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Churn Flags | Nikki * Elbaz

Sporadic observations. Misc. build-in-public experiences. Weekly podcast breakdowns turning 3-star reviews into growth experiments.

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A PMM's #1 nightmare

EP. 7 | PERCEPTION FLAG If a feature falls in the forest, does a PMM cry? So maybe a PMM's #1 nightmare is when CEO launches the big release early, over the weekend with a tweet. Shudder. But a close second? Pouring your time and energy into features your users WANT and NEED and... watching the adoption rate not. move. Luckily, Buffer's Staff Product Manager woke up from that nightmare calmly and strategically – and the result is refreshing: From single-digit feature adoption to MAU growth...

SPECIAL | ALL 9 CHANGE FLAGS Once upon a churn A daily cleanup song. A tedious accounting task. A strawberry-scented squishmallow cow. Each of those hides a churn story. Every episode of Churn Flags unpacks one Change Flag. This Special Episode gives you all nine: The 9 moments that decide churn or expansion | Special: the whole Change Flags framework Ideas from this episode you don't want to miss: (00:00) How a scented strawberry cow turned the most helpful saleslady in town into the one...

EP. 6 | CHANGE FLAG: IDENTITY There's an event that happens to every company out there. An everyday event. A common event. A dangerous event. Because it slips past retention dashboards. Even though it puts accounts at a 51%-65% churn risk. And has a very simple fix. The 51% churn risk nobody owns – and all it takes is sending a sequence you already wrote | ft. Jane Portman, co-founder of Userlist Ideas from this episode you don't want to miss: (00:00) The everyday event that slips past...

They have blinders. You have blinders. I have blinders. I made a huge mistake with this podcast. So, instead of publishing the slated-for Episode 6, we're doing something different instead: Why what you're working on is what no one adopts | Special episode: The whole Change Flags framework, live Okay, okay, I'll spill. Just in case you don't listen in time. I'm sending you to the Women in Experimentation Summit, where I'm using a bunch of fun stories to break down the Change Flags Framework...

EP. 5 | CHANGE FLAG: FEATURES There's one type of company that shouldn't run into Change Flags. Because when open source users hit a wall, they don't churn. Nor do they chat support. They just open the source code and fix the bug or add the capability themselves. So how do open source companies still lose accounts? Ep 5: Who writes the release notes when your customers write the code? The open-source product adoption gap | Ft. Mario Araujo, Head of Product Growth at Flosum, ex-Head of Growth...

EP. 4 | CHANGE FLAG: PLATFORM / PERCEPTION Up for some SaaS Mad Libs? Fill in the blank: Bitly is a ____________ (noun) You're probably right. But also wrong. Because Bitly is tackling a __________ (proper noun) Change Flag. Ep. 4: The product adoption tax nobody warns category leaders about | ft. Tara Robertson, CMO at Bitly Ideas from this episode you don't want to miss: (03:49) How being famous for one thing introduces churn (in the shape of a customer asking for a product that's been in...

699 WORDS | READ TIME: 3 MIN | CHANGE FLAG: MASTERY Interruptions are only annoying if they're interruptions When you walk into a store and a saleslady sidles over and asks how she can help, what's your reaction? Well, it depends. If you're shopping for your niece's birthday and you have no idea what's trending in the world of teeny-bopper-dom, you thank Saleslady and let her show you the selection of custom phone lanyards. But if you know the exact shade of chartreuse that Niece wants, plus...

Churn Flags Ep. 3 thumbnail — "Help docs: where adoption goes to die", featuring Anand Vatsya of Storylane

EP. 3 | CHANGE FLAG: MASTERY You can be right and you can be dead Here lies the body of William Jay,Who died maintaining his right of way. He was in the right as he sped along,But he’s just as dead as if he’d been wrong. Shoutout to my hometown, this famous joke was first published as a poem in the Detroit Free Press. And it's what came to mind as I edited today's episode. Because when we read reviews that are wrong – when the customer is complaining about something that exists in our product...

READ TIME: 4 MIN | CHANGE FLAG: MARKET / PARADIGMS The Done card Thanks to Claude and Notion, my whole business runs on a wicked Kanban. Everything that's worth anything shuffles through Upcoming, In progress, and Done. When a card hits done, it's out of my filtered view, so I just don't see it. And every week, Claude archives Done cards, and I never look at them again. Michelle Green says she thinks in boards. She's the Director of Product at Cohley (a content marketing platform that matches...

EP. 2 | CHANGE FLAG: MARKET / PARADIGMS I rated the NPS a 10. Then I left. I raved about "Waterly" to everyone. Then their competitor shipped an AI feature. So I left. Classic AI-gap-we-need-to-move-faster story, right? Actually, it wasn't really about the feature. Because just 2 weeks later, "Waterly" shipped the same AI feature. It wasn't an AI gap, it was a communication gap. And that's one of the best ways to solve for the craziness of AI-gap-we-need-to-move-faster: Ep. 2: Why accounts...