how your team thinks. Rather than creating brand-new documents every time a process needs to be documented, your team can amend a simple template.

Another benefit of standardizing your documentation process is that it makes sharing important information much easier. When people in different teams or departments know what to expect from internal documentation, they’re more likely to share and actually use that information.

Build Living Documents That Grow with Your Company

Standardization is important, but so is recognizing that very few documents will stand the test of time as your company scales. Processes that may have worked well during your company’s scrappy startup phase may be entirely inappropriate for larger, more established teams. That’s why it’s crucial to create living documents that can grow alongside your company.


Living documents—documents that are updated over time—are crucial to any long-term documentation project. This is because not only do living documents make it easier to take note of changes as they happen, but they also eliminate the need to create multiple documents. They can also be linked together to create cohesive, relevant, up-to-date document hierarchies for complex projects, rather than forcing teams to rebuild entire libraries of documentation every time from scratch.

However, just because a document can—and should—evolve and grow with your team, it’s still important to approach living documents with standardized processes in mind. This helps minimize repeated work, eliminates potential redundancies across multiple documents, and ensures everybody knows what to expect.

Use Asynchronous Communication to Empower EVERY Member of Your Team

One of the major reasons why documentation falls by the wayside is because it is perceived as a top-down process; managers document internal processes, which the rest of the team is then expected to follow. This approach can work, but it’s much more effective to secure buy-in from everyone on the team by utilizing asynchronous communication and allowing every team member to contribute.


Fortunately, there are dozens of tools that make asynchronous communication effortless. Whichever tool you choose to use, it’s important that every member of your team is able and encouraged to actively contribute to your living documentation. If your team members can offer their own insights, thoughts, and suggestions to a document, they’re much more likely to do so—and this is crucial to building a culture of documentation, rather than merely implementing yet another task for your already busy team.

Asynchronous communication is practically mandatory for distributed and virtual teams. Communicating effectively across even smaller teams can be a major challenge when you introduce factors such as time zones, which increases the risk of losing valuable internal knowledge and expertise. The easier you make it for your team to share their insights, the greater the cumulative benefit to your team as a whole.

Incorporating this approach to documentation can also make your team members feel more valued. If managers or executives are the only ones who can create or amend your living documents, it can feel exclusionary to members of your team who may have genuinely great ideas or suggestions on how to improve internal processes. Allowing and encouraging every member of your team helps your company grow, but it also helps those team members feel appreciated and that their ideas have value.

Better Documentation Makes for Better Teams

Documentation might not be the most exciting aspect of your work, but it can have an immense impact on your team’s productivity, cohesion, and overall happiness. It becomes especially important if your team or company is still in an active growth stage, particularly when branching out into new products, service areas, or industries.

By standardizing document creation and working asynchronously to keep living documents up-to-date, you’re making an invaluable investment in your team’s future success.

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Great Customer Support Starts with Great Teamwork

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Not so long ago, customer support was seen as a luxury rather than a necessity.

Many companies mistakenly saw customer support as an expense to be managed rather than as an asset to be leveraged. As flawed as this position may be, it’s understandable. After all, it’s a lot easier to quantify the value of a lead or a sale than it is to somehow measure the impact of a successful support experience.


Unfortunately, one result of this mindset is that, historically, customer support teams have been overlooked or neglected in favor of more tangible investments.

For instance, customer support has very little influence on product development, yet it’s still expected to handle any and all problems created by the product. Conversely, product teams—which can shape the growth trajectory of entire companies—often leave it to customer support teams to clean up their mess on the back end.

Of course, that was then. Things are different now—much different.

In today’s completely oversaturated technology market, it’s getting harder and harder for companies to differentiate themselves from the competition solely in terms of their underlying tech. As a result, only companies that invest in their frontline staff and give them the tools and resources they need to deliver better, faster support will succeed.

One of the best ways to deliver superior customer support is to elevate your customer support teams from within. Let’s talk about how we can do this by working together—across Sales, Marketing, and Support—toward a common goal.

Help Your Teams Work Together

Picture the scene: A customer buys two brand-new smart-home speakers because of their advertised surround-sound capability. But there’s a problem: That feature isn’t due to be rolled out until much later in the year. Now somebody has to break it to the understandably upset customer that they bought a product on the basis of a feature that hasn’t yet been implemented.

