Jim Zarkadas (00:00)
Hey, I'm Jim, and this is the Love at First Try podcast, a podcast for SaaS CEOs and developers that truly want to learn more about design and care about it, but there are no designers that find it too complex. In every episode, we discuss how to design products that become sticky and unforgettable. We dive into the topics of taste, UX, growth, and conversions, and we share practical tips and frameworks you can add into your development process. Enough with the intro, so let's dive into today's episode.
Jim Zarkadas (00:27)
Yes, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining me. ⁓ I was thinking to actually for the intro, was thinking to mention a bit like how we met initially and like making introduction about you, ⁓ like your career path. We met back, how many years ago was it? Like I think it was the first year that I moved here because we're at WeWork in Amsterdam. it's been, yeah.
Amanda (00:42)
Okay.
Yeah.
like nine years maybe.
Jim Zarkadas (00:57)
Eight to nine years, yeah, it's been a lot of time. And we had the chance to meet again at the Growth Syndicate Conference two weeks, was it two weeks? Yeah, two weeks ago in Amsterdam again. It was pretty exciting to see you. So yeah, feel free to make an intro and kind of serve more about your background.
Amanda (01:06)
Yeah.
Sure.
Sure. So my name is Amanda Murachko. I am originally from Canada. I'm ethnically Ukrainian, my last name, in case anyone's curious. ⁓ And ⁓ yeah, I'm living in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. And when we met, I was managing the International Girls Team for Europe, Middle East and Africa for Shopify. So we were a really scrappy team trying to localize and bring Shopify to...
other parts of the world, which is a really exciting team to be on at the time. And then for the last six years, I've been a staff product manager at Buffer, mostly focused on our core functionalities, channels, our API and our apps. So I cover a lot of surface area and yeah, it's been, it was great being able to run into you again. And it's funny how life works in those types of ways as well where you just end up.
Jim Zarkadas (02:05)
Thanks
Amanda (02:06)
running into the same people and at different stages in their lives. So I think meeting again at the Growth Syndicate was like a really great opportunity to reconnect as well.
Jim Zarkadas (02:14)
Yeah, a hundred percent. It's like they say that it's a small world. Yeah, always ends up being true. Yeah, side note, a bit of topic, but Alicia, if I remember correctly, it's her name. She's in the design team of Buffer and she, yeah, you know each other. So funny thing, I found her online and I hired Alicia. We worked together and she was mentoring me on UI and visual design back then because I needed to grow my skills on UI because I was mostly UX focused.
Amanda (02:19)
Indeed,
wow, ⁓ my gosh.
Jim Zarkadas (02:44)
So yeah,
that was I think three years ago or so. So I sent her a DM because I was looking at the team of buffer and I see her face. I'm like, hey, like I know Alicia. So yeah, we're gonna have probably a call to catch up in the next weeks but it was really fun to see also that yeah, you're working together. I yeah, I know Amanda, she's amazing.
Amanda (02:54)
Yeah.
Yeah, she's great.
I love Alicia and yeah, it's been really great working with her. She has such a creative mind and I think, you know, topic of your podcast is about delight and I think Alicia is one these designers that really thinks about delight at the forefront instead of being an athlete. So it's great to have her on the team and being able to use her skill set in that way too.
Jim Zarkadas (03:13)
Mm.
Mmm.
Love it, love it. Yeah, yeah, 100%, and it's pretty entrepreneurial. That's why back then, it was mostly into freelancing, if I remember correctly. And it's, I'm a big believer of entrepreneurial designers because like for me, a big thing with design is like being able to think like a business owner and like prioritize things and like you can have a massive impact on the velocity of the team or the strategy and so on. So when these are some more entrepreneurial in terms of their spirit and daily activities, I feel it can really pay off like a.
Amanda (03:35)
Thank
Mm-hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (03:56)
the teams that they're designing for actually because the mindset is just very very different.
Amanda (03:58)
Yeah.
Yeah,
I love that. think that that's also a really great quality to have in the product space as well, to have that entrepreneurial element. our product team is really small. There's only four of us, but all of us have side hustles as well. I think being able to experience the pain of founding something on your own or getting something up and running or sharing your content online, especially relevant for Buffer, we feel the point of our users a lot more. So I think having that entrepreneurial
Jim Zarkadas (04:11)
Mm.
Mm.
Amanda (04:30)
entrepreneurial element is really important as well.
Jim Zarkadas (04:32)
Yeah, fully, fully, fully agree. ⁓ So before I get into my first question, I wanted to ⁓ ask you about your presentation, the round table ⁓ in the conference in TTS, you mentioned that at Buffer, you're pivoting from enterprise to more kind of PLG and SMBs. And I'm not sure if it's like a pivot or more like a...
more refined strategy, say, because I cannot really remember buffer being enterprise driven at any point of time in the past. But it was in my notes, like when I was watching your presentation and I would, I'm curious, like to hear more about it and ⁓ yeah, what is kind of the transformation that you're going through? And I remember you mentioned about the free plan that you should have a free plan only if you believe in it. It's not just about growth and so on. So I think it would be an interesting one to, to kick off.
Amanda (05:03)
Yes.
Yeah,
so with us and an enterprise strategy, I wouldn't say it was like deep enterprise. When I joined Buffer in 2020, we were focused on a direct to consumer brand strategy, which was very similar to Shopify. So actually coming in from Shopify, coming to Buffer, was like DTC brands. Like that was kind of like the target audience. And at that stage, we had a multi-product setup. So we had our analytics packaging offer. We had
engagement, and then we had our core publishing functionality and these were all add-ons. And that was sort of bundling that was more an enterprise level kind of packaging, I'd say. Versus once we started to like unravel that a little bit and we realized that like for the majority of our users, our product pricing was way too complicated and it wasn't serving the needs of like the down market, which was the
audience of people who were using Buffer. So our pricing was not aligned with who our users were at all. So we decided to merge our product back together. It's still, there's like a lot of tech debt that we're resolving from that process actually. then around that time too, we were like, let's reinvest fully in our free plan offering. And let's change the narrative around how we gate features because
Jim Zarkadas (06:26)
Mmm.
Mm-hmm.
Always, yeah. That's life.
Amanda (06:48)
I think there's this sense of like, oh, with having a free plan, like you had that, that motion, you go through the motion of like, what features do you think should be gated for like paid accounts? But we decided to like flip that on its head a little bit and say, most, almost everything should be available to free users. And we're going to lean into usage based limits so that they can get a taste of everything. And then once they like naturally hit the limits, like for us, you can schedule up to 10 posts per channel.
Jim Zarkadas (07:08)
Mm-hmm.
Amanda (07:17)
But some users want to schedule more than like at a time. It always refers to But some users maybe want to schedule 12 posts at a time and then they'll naturally hit that limit or maybe they want to add another channel down the road. So that's kind of how we landed at like really reinvesting in our free plan offering and making sure that our top of funnel was like really healthy and we're getting lots of new acquisition through that. And naturally as users use Buffer more, ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (07:20)
Mm-hmm.
