In which I pretend to be a PM for an app called Module, a design system for Figma. I talk to Reshma, a designer with design systems experience at technical enterprise product companies and consumer brands like Coursera.
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As a PM my objective is to help build products that are applicable for increasingly high-frequency jobs so it can acquire newer users at lower cost and retain existing ones at higher value.
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To understand jobs, I'm trying to understand how often the user faces a trigger to use the app. Is there a higher frequency behavior upstream it can be relevant for. Eg: Google Maps taking eyeballs from Yelp with establishment reviews since users are already looking for directions to the establishment.
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To understand acquisition, I'm trying to understand barriers to try and switch.
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To understand retention, I'm trying to understand how quickly s/he's deriving value.
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So what did we learn
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The user is a designer at a "growing org". There's more work to be done than when the org was small with new features and product surfaces. There's an increase in the scale of work. The team's building web apps vs just websites where users are getting tasks done vs just consuming content. Because a design system is a luxury, the engineering + design team at this stage is looking to go beyond just functional fit. Because this team has grown, communication and collaboration is important with coded components that can be shared internally.
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The biggest risk to me for our product coming out of this call was acquisition. How does Module overcome some of these barriers
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Many well known and complete design systems that work well in code have been open sourced like Material from Google, Polaris from Spotify, Evergreen from Segment.
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Switching out or overhauling a design system (eg: because of new branding) is a big and bulky undertaking that larger companies with mega design teams with expertise built in undertake requiring a lot of coordination, planning and estimation to pull off well.
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I'd follow up with Reshma (and others) with the goal of uncovering
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What's the sweet spot for a growing org
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Since the market's crowded, what's a 10x improvement opportunity that we can highlight on the homepage above the fold. See Zoom when they launched to differentiate from Webex.
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Big thanks to Reshma for the hugely informative call!
