Battle for attention by different consumer apps in an environment where a large chunk of the audience are digitally native. This audience segment is inherently hyper-connected and hyper-stimulated. While personalized experiences are table-stakes in current apps, there are 3 key facets that consumer products need to look at to build stickiness. While not sufficient themselves, these traits greatly improve the chances that the consumer app will manage to cross the chasm between installation/sign-up to activation (also referred by many as ‘aha’-moment).

These 3 key traits are:

  1. Immediacy i.e. reducing time-to-value: Be it Tik-tok where you do not need to have an elaborate setup flow before viewing your first video OR delivering a PS5 in an hour, this segment of audience loves instant gratification. When we first started delivering PS5, iPhones or even physical SIMs in under an hour, key hypotheses that we successfully validated was whether reducing the friction / collapsing the decision-making window (between the end of evaluation to the purchase stages in the typical purchase cycle) improves online sales in typically high-consideration and / or high-AOV categories.  
  2. Flexibility:  Allowing users to explore and personalize their interactions, leading to a more satisfying user experience e.g. Notion, where users adapt the interface to their needs e.g. Kanban view, integrating calendars, building DB etc. from the same blank page. Adaptive interfaces that respond to individual user actions can make these products more intuitive and engaging. Yet, this flexibility must be cognisant of overloading the users with choices (paradox of choice) and these apps need to find the Goldilocks zone of their customers.
  3. Authenticity: Creating personalized experiences that resonate on an individual level. It is about crafting interactions that feel genuine and relevant e.g. for a Instagram, this could be stories I.e. ephemeral content or even messaging / lists e.g. seen South Asian and MENA users narrowcasting their WhatsApp statuses to select list of contacts / friends. These experiences are layered in the core of the product experience rather than an adjacent use-case (lower frequency of usage + farther from the main value-prop of the product)

Needless to say, executing on the above will need a hard-sell with internal teams / orgs where the decision makers will probably be not digital natives but millennials or earlier generations. In such situations, we should try to avoid defaulting to ‘homophily’ i.e. assuming that our customers are PLUs (People-Like-Us). 

Best way to avoid this trap is to build twin operating principles of: data-informed decision making and bet-centric product shipping mindset (where the focus of roadmap is on identifying and iterating to the next big bet, while sustaining existing lines-of-business).