Amanda (07:44)
they will naturally hit those upgrade paths through usage as opposed to through future gating.
Jim Zarkadas (07:50)
Yeah, I open on my other screen the buffer pricing and yeah, like the pricing benefit, see like you actually have to like how many plan, how many tunnels you can have. And then, yeah, it's just like, there is not much kind of a feature getting. It's very simple, I have to say. So it's been simplified. Like as a user, it's very easy to understand what I get on every plan. ⁓ I'm curious. I didn't have it in mind to ask this, but since you mentioned, I'm really curious. Like,
how is it to go through such a big transformation on the pricing? Because I'll give you a quick example from my experience. I lead design in a few SaaS companies and one of them is Nmade. And we went through a transformation, like a new pricing structure recently where there was one plan, it's like free plan, very limited or the paid plan that was the pricing. And I were introducing three different plans with feature gating. And for me, ⁓ I mean, I'm a designer. ⁓
I laid everything wrong, UX, delight, branding, and so on. I don't have experience with pricing, of a restructuring pricing and how you can actually roll it out. Because in theory, yeah, you can come up with a nice pricing that works for the user, but what's gonna be the business impact? Like how is gonna your revenue change? So for me, I remember back then that it was pretty terrifying. like, like I wouldn't like to be the CEO of this company right now. Even if in the end, like it was simple, like Amara was like, yeah, Jim, like there's nothing to be afraid of.
you can always roll back if it doesn't work. Like it's not that suddenly we're going to destroy the company. ⁓ And also like you do all the calculations and everything before. So you have a bit of an overview of where you're heading to. So I'm curious in your case, because it wasn't just introduce three plants and have some fluctuations in the revenue. It's like a whole revamp, whereas like you merge different products into one, you focus on usage-based pricing. So any cool kind of insights or learnings from that experience?
Amanda (09:29)
Mm. ⁓
Yeah, I would
say changing your pricing is probably the most one of the most difficult things you can do in a company because you shouldn't be changing your pricing super often. It should be something that's like well researched. You should do a lot of customer interviews, a lot of A B testing with just like just getting a sense of what resonates with your audience first before you make that change because I think it's really difficult to backtrack.
Jim Zarkadas (09:42)
Mmm.
Amanda (10:04)
And it's really difficult to, you lose trust the more you change your pricing. And we try not to change our pricing too often. Like when we did that price changing, it was in 2021, I believe. So since then we haven't changed our pricing at all. It's, I think for us, we tried to do like a legacy cohort. So we had only new users who were signing up could have access to the new pricing.
Jim Zarkadas (10:09)
Hmm.
make sense.
Amanda (10:31)
And then our legacy users, if they wanted to migrate over, we were giving them that option too. But we do have a cohort of users who are still on our legacy plan. ⁓ But that margin is very, very small now. I think it's like 96 % of users that we have revenue from are on our new buffer plan. ⁓ But that legacy cohort, they have really advanced ⁓ analytics offerings, like packages. So for them, it's like, maybe they don't want to move over just yet.
Jim Zarkadas (10:36)
That's smart,
Hmm
Amanda (11:01)
So we've kept, we've honoured that as much as possible, but with the goal of sunsetting that eventually. So like we're giving them a time horizon to say like by the end of, you know, middle of next year something, we're going to like deprecate this plan. So I think having that slow adoption was valuable for us because then we didn't have this immediate like shift in pricing where all of a sudden everyone was paying like a different amount for our plans. It was like a bit more gradual. And then because of that too,
Jim Zarkadas (11:04)
Hmm.
Exactly.
Amanda (11:31)
Our top of funnel, because we had invested in our free plan strategy, was much larger than it was when we were investing in a more enterprise level approach. So because our funnel was growing as well at the same time as we were doing this migration, we were able to kind of ⁓ recoup a lot of, let's say, the losses that we would have had from our enterprise strategy. And now we're more profitable actually than we were with our enterprise strategy because we have more users using Buffer.
Jim Zarkadas (11:50)
Mm-hmm.
Amanda (11:59)
at a lower price point than what they were on our enterprise plans.
Jim Zarkadas (12:03)
So the higher profitability is because you have like a that you don't like with enterprise, I mean, it's almost as selling premium services. Like maybe the analogy is not fully correct, but it's like more of like an idea that it's like the friction to make a sale is much higher. It takes more time. It's more complicated. The risk is higher because you lose one customer. Suddenly your MRR goes down for like a few thousand dollars. ⁓ So yeah, in this case,
Amanda (12:26)
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (12:31)
What I'm hearing and I just want to check that I understand it correctly is that with the PLG model where you focus on more users at a lower amount, it's easier to grow so you can hit better profitability faster and easier.
Amanda (12:44)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. And
I mean, I don't know if this would work for every company, but for our SaaS model where our product is very user friendly, it's like really for creators, like for us, really shifting that investment to the free plan made sense. For some businesses, it may not make sense, but it really was the thing that helped drive us to profitability. Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (12:52)
Yeah, of course.
hear you. Yeah. And on this, I mean, there is no golden practice or like I'm not into like rules of how to build a SaaS. I believe this is ⁓ silly, let's say in a way. Like it doesn't, it doesn't make sense because every business is so unique. So I'm with you when you're saying like, I'm not, I cannot tell that it's going to work for every business. So one, and with buffer, I mean, you have the data, like it's proven that this works, but also to me as a user, makes sense this model because
Amanda (13:23)
Thank
Jim Zarkadas (13:39)
I could compare it with ClickUp. Like it's a product that I used to hate for some reason because I was like, nah, they just do everything. It's not going to be nice. And then I started using it and I was like, ⁓ this is a nice product. They've done something kind of a really cool over here, like a bunch of features, but it works pretty well, very well designed. It's a really interesting product. And I started paying for it recently and I was a free user for months. But once I started bringing you more and more operations through ClickUp, I started a podcast. So suddenly I needed more custom fields. I needed a bit of AI to help me.
Amanda (13:45)
I you have a
Jim Zarkadas (14:09)
because otherwise I would waste a lot of time. The cost of kind of doing this like time wise was higher than actually going to the paid plan. So now I'm a paid user. So with these tools that you use like on a weekly or daily basis, the free plan can really help you to build a habit, build the trust, really integrate into your workflow. And then when you're ready, like you just make the step forward and you upgrade. So buffer is kind of a similar case where...
Amanda (14:11)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (14:35)
You do all your scheduling and so on through the tool and then at some point you organically grow with... ⁓ It gives you the space to grow with it. That's the nice thing when there is a free plan.
Amanda (14:40)
Yeah.
Exactly.
And to
your point too, with building the habit, that's actually one of our key pillars internally for our strategy, because we want to provide the tooling for users to build a consistent habit with posting on social media. So outside of our key functionality of just like distribution, content distribution, we're really thinking about planning and we want buffer to become like a really important like productivity tool outside of it just being a social media scheduling tool. So part of that comes with a habit formation and we're investing in things like posting schedules,
Jim Zarkadas (14:51)
Hmm
Hmm.