These sorts of situations happen every single day, and often its Support that has to deal with the aftermath. It’s on Support to deliver the bad news, and they’re the ones who somehow have to smooth over an impossible situation as best they can.

These kinds of interactions are hugely damaging to your company’s brand, not to mention that time, energy, and resources are wasted in an effort to salvage the situation. So how can you avoid situations like this in your own company? By making sure that Sales, Marketing, and Support work in harmony to create a seamless, consistent customer experience that scales. If you get this right, you’ll join the ranks of Amazon, Zappos, and other customer-centric companies that are renowned for treating their customers well.

Ready to bring everything together and deliver a superior experience to your customers? Read on.

Nail Down Your Customer Profiles

You can’t effectively support your customers if you have no idea who they really are. That’s why developing detailed, three-dimensional personas or customer profiles is essential; it’s vital that, regardless of department or job role, everybody knows and understands your customers in the same way. If you don’t, you can’t expect to communicate effectively about your customers’ needs, desires, or motivations.


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Creating rich, detailed customer profiles helps every department better understand their role in the acquisition process.

Never created a customer profile or buyer persona? Here’s how:

  • Describe your company’s ideal customer: Who are they? What matters to them? Why would they choose your business over a competitor? Once you’ve started to ask these questions, give your customer persona a name and a face to make them easier to visualize and relate to.
  • Delve deeper and fill in the blanks: Once you’ve established the skeleton of your customer profile, it’s time to drill down so you can start fleshing out the persona further. Why wouldn’t your ideal customer do business with you? What factors are important to their decision-making process? The more detail you can capture, the better; understanding the psychological nuances of your customer will help you craft deeply relevant messaging that directly appeals to and engages your ideal customer.
  • Think about how your ideal customer will discover your business: For this step, it’s time to think about content. What newspapers, magazines, and blogs does your ideal customer read—and why? Which social media platforms do they use most? What does your ideal customer search for online? Where do they get their industry news? The more you know about where and how your customers are spending their time, the more effectively you can intercept their attention and position your company as a solution to their problems.

The process of crafting detailed buyer personas takes some effort, but it pays off in the long run.

Onboard New Hires the Right Way

Many companies see onboarding as little more than a glorified orientation session. Typically, this involves a myopic focus on the company, its staff, and its internal processes. Although these are all elements of better onboarding programs, it’s vital that you also teach new hires about your ideal customers and how you interact with them as a business.

Here’s what this looks like in action:

  • Onboarding starts before a new hire’s first day: The best teams know that onboarding truly begins far in advance of a new employee’s first day on the job. In the weeks leading up to a new hire’s first day, send a series of “pre-start” onboarding emails to the new hire to prepare them for life at your company. Each email should have a different focus, but don’t feel limited to the specifics of their role—this is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the corporate culture you’ve worked hard to cultivate, too.
  • Launch a “buddy” program: Pairing a new hire with a dedicated onboarding “buddy” is a great way to personalize the onboarding experience and minimize stress for the new employee. Ideally, onboarding buddies should be chosen cross-departmentally to give new hires a better sense of what people do in other departments and how they work. This context is critical in developing a consistent, organization-wide approach to supporting your customers.

It doesn’t matter whether your new hire is joining your sales team, your marketing department, or your customer success desk. The goal is to help new hires hit the ground running and gain vital insights into how you work as a company, not just as a department.

Implement Interdepartmental Training Programs

It’s hard to get everybody on the same page if people across multiple teams can’t communicate effectively with one another.


Conducting regular, interdepartmental training sessions involving Sales, Marketing, and Support is one of the best ways to develop a singular framework for thinking about your products and your customers. This is also an exercise in cultivating empathy; exposing Sales and Marketing personnel to typical support problems helps them understand the challenges support reps face every day.

There are two things you need to do to develop an effective interdepartmental training program:

  • Be consistent: Whether it happens once a week, once a month, or once a year, it’s vital that everybody knows exactly when the next training session is so they can prepare appropriately. The more engaging your sessions are, the more value you’ll deliver to your employees.
  • Be specific: Don’t focus on vague, nebulous problems—address specific, actionable issues that your departments are trying to solve right now. Once you’ve identified tangible issues to tackle, walk through the solutions with everybody, not just key stakeholders. This is another exercise in empathy; it’s difficult to bring people together if you’re not committed to a culture of transparency, accountability, and inclusivity.

