“Prefer” Postmortem: 6 Lessons Learned From A Network Of Independent Professionals

Great post about a product that didn’t make it. Lots to grok in here.

Love this part:

You can’t obsess enough about the top-of-the-funnel.

The more time the Prefer team spent with different Soloists and Clients, the more we realized how many different value propositions there were for first-time users. We learned that some clients just wanted the ability to discover services, some Soloists only cared about referrals while others only sought a better way to serve existing clients, while other pairs of Soloists and Clients just valued things like easy billing and automatic notifications for appointments. With such variance of preferences, the “first mile” of the customer experience either didn’t evolve fast enough or failed to serve a broad enough set of users. This experience emboldened my observation that most product teams only spend the final mile of their experience building the product thinking about (and testing) the first mile of the customer’s experience using the product. It should often be the opposite.

Speaking of Scott – his book is a great read!