When I work with companies on their product strategy, or when I teach about product-led growth (PLG) I often work with people on their customer journey. The initial versions I get as a response are usually so oversimplified that they are useless for any discussion or strategic effort. 

If I ask you about the customer journey for Slack (in its early days, not now when everyone knows they need it), you would probably say something like this:

• They try it
• They invite their friends
• They like it
• They pay

But the reality is much more complex than that. The real customer journey – whether you understand it or not – is much richer. It starts way before they use your product, it includes their thoughts and not just their actions, and it’s far from being as linear and simple as you think. Some of these aspects are things that you can change if needed once you get it, and some are just how people work and you must work with them – the way they think and make decisions – in order to win. 

In our Unboxing PLG course (an online course where I teach how to approach product-led growth strategically in order to succeed) I give the following made-up example as a potential customer journey for Slack. You’ll note all the points I mentioned above, and in my next article we will dive into each and every one of them.

The Slack Example

When I was first introduced to Slack I was Head of Product at eBay, so I chose eBay as the company people work for in this example. How did people really start using Slack and got to become paying customers? I imagine it was something like that:

Let’s say that we have an engineer named Sarah. Last night she went out with her friends and they were sharing issues they had at work. It was sort of a support group. They were a number of engineers from various companies, and some of them went to school together. During the evening, as the conversation evolved, people were mentioning this thing called Slack. Sarah didn’t know what it was, so she asked them, and they explained to her that it was a cool new product that helps reduce the use of email for internal communication.

Sarah didn’t really care about reducing email, so she practically forgot all about it. A few days later though, she ran into a very annoying and long email thread that she was added to late in the conversation. She couldn’t understand the context of what was going on, it felt like an endless ping-pong and it was hard to follow who was saying what. That’s when she suddenly remembered her conversation with her friends, who said that Slack solved this problem exactly. She decided to check out what they were talking about.

She went to the Slack website and saw what it was. She understood that it could potentially solve her problem, especially since it was free. So she signed in and started exploring the tool. She grasped the concept of channels and decided it was worth a try. She invited her team members, and they engaged in casual conversations (Hi! Hi 🙂 What’s up? I’m good and so on), exploring the tool’s features. After spending some time on Slack without any immediate need for serious discussions, they left it for the day.

The following day, Nate, another team member who enjoyed trying new tools, saw the potential in Slack and decided to use it for communicating within the team. He reached out to Sarah – on Slack of course, and they had a “real” conversation, realizing the comfort and convenience of the platform. They agreed to encourage other team members to use Slack, recognizing its potential as a powerful tool.

As Sarah and Nate deliberately “pulled” conversations to Slack instead of other tools, the team began using Slack for their day-to-day communication. At this point, they no longer wanted to rely on other forms of communication when interacting with people outside their team. For instance, they invited their product manager, Leah, to join Slack. Initially hesitant (who needs another tool?!), Leah eventually started using the tool as the team consistently sent her messages through it. She gradually became accustomed to Slack and preferred it over other communication tools herself.

As Leah recognized the benefits of using Slack exclusively, she started inviting other members of the product team to join as well. This decision aimed to consolidate their communication channels and maximize the benefits of Slack. Gradually, Slack became the default tool for everyday communication between the two teams — Leah’s product team and Sarah’s development team. With a strong commitment to Slack, the team expanded its usage by opening additional channels for specific discussions, such as product updates and A/B test results. They were now using Slack daily and were satisfied with its functionality.

One day Leah attempted to search for something in the product updates channel and realized that her access to the history of discussions was limited. Slack prompted her to upgrade to a paid version to access further history. Initially finding this restriction unreasonable, Leah eventually acknowledged the value of having a Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge, AKA Slack. She suggested to her manager, Tom, that they pay for the premium features to obtain the full value of the tool. Understanding the importance of accessing history, Tom agreed, and they began exploring the pricing and budget options.

Since the pricing was based on a per-user model, Tom collaborated with Dana, the engineering manager of the engineering team to secure the necessary budget. With this collaboration, eBay transitioned from a free user to a paid customer, initially for a single team. Given eBay’s size, it was likely that other teams within the company would follow a similar process. Eventually, eBay could explore two possible paths: either eBay would receive license and budget requests for Slack from various teams, leading them to negotiate an enterprise agreement with Slack, or Slack would proactively approach eBay due to the presence of multiple teams already using their product, proposing an enterprise agreement at more favorable terms. In either case, eBay would evolve from being a paying customer to becoming an enterprise-grade paying customer.

Why It Matters

As you can see, the real journey is much more detailed than how most of us think about it at first, but it’s exactly those details that matter. If you don’t understand your customer journey at that level, it’s easy to lose your way. You will see that things don’t work, but won’t have any idea why.

Why do they not click that button? In most cases, it’s not because the button isn’t large enough or hard to find. It’s because when you think about what’s happening in their heads, it’s just not the next logical step, although your UX might try to lead them there. If you want to fix it, you better understand what’s really broken.

For example, a company I work with wanted to understand why retained users are not converting to paid users (I’m helping them with their transition into product-led growth). When I did this analysis with them, we realized that depending on a person’s initial intent with the product, there are a number of potential next steps after they start using it. It sounds trivial, but you must get into this mindset of walking in the customer’s shoes in order to really understand what it means. 

Unfortunately, they also knew that they don’t really know people’s intent. So they added a question after signup to learn what people are actually here for. To their surprise, it turned out that 40% of the retained users – people who kept using the system by the way – are of a different profile than the one they are aiming for. These are people who only needed their product for personal use and would never ever become paying users.

This is a serious outcome that requires rethinking their marketing, their goals, pricing, and even strategy. Not a pleasant finding. But without it, they could have been moving buttons and changing microcopy forever, to no avail. If people aren’t here to get the value that you are charging for, they wouldn’t pay. If the problem they are solving with your product isn’t serious enough for them to spend money on, they wouldn’t pay – no matter how beautiful and intuitive your product is.

If you are working on a PLG product, this exercise is even more important for you, since you are expecting your customers to walk this journey on their own, and you must make sure it leads them to the right place. That’s part of what we are talking about in our Unboxing PLG online course, alongside how to create a good strategy for product-led growth success and what it takes to actually get there. 

The customer journey is a key factor in your ability to create a successful product. Understanding how your customers interact with your product – for real, including their thoughts and feelings, will uncover underlying issues that are very difficult to see otherwise but have an immense impact on the outcome. Don’t give up on this important tool. Force yourself to get into your customers’ heads and start understanding your customer journey today.