Opening lines of communication between Sales, Marketing, and Support will help your sales reps and marketing personnel gain a better understanding of the problems your support team faces every single day, which in turn can help surface new ideas and innovative solutions.

Investing in Support Drives Revenue

There’s no other way to put it: The more effort and resources you devote to providing top-tier customer support, the happier your customers will be—and your revenues will likely increase alongside your customers’ happiness.

Happy Customers Are Loyal Customers

There are few customer retention strategies more potent than doing everything in your power to make your customers as happy as you can. Why? Because the decision to patronize one company over another isn’t a logical decision—it’s an emotional decision. And, whether positive or negative, your frontline support staff is often the source of that emotion.


Great customer support experiences create positive emotions that result in happier, more loyal customers. This isn’t just important in terms of customer retention; it can be a valuable asset in attracting new business:

  • According to American Express, happy, satisfied customers tell an average of nine people about their positive experiences with a company or brand.
  • Data from Right Now suggests that 73% of customers say friendly, helpful support staff can make them fall in love with a brand.

This is all well and good, but that door swings both ways:

  • According to Right Now, 82% of customers have abandoned a company or brand due to a negative support experience.
  • Approximately 67% of consumers cite bad experiences as the primary reason for churn.

Loyal Customers Spend More

It’s no secret that consumers who spend longer in a retail store are significantly more likely to spend more than in-and-out customers. This can be explained, in part, by inertia; it’s harder to stop doing something once we’ve gotten started. Fortunately, this principle also applies to users of SaaS products.

Once a customer has a positive association with a brand—whether physical or virtual—they’re much more likely to spend more:

  • According to Temkin Group, 86% of consumers who have a positive interaction with a brand are likely to repurchase from that business.
  • Data from Medallia, a provider of customer-experience software, suggests that customers who report the best experiences with brands spend approximately 2.4x more annually than customers who report negative experiences.

Investing in Support Is Investing In Your Business

For far too long, customer support has been seen as an add-on, rather than an essential component of a business’s retention strategies. It’s only in the past few years that companies have begun to rethink their relationship with support teams and recognize superior support as a key differentiator in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

That’s why it’s crucial to empower your support team internally. That means facilitating communication between departments, helping employees work together toward shared objectives, and solving problems creatively by inviting everyone to participate.

Support teams can’t do their job without support. That means not only investing in new technologies but also securing buy-in across the entire company and making superior support a core part of everything you do as a business.

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3 Ways to Prioritize Product Development with Matrices

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Even the most organized people only have so much time, which makes prioritizing work all the more important. But how do you prioritize which tasks or product features to focus on when you’re faced with dozens of potential opportunities and a small army of stakeholders?

Matrices are simple organizational tools that can help you and your team visualize your product’s potential features within the context of all the possible features you could develop.

Although there are several different types of prioritization matrices, in today’s post we’ll be looking at three of the most common: the value-complexity matrix, the value-risk matrix, and agile user story mapping.

Prioritizing Product Features Using a Value-Complexity Matrix

As its name implies, value-complexity matrices plot the potential value of a product feature alongside the complexity of implementing such features. Put another way, this kind of matrix categorizes product features by their expected business value and their implementation complexity.

The definition of “business value” will vary from one company to another, even among competing businesses in the same industry or vertical. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of factors that can determine the business value of a product feature, from a proposed feature’s potential value to end users to the traffic or revenue that feature could potentially generate.

“Implementation complexity” is a similarly broad term that can encompass a range of technical challenges, from the length of time a proposed feature will take to integrate into an existing system to the costs of actually developing that feature.

At their simplest, value-complexity matrices can be formatted as a 2×2 grid of quadrants. The business value of a project can be categorized as either high or low, whereas the implementation complexity of a project can be represented as low or high.

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High-value, low-complexity items are the “low-hanging” fruit; these items should be strongly considered for further development given their high potential impact on the business and the ease with which they can be implemented. However, while you can and should pursue these high-value, low-complexity opportunities, it’s vital not to focus on these opportunities to the exclusion of all others. Many startups mistakenly focus all their efforts on securing these easier wins, often to the detriment of high-value, high-complexity features.

High-value, high-complexity items are often broader, more strategic initiatives that require a much greater investment of time, money, and/or effort. Despite the higher costs of implementing these features, high-value, high-complexity features can be immensely valuable in the long run. Rather than overlook these opportunities, consider examining these items to see if any of these longer-term goals can be broken down into simpler, easier subtasks.

