- Initial 70% adoption metric was misleading.
- "Team Adoption" metric predicts churn and expansion.
- Causal link between @mentions and business growth.
- Iceberg model reveals hidden user needs.
In the fast-paced world of product development, celebrating a feature's high adoption rate is a common, yet potentially misleading, triumph. Inbal Horn, a Product Manager at Monday.com, shares a compelling journey of how her team challenged their own success metrics, diving deep to uncover the true impact of their "winning" communication feature. This exploration led to surprising discoveries and innovative strategies that redefined their approach to product growth.
Monday.com's communication features, particularly the "Updates" section, boasted an impressive 70% user adoption. On the surface, this seemed like a product manager's dream. However, Horn and her team recognized the need to connect these internal product metrics to tangible business outcomes. Collaborating with their growth organization, they developed a new leading indicator: "Team Adoption." This metric measures the percentage of users actively engaging with the product within the first 30 days of an account's conversion. Crucially, Team Adoption was found to be a powerful predictor of future churn and expansion, offering a direct link to the company's top-line business goals.
Further analysis using a tool called Loops revealed a critical causal link: the simple act of @mentioning another user within an update significantly increased an account's Team Adoption. This finding shifted the team's focus from general "update usage" to specific, high-impact communication behaviors. With this new understanding, they re-evaluated their initial 70% adoption figure, only to discover a stark reality: only 30% of users performed a communication action (mention or reply) monthly, and only 50% of accounts had even one communication action. The seemingly successful feature was, in reality, underutilized in its most impactful form.
To address this, Horn's team adopted an "iceberg model" for user behavior, categorizing non-adopters into three groups: those unaware of the feature (above the water), those using other communication tools (just below the surface), and those restricted by compliance or specific use cases (deep below the surface). For the "above water" users, they enhanced discoverability and education, leading to a 5% increase in communicating users. For users with existing communication habits, they innovated by allowing replies to Monday.com mentions directly from Slack or email, growing the communication user base by 16% without cannibalizing in-app engagement.
For the deepest layer of the iceberg – users with compliance or specific needs – the team introduced granular permissions. By allowing administrators to control who can communicate, read, edit, or delete updates, they built trust and enabled communication in environments where it was previously restricted. This strategic move demonstrated that sometimes, adding "blocks" or controls can actually "enable" broader adoption by addressing fundamental concerns. The journey underscores the importance of rigorous data analysis, understanding causality, and empathetic user research to transform seemingly successful features into truly impactful drivers of business growth.
“If we change our perspective, dig deeper, and truly look for the meaning and value we provide to customers, we can give a lot of new value to our users within existing features.”
- Inbal Horn, Product Manager at Monday