Amanda (15:16)
and streaks, which I think is now like table stakes for a lot of apps out there. But to just ensure that gamification aspect is like, ⁓ I've posted consistently on social media every week. For me, ⁓ even though I was an active social media user, ⁓ also outside of my own personal brand, because I have a site thing that I run as well, ⁓ there were weeks that I wasn't posting.
But now because we have, I know it's like feels very novel, but we have a streaks functionality and buffer and all of us are trying to keep our streaks up. So now it's like 38 weeks or something that I've been posting consistently on social media, which is crazy. That's like having a baby or something. Like there's like so much that goes into that. And also.
Jim Zarkadas (15:57)
You
Yeah.
Amanda (16:01)
Because of that ⁓ consistency to my social media following has grown quite significantly over the last few months. So that habit formation does pay off in a really tangible way for the end user as well. And I think that's the case as well with some of the tooling that people use for productivity more broadly as well. The more that you use it, the more benefits that you actually get from it in your daily life as well.
Jim Zarkadas (16:21)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, fully, fully agree. And like on the gamification, it's also like interesting. What is that? Todoist, I think is the name of the app with the karma on the to-dos. It's always interesting. Like when it comes to how to develop and how you can add some meaningful gamification there. And for you, especially because it's like a Nintendo challenge that you have within the company to keep posting every day, it works even better. ⁓
Amanda (16:29)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (16:45)
That's cool. Okay. That's very interesting. And the so that the first question that had in my list ⁓ was you had a slide in your presentation where the title was I treason is key. Early stage equals speed. See fast. I traded based on feedback. Let us say it's equals to depth police. What works with user improved retention. So yeah I'm curious to learn more about like to hear more about like the mindsets.
Maybe some examples like kind of a, what are your thoughts on this topic, on how you approach that iteration within buffer and what are some core values.
Amanda (17:20)
Sure.
So there are lot of learnings that come with iteration, just getting value out to customers as soon as possible. Failing fast, I think, is an important value that we try to embody as well, because we have been at points in Buffer, like when I joined and we were doing the multi-product approach, where we were invested in projects that lasted over a year, only to find out that it didn't resonate with customers, right? So it's like...
Jim Zarkadas (17:29)
Mm.
Yep, another
feeling, yeah. ⁓
Amanda (17:46)
Yeah,
so it's better to fail early and get something out ⁓ and then an iterate from there. So for us, what I like to try to do is try to reduce scope as much as possible and still ship a polished feature, but maybe with the reduced functionality to get like just a sense of if we're headed in the right direction. So we're doing that right now with our we're working on our public API. So we're going to go into a closed beta really soon. And we're it's going to be without the bells and whistles like
We're
not going to have a great developer experience right out the gate, but we want feedback on just like basic functionality. Like, we developing the right end points? Is this like exactly what you were expecting from this type of API functionality? And then we can kind of iterate from there. And I think too, when you build in public, I think you automatically gain a lot of trust from your users as well. So I had this experience when building the threads integration, we were getting a lot of demand at that time for us to build something and we had heard
from the meta team that something was in the works, but we didn't get access to their API yet. So what I was doing was building ⁓ like a mock-up.
Like we had built all the front end functionality and we were sharing it on threads being like, we're ready for the API whenever they give it to us. And like we were building up that momentum. ⁓ And I think that resonated with users as well because ⁓ we work really closely with the threads team and they were saying to us like, because we had so much momentum from our build in public strategy, it put pressure on them to release the API a little bit sooner and for us to get access.
Jim Zarkadas (19:06)
Nice.
That's
Amanda (19:23)
early
as well. So I think that also it gave trust with our users too, because they're asking for things and we, with our line of business, we're really tied to third party API's. So we don't always have control over what we can and can't work on, but
When we're able to build in public, we're showing them like we're doing our best to gain access. Like this is what we've done so far. Like we can kind of like also fail alongside them. And when they have access to our beta and they're giving us feedback, we can act on that feedback. It feels like we're building it with them. And that community feeling is really important for us. Like that's something that Buffer has always kind of leaned into is having like a really strong and active community and kind of building alongside them as well. So like, as we approach our API, ⁓ we are really looking forward to having our developers.
build
out like third party integrations and workflows and sharing those things and sharing their learnings and like kind of allowing it to grow organically from there. And that's just always been something that we've strived for. And I think that's also something Shopify did really well as well. And I think when we worked together through the partner ecosystem, especially at that time, the majority of Shopify's growth came from a partner ecosystem, especially in Europe. And I think it's because of this like build in public, giving access to the ecosystem to build.
Jim Zarkadas (20:30)
Mm.
Amanda (20:37)
things on top of their APIs ⁓ and not just gating things. think having more competition is sometimes even better. So we've had competitors build off of Buffer's API as well, ⁓ but it's created a richer ecosystem. It just makes the pie bigger instead of it making less shares of the same pie, if that makes sense. So I know that's kind of deviation from your question a little bit, but...
Jim Zarkadas (20:39)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
No, but everything
is connected to each other. I fully, fully hear you and how like building public is like part of iteration essentially. It's like you don't have to do it as a company, but it's like the whole idea of like iteration is key. Like you say that early stage, like shipping fast and failing fast is all about learning, right? And with building public is a way to actually do the iteration in a way where can collect even more feedback, be more open, more welcome and... ⁓
Amanda (21:17)
you
Jim Zarkadas (21:25)
start building some kind of ecosystem and community through that as well. So yeah.
Amanda (21:28)
Yeah, exactly.
And then there are parts where we're...
really investing more in that polish, right? And I think right now, like my team is responsible for a lot of like the backend ⁓ infrastructure. So of course you want to make sure that you're building whatever you build us for the longterm. don't want to necessarily put solutions up all the time just to fix bugs. So for us to like really build the right foundations that we can scale appropriately in the next few years is also important. So those things take a longer time, but
Jim Zarkadas (21:40)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Yep, exactly.
Amanda (22:01)
especially if it's a public facing feature. As I said in my presentation too, slap a beta sticker on it. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (22:04)
Yeah.
Yeah, that
was the first, the second thing that I would mention that on your, that was on your presentation that I really loved. It's like, yeah, just put a beta and then expectations are probably managed.
Amanda (22:18)
Yeah,
and then I mean, people will give you feedback if you have a feedback form button, like as long as it's discoverable, we get tons of feedback, just a slow lift if they like it or if they don't like it, you'll start to get that feedback really organically too. ⁓ So we actually have an example, like one of the projects Alicia is working on right now, we're building out our new engagement tooling.
Jim Zarkadas (22:22)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm
Amanda (22:37)
It's available in beta right now, but we feel like the UX is not there just yet. So we're taking a couple more weeks to polish it up before launching it more broadly. So that's like another great example of like, we haven't quite hit the mark yet. We want it to be incredibly delightful. We want people to go in and feel like it's fun. they want like, you know, when you're responding to comments, it can kind of feel like maybe a bit draining at times, but we want it to feel like a really delightful experience. They're gaining insights from doing these key actions.