Low-value, low-complexity opportunities may be worthwhile exploring eventually, but they should not be prioritized above the high-value features you’ve identified in your project. These ideas may be worth revisiting further down the road, and it may be worth examining whether there are opportunities to derive greater value from these items in the future.

Low-value, high-complexity items should be avoided at all costs. Not only do these opportunities offer little in terms of business value, the complexity of their implementation means these features are effectively off-limits.

Prioritizing Product Features Using a Value-Risk Matrix

Another way to evaluate the potential business impact of proposed product features is to use a value-risk matrix. Similarly to our value-complexity matrix above, value-risk matrices also categorize product features according to their potential business impact but also categorize these opportunities by the overall risk that their implementation poses to the business.

No business can completely insulate itself from all risk, especially when it comes to product development. However, you can categorize and plan for potential risks using a value-risk matrix, especially if you’re not completely sure about your underlying assumptions about a particular product feature. This makes value-risk matrices ideally suited to calculating the potential impact of completely new ideas and initiatives.

Like our value-complexity matrix, value-risk matrices can be structured as a 2×2 grid of quadrants: a project’s value can be categorized as either low or high, as can the associated risk:

High-value, low-risk opportunities are your most urgent priorities. These items promise high value to the business or user while carrying little or no risk, making them the most effective investment of your time and resources.

High-value, high-risk items are also deserving of serious consideration. However, while the potential impact of these opportunities can be exciting, the risks associated with these features can necessitate a more strategic approach, particularly if the risks are primarily financial.

Low-value, low-risk opportunities are definitely worth exploring but only once your high-value, low-risk opportunities have been prioritized. Implementing several lower-value features can have a larger cumulative impact over time, but their individual value makes them less urgent than other priorities.

Low-value, high-risk items should generally be avoided. Not only does their risk outweigh the potential benefits, but pursuing these opportunities could jeopardize the execution of higher-priority items.

Prioritizing Product Features with User Story Maps

So far, we’ve focused on techniques that emphasize the needs of your business and your product development teams. Sometimes, however, you need to put your users first, which is when user story mapping comes into play.

Originally developed by product management consultant Jeff Patton in 2005, user story maps plot your product development priorities against your users’ experiences of actually using your product.

[Source]

Unlike our first two examples, there is no one definitive way to structure or visualize a user story map. There are, however, some commonalities you’ll see among many user story maps.

The top row in our example user story map above (in blue) focuses on things that the user can do. This might include searching for a specific product, adding that product to an ecommerce shopping cart, paying for the product at checkout, or abandoning the cart. These events are typically presented sequentially from left to right, representing the various stages of the user journey.

The second row (in green) represents the various actions that the user can take to complete a given task. The remaining rows (in yellow) represent available subtasks or actions. As you can see in the figure above, the lower an item is in the user story map, the less significant or necessary that subtask is. Many companies can and do segment their subtasks by planned release, which allows development teams to further prioritize subtasks by urgency.

One aspect of user story maps that makes them so versatile is the freedom with which teams can reorganize and reorder tasks as a product is developed. This flexibility can be a major advantage when planning development cycles, as unlike the value-complexity and value-risk matrices, the stories within a user map can be changed, moved, and adjusted over time.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road(map)

The three examples are great starting points for further project planning. For example, if budgetary concerns are among your most urgent priorities, you might find that adapting a value-complexity matrix into a value-cost matrix is more useful.

Your team’s objectives will inform not only what you should be focusing your time and efforts on, but also how you’ll identify and distinguish urgent opportunities; a scrappy, two-person startup that needs to reach product-market fit ASAP will have very different priorities than an established, legacy enterprise IT firm.

When it comes to product development and planning your next dev cycle, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. There is no “correct” way of developing your product roadmap. When putting your product roadmap together, encourage every member of your team to help define and structure the process rather than forcing your team to adapt to a rigid, inflexible roadmap. Your team will be happier, your product will be better, and your users will definitely appreciate it.

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How to Grow a Blog the Hard Way

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Oftentimes, one of the biggest roadblocks to creating great content isn’t finding the time to write it or coming up with new angles to well-worn topics or establishing a regular publication schedule.

It’s finding smart, knowledgeable subject-matter experts who are willing to actually write content.


