Use the Games of Product Activity to Define Your Engagement Strategy

This post is part of our North Star series. Read the rest here.

Revenue growth depends on customer engagement. You drive revenue when you engage your customers by consistently delivering value and helping them discover that value. Without engagement, your customers will unlikely want to keep investing their time and money in your platform.

At Amplitude, we've researched thousands of companies and trillions of user actions. We found that all digital products engage users in one of three ways: attention, productivity, or transaction. We call these the three games of engagement or games of product.

Unless you know which game your digital product is playing, you can't adjust your product to win the game. For hypergrowth, it's necessary to focus on one game so everyone on your team knows whether they're playing to win more attention, productivity, or transactions.

The games of product activity will help you and your team define which game of engagement your product is playing.

Introduce your team to the three games

To run the activity, you just need to introduce your team to the three games and then run a discussion. First, make sure your team understands the concept of value exchange in digital products.

The digital product value exchange

Most digital products involve a value exchange. You offer value to the customers by doing things like providing them with the information they need, entertaining them, obtaining an item they need, or helping them complete a task. Customers provide compensation in the form of the following.

• Purchase: Buying your product
• Ad engagement: Interacting with ads on your platform
• Referrals: Sharing your product with friends and family
• New content: Contributing content to your platform
• Price and content signals: Customer engagement and usage give you valuable information about how valuable they find different products and/or content.

The value you give customers and how they compensate for it looks different in each game.

Attention

In the attention game, your product tries to make sure your users spend as much time on the platform as possible. Attention products typically offer value in the form of:

• Entertainment: Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube TV
• Information: Reddit, Quora, and Lemmy
• Self-expression: Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest

Products playing the attention game offer different kinds of value such as connection, stimulation, or emotional relief. Often, these products might provide a mix—for instance, people use Instagram to connect with friends, promote themselves, and learn information.

Transaction

The transaction game involves helping customers to complete purchases. Most companies playing this game are ecommerce platforms. In contrast to attention, users' time on your product isn't that relevant. If customers aim to make a quick purchase, you want to reduce the time they spend on your platform—or at least the time it takes to complete the checkout process.

However, different ecommerce platforms offer different types of value. Walmart and Amazon, for instance, offer utility—access to the products you need quickly and at a low price. In contrast, a luxury platform like FWRD offers customers status and recognition, so the transaction cost doesn't matter as much.

Productivity

In the productivity game, products give customers an easy and reliable way to complete a task or workflow. Unlike an attention product, time spent on a productivity product can reduce its value. Instead, productivity companies aim to give users ease of use, efficiency, and/or mastery over a particular task—helping them do something they couldn't do without the platform or improve how they complete an existing task.

In B2B, productivity is the dominant game. Examples of companies playing the productivity game include Adobe, Asana, and Dropbox.

Discuss with your team and define your game

Once everyone on your team has had a chance to learn what the games are, ask them to discuss which game your product is playing. Although it's tempting to say that your product plays all three games or more than one, it's not useful for your strategy. So, prompt your team to decide on one game.

Imagine you work for a grocery delivery product. The game you're playing is the transaction game. The more customers complete a transaction, the more you win.

If your team isn’t clear on the game you're playing, they might focus on the wrong things. Perhaps they spend time creating and shipping features that increase the time customers spend browsing the store instead of improving the checkout experience to help customers complete more purchases.

Use a North Star Metric that aligns with your game

Once you've determined your engagement game, the next step is to align your North Star Metric (NSM) to your game. When your North Star Metric lines up with your engagement model, you can improve your business. The alignment helps you see what you need to do to improve your product experience.

A North Star Metric is a product team's measure of success. Your North Star lays out the relationship between the customer problems you solve and the revenue you generate by solving those problems.

If your North Star Metric doesn't represent how customers engage with your product, you might adjust your app to achieve the wrong metric and outcome.

Even within the same type of game, companies will have different business models (different ways of creating the product value exchange) and, therefore, a different North Star. Let's look at some hypothetical examples:

• Attention game NSM examples:
  • Facebook: Time spent actively engaging with the feed
  • Netflix: Number of subscribers waiting more than X hours of content per month

• Transaction game NSM examples:
  • Amazon: Purchases per Prime subscriber
  • Walmart: Purchases per customer visit or session

• Productivity game NSM examples
  • Asana: Average tasks completed per account
  • Dropbox: Average files shared per account