Jim Zarkadas (22:37)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Amanda (23:07)
So we're spending a little bit more time like making sure that that experience feels top-notch. But at the same time, it's available in beta. So we do have users who are already testing it who want that functionality and they don't necessarily care about all the bells and whistles. So that's kind of like still building in public while iterating on the future as well.
Jim Zarkadas (23:27)
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, it's very, very interesting. And you mentioned on the beta part, like in your presentation, that you do have, how is it called? Yeah, the community beta. So when would you mention community beta? You mean you've built like a group of people that said, hey, I would love to be part of the beta program, let's say, and test stuff, or how does it work?
Amanda (23:38)
Yes, this is a community beta that I was discussing.
up.
So we have a feature called community, which is our engagement functionality. So that's why it's the capital C community. However, we do have a beta group as well, which we have been building over the last two years, who are users who have decided to opt into our beta program. So we have a field in our settings where people can opt in and then they can get all the different features that are currently in beta. And then we have a Discord community where we actively seek feedback around those features as well.
Jim Zarkadas (23:55)
Mmm.
Huh.
Amanda (24:21)
We have a small C community related to the beta functionality, but our feature community is currently in beta right now, and that's the feature that Alicia is working on actually.
Jim Zarkadas (24:31)
I see, I see, okay, yeah,
I'm a bit confused on that one. Yeah, that's really cool. And it's like, yeah, with the beta, you have like the public beta, and then you have like also the internal communities like the Discord. Like for ZenMate, for example, it's a scheduling software for cleaning businesses to monitor appointments, payroll, the schedule of their cleaners, and so on, in the United States. And we have a Facebook group, because they hang out mostly Facebook, like Discord, for example, wouldn't work for that audience.
where it's like the internal ZenMate group and they actually share, we share prototypes, are screenshots and stuff and we get some feedback ⁓ whenever we need to. So it's always interesting to build kind of a group that you can engage with and have more kind of a direct communication ⁓ with them. Yeah, and on the parts that you were mentioning before on the iterations is key. It's something that we'll be discussing a lot ⁓ with every team that we're working with. And one thing that I'm more...
the C of Zenmates said, told me in the past that I really liked is that you have some features that are like the Apple style. You just have to release them when they're really good and you have to nail them before going live. And then you have the other ones. I don't remember how they called, how he called them. I think it was like Google style features, but maybe I'm wrong, where it's more like you, you just kind of a see fast, like it does have to be great. The V1 and then you iterate and learn along, along the way. ⁓ And
On this, with the whole idea of fail fast and so on, because it's a very confusing topic for many SaaS founders, I feel it's really about understanding what is the value you're creating and what are the expectations from the audience. So essentially, what we call the MAP is the V1, right? It's like the first version that is gonna go live. And it depends, for example, if you're building, we released at ZenMate this week, the new navigation. So it's a new primary navigation sidebar.
a new way to navigate your settings with a full screen model, way more intuitive, because before it was very confusing and chaotic. This one, you cannot just move fast and break it and ship something that is kind of a half there, because it's like a fundamental functionality of the software. We're talking about the navigation. If people have a hard time to navigate, it's gonna be a problem. But if it's a new feature that is experimental, like we had the availability of every cleaner to say, to mention when they're gonna be off, when they have some hold days and so on, you can release a...
Amanda (26:33)
Yes.
Jim Zarkadas (26:51)
a beta V1 that is kind of there, like it's clunky, it does have great UX, but then you can understand what people truly need because that can be very challenging many times. You can kind of understand what people need, but you don't have access to all the details. So you can build a basic MVP and use this as an excuse to get them into calls and discuss, we built this, we want to learn how we can make it better. So it's different if you just invite them to explore the idea and different to have an MVP.
that they can start using and then you can have like a more hands-on discussion. yeah, with the iteration, it's always interesting to that first you need to understand what is the thing that I'm building and define the V1 because it's not the same. Like I've seen many people trying to come up with a golden rule that applies to all MVPs and like, no, it really depends. Like if we're talking about the MVP of the whole product or of a feature or of a UX improvement, let's say it's very, very different. So yeah.
Amanda (27:47)
Yeah.
Yeah, but
you're totally right. It really does depend on what you're building. And I think there's also a difference between building an MVP where it's a little bit more rough around the edges for features that are not core functionality.
Jim Zarkadas (28:00)
Yeah,
Amanda (28:00)
versus
Jim Zarkadas (28:01)
yeah.
Amanda (28:01)
building, I would say, like a minimum level product. And I would say that those features could still be minimal in scope, but should be very polished experiences. So maybe they don't have all the bells and whistles, but the UX and the UI should be top notch still. And then you can continue to iterate on that still by adding new functionality, but the user experience is still really good from the beginning.
Jim Zarkadas (28:11)
Mmm, yeah.
Yeah.
Amanda (28:24)
And I think it's really important for founders or product managers, designers to think about what are their core actions that they want a user to take. Like what's the one most important action that they want a user to take in their product. And that experience should be a minimum lovable product. It shouldn't be just an MVP. Like you have to make sure that that's a really polished experience. for us, creating a post is that action. It's like when they take that action, there's like an aha moment. So for us, we post,
change anything in our ⁓ composer like our post composer it's very delicate we want to make sure that like it's very very solid before we release anything because if something goes down
Jim Zarkadas (29:02)
Yes.
Amanda (29:05)
that breaks the entire experience and then people don't convert or they decide to move on from BufferChert. That's like a flywheel that can either propel them to an active user or cause them to turn. So for us, it's really important to that experience. But other areas of the product, like we have more idea iteration spaces and RSS feeds now, or even the community tab to a certain extent, we can be a little bit more fun and experimental with those things because I think
Jim Zarkadas (29:12)
Exactly.
Mm-hmm.
Amanda (29:35)
think we can just gain feedback as we go and it doesn't break a core experience at all.
Jim Zarkadas (29:39)
Mmm.
100 % like for this, I like to say that sometimes like when people ask like what should be in the MVP, my answer sometimes like use your common sense. And what I mean by that is like what you're describing is like people are buying buffered scheduled posts. If this doesn't work properly, they're not gonna go and explore other features because you need to deliver on the core mechanism. You can cut down on delight, but the functionality and reliability needs to be there. It needs to really be bug free. But when it to analytics, you have more space for like cutting the scope or like.
having like a lower quality in the first release and so on. yeah, it's like defining like the, what are the fully essential things that you cannot do any sacrifice is really, really important. ⁓ Yeah, fully, fully agree. And the beta is also interesting that the whole thing with the beta that we discussed before. ⁓
Amanda (30:22)
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (30:33)
I come from an engineering background. I pivoted to product design strategy, which was my dream along the way. And for me to learn about how can you build great products, delightful products, amazing that are easy to use and so on. And I wasn't a SaaS, I haven't been a SaaS founder and I couldn't really understand like the whole thing, like with a beta for some reason, it never really, I never really felt that you can just kind of literally put a bud. It takes like three minutes development wise to just add a small rectangular with a word in it. And suddenly.