This, more than anything else, limits the growth of so many blogs. When your writers are also practitioners, it shows in the content. It’s smarter, more insightful, more engaging. You can fake it to an extent, but you just can’t beat content written by someone who really knows what they’re talking about.

Take Intercom, for instance. Intercom’s reputation for quality content is well-deserved, and the company is almost as well-known for the quality of its content as it is for its products. This isn’t accidental; it’s by design. Intercom has made content an integral part of the entire company. Intercom’s co-founder Des Traynor has long been an evangelist for quality content and wrote 93 of Intercom’s first 100 posts himself.

Executive support for content is all well and good, but it doesn’t guarantee success. That’s why, when Intercom began hiring its internal content team, new hires were told they would be editorial conduits for Intercom’s institutional expertise, not just mere content writers. This approach defies conventional wisdom—particularly in SaaS—and it’s also brutally difficult to pull off. It’s this commitment to editorial excellence that sets Intercom apart, even in a densely crowded space.

Intercom’s content team is responsible for growing the company blog and publishing Intercom’s range of books. That’s not all, however. Intercom’s content team also solicits and publishes writing by their peers in other parts of the company—the designers, engineers, marketers, and product managers who work hard to produce, market, and sell Intercom’s products. This content not only fuels growth but also serves as valuable reference material for experts who lack a wealth of outlets that publish the kind of specialized content they need to perform at the top of their game.

To learn more about Intercom’s approach to content, we spoke with senior editor Geoffrey Keating. You may not see Geoffrey’s byline on the Intercom blog all that often, but he is instrumental to the quality of Intercom’s content.

Build Domain Expertise into Your Blog

Saying you need subject-matter experts to publish their insights on your blog is one thing, but actually convincing them to do so is another matter entirely.

If you’ve ever tried to coerce busy engineers or executives into writing a blog post, you probably already know how difficult that can be. According to Geoffrey, the key to success is all about building and maintaining momentum—a process that begins during the hiring process at Intercom.

“For many new employees, the first point of contact they have with Intercom is actually the blog. It’s an incredible recruitment tool for us,” Geoffrey says. “Before new employees start at Intercom, they are usually quite bought into the culture and the philosophy. So for a lot of them, writing for the blog is quite prestigious.”

This sense of prestige is actively cultivated by Intercom’s managers, who often encourage their direct reports to contribute to the company blog. Some managers even incorporate writing and publishing content into employees’ quarterly goals.

“The buy-in we have into content across management makes our job a hell of a lot easier, but at the same time, this is not some perfect process,” Geoffrey explains. “Our writers still have product to build and customers to support. There are times when it would be easier for us to just sit down and try and tell the story ourselves. But we wouldn’t make full use of the knowledge and experience of the writer, and we certainly wouldn’t make the writer feel like they have full responsibility for the story.”

Securing the kind of buy-in that Intercom enjoys isn’t easy, and it certainly isn’t quick. According to Geoffrey, allowing subject-matter experts to craft their own content can be a time-consuming process. That said, encouraging domain experts to contribute to the blog often has a flywheel effect.

“Getting practitioners to write and getting them involved in the editing process might be a bit slower at times, but it means they are much more inclined to pitch in again,” Geoffrey says. “When someone publishes for the first time on Inside Intercom, it’s not uncommon for us to receive another draft from that author one or two weeks later. That’s when we know our process is working.”

Hiring experienced editors to run a corporate blog isn’t the most popular approach in the B2B SaaS world. Is the extra work really worth it?

The results speak for themselves. Take one of Intercom’s most popular posts, The end of apps as we know them, for example. That post was written by Paul Adams, Intercom’s VP of Product and a veteran of both Google and Facebook. Not only is Paul’s topic highly relevant to today’s B2B SaaS landscape, but it also benefits immensely from the decade of experience that Paul brings to the table.

Paul’s post was highly controversial when it was first published, and this controversy resulted in more than 400 different outlets citing Paul’s post. Even the most skilled content marketer may have struggled to write such an excellent post—but Intercom’s strong editorial team helped make it happen.

Paul’s post is far from an outlier for Intercom. The company has published hundreds of similarly successful articles, many of which have been slow-burning, long-tail successes.

Make Nonwriters’ Lives Easier

Despite Intercom’s fastidious approach to content, a remarkable 204 people have written posts for the Intercom blog. Each post appeals to select groups of readers within Intercom’s broader audience, but the cumulative effect is an unstoppable engine of growth that has a significant impact on Intercom’s bottom line. That simply isn’t possible without solid processes in place to support the diverse range of people who write for the Intercom blog on a regular basis.

