HYPERGROWTH Quotes

“When you spend more time talking to “internal stakeholders” than your customers, you’ve lost the ship.”
― David Cancel, HYPERGROWTH: How the Customer-Driven Model Is Revolutionizing the Way Businesses Build Products, Teams, & Brands

“Customers care about being heard, and they care about having their feedback taken into account and knowing that something is being done because of that. They don’t care about when the next version of your product is coming out.”
― David Cancel, HYPERGROWTH: How the Customer-Driven Model Is Revolutionizing the Way Businesses Build Products, Teams, & Brands

“The Spotlight Framework 1. User Experience Issues ​● ​ How do I ...? ​● ​ What happens when ...? ​● ​ I tried to … 2. Product Marketing Issues ​● ​ Can you/I ...? ​● ​ How do you compare to ...? ​● ​ How are you different than ...? ​● ​ Why should I use you for/to ...? 3. Positioning Issues ​● ​ I'm probably not your target customer … ​● ​ I'm sure I'm wrong but I thought ... Using this framework, we can see that a question like “How do I integrate this with Trello?” fits into the user experience category. Because clearly the customer already knows that the integration is possible. It’s not a discoverability thing. They’re not asking if it’s possible, they know that it’s possible, they expect that it’s possible, but they just don’t know how to get it done. In contrast, customers could be asking, “Hey, can you guys integrate with Trello?” or “Can I integrate this part of your app with Trello?” Once again, the important part to focus on here is not the Trello part, it’s the “Can you ...?” or “Can I ...?” And what that tells you is that you have some level of product marketing issue. Because if you can integrate with Trello, the fact they’re asking you that and that they don’t know means that they weren’t educated properly along some part of the sign-up or getting-started path. (It could’ve been a features page on the website where it wasn’t clear, or it could be that you need to do a better job of calling it out inside of the product.) So that’s how I think about user experience issues vs. product marketing issues. But there’s also a third category in my framework: Positioning. Positioning issues are when someone gives you feedback, and they’re usually trying to be nice, and they’ll say something like, “I’m probably not your target customer, but ...” Now, if you know that person is your target customer, there’s probably something wrong in your positioning that’s leading them to believe they’re not a good fit.”
― David Cancel, HYPERGROWTH: How the Customer-Driven Model Is Revolutionizing the Way Businesses Build Products, Teams, & Brands

“I have earmarked in my schedule a certain percentage of my time that I’m always out talking to customers and prospects and learning from them. I try to organize these meetings to happen in-person because I want to see the customer in their natural environment. If I can’t get it in-person in their of office, then I’ll try to do it over coffee, or over a walk, or over lunch, because I want to get them in an environment where their guard is down and we can get them talking about things.”
― David Cancel, HYPERGROWTH: How the Customer-Driven Model Is Revolutionizing the Way Businesses Build Products, Teams, & Brands

“We would get those insights a lot of the time by visiting customers, which is the best. Because we want to see their of office, who sits next to them, if they’re in a cubicle, what’s in their cubicle, what do they have printed out that’s hung on the wall, what does their browser look like, what are their favorites, what’s on their desktop? You just really want to understand, as a researcher, what are they doing? What does their day look like? And the reason why I care so much about that is because rarely do you get that information when you ask someone a pointed question about features or functions or things that they need. A lot of the times we found that the information we were getting when we asked customers directly was kind of aspirational: It was things that they thought that they wanted or that they dreamed of, but when we looked at what they actually did each day, in most cases it had zero overlap. So we learned way more by having those interviews and watching what they were doing, and seeing their daily practice, and seeing how they had to go through ve different apps to do something, or download something into Excel. Excel was gold for us. It’s always been for me, building the kind software that I do. As soon as I see a customer or prospect use Excel, I know we’re onto something. That’s where they’re doing something that we can help them do more efficiently. But it’s something that almost no customer is going to tell you about. Because it’s so boring to tell someone that: “I download this, I export this, I put it in Excel, and I sort it this way, and I do that, then I put it here, then I do this, then I re-upload it here, then I put it in PowerPoint ...”
― David Cancel, HYPERGROWTH: How the Customer-Driven Model Is Revolutionizing the Way Businesses Build Products, Teams, & Brands

“So we’d look at those quantitative metrics, and then we’d have more qualitative ones, which included: ​● ​ The NPS of that customer segment for that product type ​● ​ Feedback that we were getting in-app and outside of that app ​● ​ Features and functions they were asking for / ideas that they were submitting and voting up ​● ​ There were many others that we looked at but this gives you an idea of the metrics we were (and still are) interested in.”
― David Cancel, HYPERGROWTH: How the Customer-Driven Model Is Revolutionizing the Way Businesses Build Products, Teams, & Brands

“At HubSpot, for each of the cohorts that we would be looking at, both by plan size and by persona type, we’d ask questions like ... ​● ​ What’s their frequency of use with different features and functions of that team’s products? Is it getting better over time? ​● ​ Are our best cohorts using the product more over time? How are they using it? ​● ​ What are the best combination of products? ​● ​  Are they using the best three features that we see that we think are correlated with lower churn?”
― David Cancel, HYPERGROWTH: How the Customer-Driven Model Is Revolutionizing the Way Businesses Build Products, Teams, & Brands

“Response time of application -- is it getting better over time?”
― David Cancel, HYPERGROWTH: How the Customer-Driven Model Is Revolutionizing the Way Businesses Build Products, Teams, & Brands

“Our model was always the servant leadership model, meaning the higher your title, the lower you are on the totem pole -- and the more your job is to support the individual contributors and the customers above you.”
― David Cancel, HYPERGROWTH: How the Customer-Driven Model Is Revolutionizing the Way Businesses Build Products, Teams, & Brands

“believe that in today’s world, helping is the new selling and customer experience is the new marketing.”
― David Cancel, HYPERGROWTH: How the Customer-Driven Model Is Revolutionizing the Way Businesses Build Products, Teams, & Brands

“I believe that in today’s world, helping is the new selling and customer experience is the new marketing.”
― David Cancel, HYPERGROWTH: How the Customer-Driven Model Is Revolutionizing the Way Businesses Build Products, Teams, & Brands

“Roadmaps solve for the company not the customer. What solves for the customer is non-stop testing and a continuous improvement.”
― David Cancel, HYPERGROWTH: How the Customer-Driven Model Is Revolutionizing the Way Businesses Build Products, Teams, & Brands