Amanda (31:00)
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (31:01)
people are okay with if this is like more broken because it's just a beta, you manage the expectations. It totally makes sense and it sounds like a very simple idea, but I don't feel like many, yeah, many people in product teams really understand how easy and powerful it can be. ⁓
Amanda (31:17)
Yeah, even
us, it took a while for us to get to that stage where we felt comfortable putting things into beta more often and just leaving them in beta because ⁓ there was a moment where it's like, well, we just saw it as like a default step where it's like, we'll put it into beta for two weeks. We'll make sure nothing's broken. Then we'll roll it out to GA. Now we're at a stage of buffer where it's like, let's leave it in beta for as long as it takes for us to nail the product experience. And then we'll roll it out to GA. So I think that we're getting more comfortable
Jim Zarkadas (31:46)
Mm-hmm.
Amanda (31:47)
with holding back big go-to-market launches in order for us to... So we are iterating in public, as I mentioned, like with the beta label and stuff, but we're not publicly launching something until we feel we've nailed the experience.
Jim Zarkadas (32:01)
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, it's like, ⁓ yeah, exactly. That you don't do like from a marketing point of view as well. It's like you don't start promoting it actively and trying to bring all the eyeballs on that feature because you're still building it. But it's in the product, people can use it, you can gather data. And it's the cliche that they say that the moment you see it is when you really start learning. That's really, really true. Of course, you can do custom research before we can invite people, test prototypes. But what I've seen with design, like with product is that you can sell them Figma prototypes.
Amanda (32:17)
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (32:31)
You can gather some insights, but the real moment of truth is when you see people using it and how they try to integrate this into their workflow, actually. ⁓ And you get way, way better insights because before that, you ask them to imagine things, to think about things. You don't ask them to use it and then you just observe. And this is the best kind of a customer research, in my opinion, to actually give something to people and observe.
and ask questions based on that. Instead of asking them to try to imagine if they had this, what they would do. It's like, I would even also give different answers. My answers would be different to what I'm doing in real life many times. So yeah, that's where the beta can really, really help as well to get some stress out of the process.
Amanda (33:19)
Yeah,
we even, of course, people are more forthcoming with just giving feedback, like even if it's just a sentence or what have you in our feedback form. But even just watching, we do like session replays with some of our features too. Just even watching how users are interacting with the product, you can derive a lot from just observations where if they're like unable to find a feature or they're like clicking around.
Jim Zarkadas (33:28)
Mm-hmm.
Amanda (33:46)
or like, you know, going back and forth, we saw this actually on our mobile apps with our calendar functionality. People would go to our calendar on mobile and only do it, only go once. Like, so even just the data to have that was like, why are they doing that? And it's because the expectation of what they were expecting to be there versus what they actually got from that experience was very different. So once I started speaking to customers, I reached out to those who didn't go back for a second.
Jim Zarkadas (34:00)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Amanda (34:11)
look at the calendar, I like, why did you not go back to do another schedule from there? They're like, oh, was too complicated, I didn't know it.
what to expect, I didn't need this kind of thing. So because of that information, we were able to make changes on our mobile experience recently to improve our calendar functionality and make it more embedded within our scheduling tools. things like that, you can derive a lot just from like looking at the data, looking at session, like actual session replays, if you have tools like that are tracking ⁓ mouse clicks and stuff like that. I think even from those tools alone, you can get so much out of the beta experience.
Jim Zarkadas (34:29)
Mm-mm.
Hmm.
totally agree. this, now that you mentioned this, like the perfect time to ask my next question, which is a practical one. What are the rituals you have and the processes to collect user feedbacks? Like what we call continuous kind of a user research. Could be feedback buttons, could be rituals that you have that let's say every Wednesday we watch user session recordings or something like that. I can share some stuff that we're doing at Zenmed as an example, maybe to make the question more clear.
There are three main ways we collect, sorry, four ways that we collect feedback first, and internal Facebook group where we share, we announce new things, and then we gather feedback or we share an idea and we see how people react. There is the Cani, it's like a product feedback collection board where people can suggest features and so on, which is like a backlog of a lot of ideas where can get some signals. It's not the main place where we hang out. Supporting, when we release something, we just keep an eye on what people mention support.
And the two other things are, it's inviting. We have one of our best customers that we're actually have a partnership with on a marketing level as well. ⁓ She's now part of ZenMate as Stephanie, she's a cleaning business owner, has been using ZenMate for many years and she grew from zero to one million of revenue by using ZenMate as your scheduling software.
And she's in the design calls. I design and I have access to Steph and ask, hey Steph, what do you think? Like, does this make sense? Or I can ask about processes. For example, invoicing. So how do you do invoicing in your team? I can ask to jump in a call with a team member and just shadow them when they're doing the invoicing stuff and they're sending invoices to the customers and collecting payments and understanding what they're doing, observe the workflows and so on. So we actually found one customer that we fully integrated into, integrate them into the.
the process. Of course, it's only one and you have like thousands of customers that you want to keep an eye, like to keep your brain and your mind and eyes open to not be too biased with what they need and always think about the whole customer base. But even with just one, you can get a lot of insights, which is sometimes mind blowing on how different the design process feels and looks like. And the final ritual that we have, this is more on activation. What we do is that every
Every Wednesday, I spent around 30 minutes to watch five to six session recordings from new trials. So that's a ritual that we developed that every week I have to watch five session recordings of new users using ZenMate. And it's always like you can say that, yeah, let's just watch session recordings. But I found the five a good number where it's not too big of a task to distract you from your current thing and stuff, but also not too small of an amount where you...
You don't really get any insights and it's a really nice ritual to just kind of see what people are doing For example, we realized that more and more people are using mobile web to use ZenMate and we had no idea about it ⁓ Actually, and it's something that just came up through the session recordings bugs people interact with when they sign up So it's many random insights you wouldn't expect ⁓ So yeah, it's a these are kind of some rituals that we've built to systemize like operationalize in a way how we
engage with users and learn from them. So I'm curious in Buffer, what are some feedback streams, retails and processes you have on ⁓ to learn more about users.
Amanda (38:11)
Yeah, so for
me, I am a very like type A personality. So I have my Mondays reserved for like really gathering a lot of feedback from users. we have a public suggestions board, which I monitor on Mondays.
Jim Zarkadas (38:23)
Mmm.