“As the team has grown, we’ve built up a well-oiled machine,” Geoffrey says. “We do have a lot of process for our team, but we try to keep as many of these processes invisible to the author as possible. If you force new writers to adopt your systems and processes before they even put pen to paper, they might stop while they’re ahead. Our mission is to make it as easy as possible to write for us.”

For writers, the process couldn’t be easier. First, Intercom’s editorial team asks all potential contributors to summarize their proposed post as a short elevator pitch. Intercom’s editors then work with individual writers to get to the core of their topic and identify key points. Editors then work with writers to create detailed outlines, ensuring that everybody is on the same page and reducing the likelihood of extensive edits later on.

“If you’re a designer working on a new product, you wouldn’t jump straight into Sketch or Photoshop,” Geoffrey explains. “You’d sketch some wireframes and get feedback. The exact same goes for writing. When you start with an outline rather than a fully-fledged draft, it adds structure and clarity to the idea. A lot of authors will append the elevator pitch to the top of their documents, where it acts as this sort of ‘North Star’ to keep them on track as they’re writing.”

At this point, contributors are free to actually write their initial drafts—but Geoffrey and the rest of the editorial team are always available to provide writers with support and guidance. It is at this point that Geoffrey’s role begins to diverge from that of the traditional editor.

“Editing as a discipline is so professionalized, and it’s very much baked into the newspaper, magazine, and the book industries,” Geoffrey says. “While the core concepts are the same, I’ve never found that style strictly applicable for what we’re trying to do at Intercom. I don’t deal with writers on a daily basis. I deal with subject-matter experts who are not professional writers. A huge part of our job is actually brainstorming, coaching people, and holding their hand through the process rather than jumping into a doc and chopping and changing their words. I think that’s something that editors probably underplay quite a lot.”

Rather than leaving line edits in draft documents, Geoffrey prefers to sit down with writers face-to-face. Geoffrey describes this approach as “collaborative editing” and finds that it’s much more effective to emphasize an article’s strengths than it is to overwhelm new writers with criticism.

“Getting the first draft over the line is always really, really hard,” Geoffrey says. “But it can’t be underestimated the endorphins you get from publishing an article. So once people have gotten a taste of published life, they’re eager to contribute again because it’s pretty addictive.”

Appearing Effortless Doesn’t Mean It’s Easy

We titled this post “Grow a Blog the Hard Way” for a reason: Building sustainable organic traffic over time is always a challenge, which is why so many startups hire content creators rather than content facilitators.

But building a team tasked with extracting subject-matter expertise from busy practitioners, encouraging them to frame that knowledge in their own words, and maintaining a consistently rewarding, engaging experience for readers is hard—really hard.

As we’ve discussed before, the first decision to be made in any content strategy is whether to be better or different. Successfully executing on a brand-new, untested formula is difficult precisely because there’s no road map to follow. But the elements that make Intercom’s blog truly excellent are also the same elements that make replicating Intercom’s success so difficult.

A company-wide culture of content and a collaborative approach to editing has created a flywheel effect for Intercom, but it has also created a moat. It would take several years of sustained effort, a considerable budget, and a team of highly skilled editorial professionals to even come close to matching the quality and consistency of Intercom’s content.

To the untrained eye, Intercom’s content engine appears to function effortlessly, but the appearance of ease belies just how much work has gone into making Intercom’s blog one of the very best in SaaS. Intercom may be one of the leading B2B SaaS blogs today—but it all began with a bold vision of what B2B content could be, and a lot of late nights and hard work.

“Full disclosure: We’re extremely privileged and lucky to have an entire editorial team at the company’s disposal,” Geoffrey says. “I’m very attuned to the fact that if you’re working at another B2B company, there might be no professional writers, there might be no content marketers—you might have no one willing to contribute to your blog. But hopefully what I’ve shared are some small steps that will help you get started on the right track.”

Without a doubt, he has. Learn more about Geoffrey and his work by following him on Twitter, and delve deeper into his editing process by reading his excellent piece In Praise of Editing.

P.S. If you liked this article, you should subscribe to our newsletter. We’ll email you a daily blog post with actionable and unconventional advice on how to work better.

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