Amanda (38:27)
⁓ And it's basically a public roadmap as well, like also leaning into building in public like thing and we're very transparent about the things we're working on things We're not working on so if you go to suggestions.buffer.com You can see all the things that people have been voting on and we direct a lot of customers there who come through customer support as well We're like if you're interested in this feature, we don't support it right now Please go and up vote it or suggest it yourself on the suggestions board because for us then I get a sense of like the of course you want to solve a ton of customer problems
as much as you can, but it's helpful for me to weigh out what the majority of our customers are asking for and trying to prioritize that alongside our roadmap. So ⁓ I think having that board is always a good pulse check for myself to make sure that we're still prioritized on fixing the pain points because there are some times where we go to that board and LinkedIn mentions, which I talked about in my presentation, we didn't have access to the API. That was our top feature request, but I was able to leverage that with conversations.
with the LinkedIn team directly. ⁓ And people were really up in arms. They were like, we are leaving Buffer if we don't have this feature. So it was a really difficult conversation to manage because of course we didn't have complete access yet, but we were trying to build in public and trying to keep our customers aware of the situation. And we have a label as well on some of our suggestions when we're blocked by API limitations too, so that they're aware of what we're trying to work around as well. So that's one data source.
Jim Zarkadas (39:35)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Amanda (39:57)
that I look at. ⁓ We also have recently a customer collaboration channel in Buffer where our advocacy team, our customer support team, and our mostly product team work directly together to answer ⁓ customer support requests that come through. So we're in the inbox talking to customers directly, especially if they have any things that crop up. And sometimes our advocates will, our customer support folks will raise issues for like bugs to be fixed or issues
Jim Zarkadas (40:14)
Mm-hmm.
Amanda (40:27)
to be prioritized directly from some of those conversations as well in that channel. So we're working collectively as a larger engineering product design advocacy conglomerate to resolve some of these customer friction points as well. So I think that that's been a really important touch point to get a bit closer to customers. We also have our Discord channel, as I mentioned, where we have like more casual interactions with our users. But I think those are the ones who are, let's say are
Jim Zarkadas (40:40)
Mm-hmm.
Mm.
Yeah.
Amanda (40:54)
advocates. Yeah, so they're the ones who are going to be campaigning or telling their friends about Buffer and they're really, know, brand ambassadors, I should say, of
Jim Zarkadas (40:56)
Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Amanda (41:05)
Buffer, so there are
like top 1 % of Buffer users, let's say, who are like super highly engaged, willing to give feedback, willing to hop on calls. We also have two ⁓ customer interviews. have like, ⁓ we try to schedule one per week, realistically. ⁓ We have a call to action at the bottom of our emails to say like, hey, if you want to jump on a call and discuss something that you'd like to see built into Buffer, we would love to know more about your content creation journey. ⁓
So we're trying to convince some of our users to schedule time with us as well to give us feedback directly. And then honestly, sometimes I just cold email users and like, hey, I noticed you did this thing in buffer. If you have a moment.
Jim Zarkadas (41:43)
Thanks.
Yeah.
Amanda (41:51)
to just tell me why you did this action or why you decided to not come back and do this again, I'd love to know more. So I try to do that, especially as we build out new UI improvements, because sometimes you don't know, like, if I remove this feature, is this going to be like a game changing moment or like a deal breaker for customers? Or if I change it in any way, like, how will that impact their daily business? So especially I now manage the mobile apps.
Jim Zarkadas (42:15)
Hmm.
Amanda (42:19)
upskilling in a little bit too. So I love to just reach out to customers and be like, hey, you know, one sentence answer, I just want to know how you're using this feature. And then it's a low barrier to entry for them because sometimes asking them to get on a 30 minute call with us is a big ask. So I try to just make the barrier to entry super low and then collect feedback as well. So it just depends on the week. I think we as a product team try to get as close to the customers as possible. And I think to ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (42:34)
Yeah, true.
Amanda (42:48)
because we are all naturally dogfooding our product. We have a little bit more empathy for the end user too, because we're experiencing sometimes like those pain points firsthand as well as our journey.
Jim Zarkadas (42:52)
Hmm.
Yes.
Yeah, and also this one, this is one of the best things to have actually, because it's customer research. Like being the customer, sure you'll buy us because you're a product and so on, but if you're solving your own problems, then you already have a big leverage in terms of like understanding the end user. So that's also a really interesting way to kind ⁓ of decide what's next, understand more, what's the impact and so on. ⁓
Amanda (43:12)
Mm-hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (43:28)
Ammar used to be a clinic business owner. That's how he started also ZenMate, but it's a tricky one because for me, for example, as a designer, I'm like, I can understand some things, but I don't run a clinic business and I cannot feel the anxiety that person feels when something is confusing. Let's add the color. I'm just coming up with something right. I'm just like developing that level of empathy to understand the emotion people have with specific interactions or the urgency they may feel with like a specific flow or other things.
is very tricky. And also one realization that I had recently is that it's very different to every company. Because for example, with KnowledgeHole, another team we're working with, it's a knowledge-based software to build your help center or your internal documentation. ⁓ We're using it for our own docs. So we have a team that has like very specific opinions about how documentation should look like and how the confusing the article editor is now that we're redesigning the full.
editor of the article and so on. So there we don't really need to invite external customers because we are the customers. Like the documentation team is the customer kind of representatives, let's say. ⁓ And also for me, it's easier, it's easy to use it. Like I can gain more empathy and understand the product easier compared to Zenmai. So it always depends on the product. And the nice thing with buffer is that, yeah, it's pretty straightforward more. It's like B2B, but like almost B2C stars. Like it's just a single individual.
Amanda (44:42)
Thank
do it.
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (44:53)
could use it.
Amanda (44:54)
Exactly. It is a little bit of a different product, right, where the barrier to entry is very low. there's like, anyone could hypothetically use Buffer, my mom could use Buffer, anybody. It's like really, really easy for anyone to use. But Shopify was similar. Like they really encouraged us all, even if we weren't business owners at the time, to open a Shopify store and try selling something.
Jim Zarkadas (45:10)
Mmm.
Right?
Amanda (45:17)
So that was a big learning experience for me too, because all of a sudden, like I experienced the pain of, you know, getting, having something not send on time, or I also experienced the excitement of getting my first sale from someone I didn't know. yeah. So, yeah. So having that experience twice where, you know, at Shopify, I went through that journey of being a customer of Shopify and then actually
Jim Zarkadas (45:33)
Exactly right. Yeah, this is a beautiful example. Yeah.
Amanda (45:44)
throughout COVID in particular, I became more of a Shopify developer. I was doing a lot of freelance work on Shopify too. So then I had like a different set of empathy where I'm like, now I know what that experience is like for folks like yourself going through the partner program, ⁓ which was mostly the product that I was managing at Shopify. And then now going through the motions at Buffer of like dogfooding it for my side hustle. But now very actively over the last year, dogfooding it as like me as an individual creator. And that's like a very different.
Jim Zarkadas (45:55)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Amanda (46:14)
experience
as well. yeah, it's like, think it's not possible for every company to have this, ⁓ this area to like lean into dog fooding. But at the same time, if you do have that capacity, it's still valuable to test it out.
Jim Zarkadas (46:16)
Yeah.
Yeah, on this there is a principle that I have in my life. ⁓ And it's what they say with the body, that the food you eat defines your energy and how you feel. It's like good energy in, good energy out in a way. ⁓ It's the same with the brain. High quality insights and info in, great ideas come out. So if you pay attention to what you feed your brain with, then you can improve your output and the quality of the output. And the context of design teams, because my business is, what we are is a...
in-house design team as a service. So we team up with technical systems that don't have designers and they need like really senior design help and we become their in-house design team and lead the product and branding. My job, like as the founder and CEO to make this company successful is make sure we have the most well-trained designers to help systems out there and build systems to make them the best designers for these specific companies. And what I mean by that is ⁓ training the design team
to understand your users is a super fascinating topic for me because it's like, it's really one of the core KPIs that I'm looking at to improve like my business and make sure I'm on top of my game. And for ZenMate, it's something that I've been trying to define and doing different experiments. Like one thing we did with Amar recently, for example, was I got some training from Amar on how they do demo calls to users. And I was like, you know what? I'm designing the onboarding right now on ZenMate. We're doing some 80-20 style improvements, like some simple quick fixes.
Amanda (47:49)
Hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (47:59)
I can look at it as a designer and think about what is confusing, what is not, what is delightful, what is not, but how do we actually sell ZenMate? What do people ask in the demo calls and so on? And I was thinking, what if I develop a ritual where I own one demo call per week as the designer and try to sell ZenMate to somebody and get their questions, not really sell, more kind of a demo and explain the value and understand how they describe the value. What are the words that they use and how much influence this could have on
my ideas and the designs that I produce for onboarding. So building processes and systems to train the design team on a consistent basis, like almost build a habit where they can understand more and more of the user is really interesting. Like one way is dog fooding, like what you would describe with Shopify or like now that you're using buffers individual, the other one could be demo calls, but yeah, it's very different at every company because the product's very different and the audience.
Amanda (48:51)
Yeah, I think
your point is spot on. think just getting that customer empathy, can happen in a multitude of different ways. You don't necessarily have to be dogfooding, but you do need to spend time as close to the customer pain points and in that customer space as possible. And it is so surprising to me how few product managers and designers speak to customers.
Jim Zarkadas (49:09)
Exactly.
right?
Amanda (49:17)
I have these conversations a lot with other folks in the industry and I'm like, when was the last time you had a customer call or when was the last time you responded to a customer email or had any interaction with a customer? Like I chat with a lot on social media or discord. And sometimes they're like, it's been like a month or more. And I think if you're not baking that into your regular weekly routine, then it's really easy to fall out of the habit of doing that. And then you can lose sight of what you're building. And I think just having that like.
Jim Zarkadas (49:41)
Yes.
Amanda (49:45)
finger to the pulse is just so valuable because you can be building something really important and like transformational for your business. But if there's like a little bug that all your users are annoyed about that you're not prioritizing, that will be the thing like we've launched features before.
where we were like, this like a game changer for us. And people will comment on LinkedIn on our post being like, why didn't you fix this bug yet? And it's like, you know, it kind of tracks from the experience. like the, you feel from like launching a new, a brand new feature and how like incredible that is. And then it's like, yeah, you can't lose sight of those like quality features. And I think continuing those conversations and feedback loops with customers keeps you humble and keeps you really close to those spaces as much as you can. So.
Jim Zarkadas (50:20)
Hmm.
True,
true. And like I fully agree on what you said, like it's strange that many teams don't talk to users. Like my, because I've been into that position. My take on this is that everybody says, yeah, just talk to the users. Like, and I'm like, yeah, cool. But what is a productive, efficient, pragmatic way where I can do that? Like I could schedule a call with their customer every week, but honestly it takes a lot of effort. You need to email them. you need to...
Amanda (50:52)
Thank
Jim Zarkadas (50:59)
reduce the frictions like from atomic habits, if you want a habit to make it happen, reduce the friction, make it easy, make it obvious, right? And on this, I'm a big fan, like since I started building a business on my own, I got into the systems idea, like how can you build systems that actually you save them, you build like an engine, then this engine works and you don't have every week to kind of make it happen.
And I feel it's like about coming up with systems where you don't really need to try to talk to users. So it could be that somebody's scheduled for you one call. So you get a virtual assistant for your design team and that virtual assistant is responsible to book a call in every, for every designer so that the designer doesn't have to chase people.
Amanda (51:26)
and I'm leaving.
Yeah, we have it automated so
we don't have to chase. We have it completely automated so it just it calendars. Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (51:42)
Exactly. That
could be one thing. The other thing that we do with Stephanie where we have her in the design call is a big one. One of my ideas that I would really love to try out at some point but I haven't found a way because it's too complex is what if I could spend one day per week or at least just do one week where I join a clinic business, I go to their office and I just design from there. I use it as my office and I just observe phone calls, reactions.
I don't know if they're screaming, how they react with customers, emergency situations, because many times in the morning, cleaners call and say, hey, I'm sick. And then they need to reschedule appointments. How does this happen in ZenMate? Is ZenMate really helping them to take quick decisions and adjust their schedule to the new urgent situation or not? So these kinds of things, you need to be there to see them, to really feel like the, how these people feel and also come up with great ideas. So just spending time in the environment of the user can be...
can be interesting as well. Of course, it's more of a one-off thing, unless you have a cleaning business next door and can just join them for one day per week or something. But yeah, for me, it's very creative and fascinating topic because it's so different to every SaaS company because they serve entirely different audience, they solve different problems. ⁓ So yeah, it's very interesting how, what is the right way to do custom research for that specific company. I find it really, really fascinating. ⁓ Nice.
Amanda (53:01)
you
think the embedded
approach is really a great one if you can do it because you gain so much insight from that. Like at Shopify, we did that a lot too. I think you probably saw in Amsterdam, I would go and visit businesses, especially as we were trying to like localize in the Netherlands and in other European countries. Every time I traveled to a new city, I'd go to visit businesses that were on Shopify and just to chat with people who work there, especially as we were rolling out point of sale too. I'd go in and be like,
Jim Zarkadas (53:08)
Hmm
Mm-hmm.
Love it.
Amanda (53:35)
how is this feeling for you? What are the things you'd like to improve? What's missing from it? And just having interactions with people on the ground, I think, really can make such a big difference. And we're starting to do that a bit at Buffer too, like trying to meet more business owners who are using Buffer in person and just making sure that we have those interactions so that we can bring those things back as insights to building out a more efficient and effective product as well.
Jim Zarkadas (53:39)
Love it.
Yeah, 100%. Yeah, love the idea that you had with Shopify to just kind of visit the businesses and just see the behind the scenes. It's also a good reminder that it's like a real store at a street in the, I don't know, like in whatever area and a person that maybe is not technical trying to figure it out. Because sometimes in tech, we're just kind of in our bubble with all the Apple devices and everything. It's just kind of a loose...
complete kind of a side of where people really are, what they're using, even like the devices, like simple stuff on the design side, like what is the screen size that they're using? Like sometimes you're designing for the wrong screen size. Of course, considering Google Analytics, you don't have to go and visit the store, but it's just like many small things that you can actually see. ⁓
Amanda (54:43)
Hmm.
Yeah, think
too, especially this is something, you know, bit tangential, but adjacent. Like if you have a product that's on web and a mobile device, like if you have an app as well, that's ⁓ compatible. Those are different experiences. So you have to about what a mobile user's needs are versus what a web user's needs are. That's something I've really had to think about deeply in the last year as I took on the mobile apps team. But
Jim Zarkadas (55:01)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Amanda (55:12)
It doesn't always make sense to copy paste features from web to mobile. It's like a very different use case. Like people might be on the go trying to solve things and like there's, there can be a lot of, have a finite amount of space on a mobile phone. You don't want to have a lot of bloat on your apps. So like really think about the, the user experience will be different depending on which device they're on. And I think sometimes that's clouded as well when people are building products.
Jim Zarkadas (55:17)
Yes.
Exactly.
You see me noting because I'm redesigning the apps that's handmade right now. I'm like, I agree so much because that was the key side we had is like, the first thought is like, yeah, let's just replicate the product mobile. But it's really what I said, they're using it for different jobs to be done. Like the jobs are kind of different and the context is different. Like on the go in the case of cleaning businesses for my case, like usually they get a phone call, like a cancellation, they need to reschedule. So rescheduling.
is more frequent than actually scheduling a new appointment. ⁓ So it's more like to react on situations that happen. ⁓ And in the case of ZenMate, it's mostly used by cleaners and not like the cleaning business owners because the owners are at the office using their ⁓ laptop mainly or desktop. So yeah, it's very, very true. I can really relate to that. It's the same case in ZenMate as well, where mobile is a different product. It's not just a different device.
Amanda (56:07)
No.
Yeah, exactly.
So for us too, like, you know, our agency users who have like multiple accounts that they're running, they're typically spending time on their laptops to do a lot of work.
Jim Zarkadas (56:41)
Mm.
Amanda (56:43)
But for the individual creator who's like, just, I have an idea. I just want to note it somewhere. They're the ones who are mostly using the mobile apps. So for us, we really had to think about what's the optimal user experience on mobile versus on web. And let's start stripping away features, because I think sometimes the mobile experience can be quite noisy. So we're kind of going through that journey at the moment, too.
Jim Zarkadas (56:47)
Yes.
Hmm.
Very true, yeah, yeah, very true. And look at the time and I know we're heading close ⁓ to the end. So I have two more questions that I wanna ask you. ⁓ The first one was from the slides of your presentation. You mentioned that at Buffer you have the fast and slow teams. ⁓ And I would like just to explain more kind of the idea. You mentioned that fast teams are more...
Amanda (57:25)
Mm.
Jim Zarkadas (57:32)
augmented by artificial intelligence and ideally you're great new features every once a week. And then the slow teams are the ones focused on long-term big strategic infrastructure level changes. So yeah, just kind of if you could share more kind of insights and the idea around how you structure the teams and build a product, would be really cool.
Amanda (57:52)
Sure, so I should note that this is not how necessarily this works in practice at Buffer, but it's something like I'm noodling on a lot recently. Yeah, because I'm part of a team that is both fast and slow. Like we work on a lot of architectural decisions. We work on like foundational, backend work, tech debt, things that are going to last us hopefully for many years. But at the same time, like if a new feature is rolled out on a channel, we want to get, first to market. So it's about striking that balance where
Jim Zarkadas (57:57)
Thank you. Wish power to you. Yeah.
Hmm.
Amanda (58:21)
it's okay to be slow when you are building for the long term to make sure you make the right choices that will help you scale long term as well. But if you're trying to ship iteratively and get things out quickly, it's also okay to lean into being fast and try to ship on a regular cadence. For us, it's really important. Last year, we were really great at shipping something almost every week, every two weeks, and then keeping Buffer top of mind for our users being like, if people were posting like, wow, is it just us or is Buffer like,
constantly shipping stuff. ⁓ So we're trying to get back to that momentum a little bit this year, which is constantly shipping new things, even if it's small features, but making a big deal about the small features too. ⁓ I think that that's where we were missing the mark a little bit over the last few months is that we're starting to bundle things too much. And it's like, why not just make a big deal about all the little things we're shipping to or even some of the... ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (58:57)
Hmm.
Exactly. Yes.
Amanda (59:16)
like structural work that we're doing, like why maybe people are interested in that stuff. And if there's like better posting liability or like we've reduced errors, which I also talked about in my presentation as well, like maybe people will probably be excited about that too, because our reliability has gotten a lot better. So I think there is like that balance of while we still want to ship features on a regular cadence, we'd also need some teams focused on like building for the longterm too. So it's, think about strike.
Jim Zarkadas (59:21)
Yeah.
Exactly.
Hmm.
Amanda (59:45)
balance of like, I would recommend like reserving space for both of these teams to exist. I think if you invest too much in one or the other, then the business, so I think it's mostly about striking the balance.
Jim Zarkadas (59:55)
Hmm.
Very, very true. Yeah, very true. Very true. And like on what you said, to make a big deal, I'm fully in the same page. it's the recent example from my work with the primary navigation, we made it a big deal by just announcing it, making some nice visual celebrating that we have a new navigation, we're making ZenMade even more intuitive for people and easier to use. If you think about it from a tech point of view, yeah, it's just a new sidebar, a bunch of new icons and labels. Like how groundbreaking that, but it's...
Amanda (1:00:20)
Hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (1:00:28)
Making a big deal doesn't mean overselling it or saying that we change the world or anything like that, but more about making it a moment of celebration and a moment, like an opportunity to build even more trust ⁓ and a better partnership with your users actually, because it's what I said, even if you sold bugs, like just celebrate it, say, hey, well, like we got all these bugs away because there is no software that is bug free. So it's actually an improvement. So the more you communicate,
the more you stay on top of mine as well. And the more they see that these people are really, they really care about improving buffers. ⁓ Framer is a company that is also doing this. And I'm a designer, I'm using Framer ⁓ every week and yeah, I love them. It's such a cool product also. And they just keep shipping every single week, I think. And sometimes they release a small one. We add new fonts in your font selection. Yeah, it's not like a new feature, but it's actually cool. You see that they just keep adding things.
Amanda (1:01:07)
on.
Jim Zarkadas (1:01:22)
And it's one of the reasons that I'm in love with Framer. I've been selling it to my clients as well is because I see how committed they are to make it the best. Like I get an email from them every single week about how they're improving it.
Amanda (1:01:35)
Yeah, no, it's incredible. Framer, I love Framer as well. Dutch Unicorn success story. ⁓ Nice to also see them succeed as well amongst like the big leagues too. But they've always been someone, sorry, a company that has been so ⁓ customer first, user first and held their product to such a high standard for delight and user experience that I think that that ended up permeating into every aspect of their business. And that's why they're now
Jim Zarkadas (1:01:40)
right? yep
Mmm.
Amanda (1:02:02)
known for being such a best-in-class design tool.
Jim Zarkadas (1:02:06)
Yeah, and they're really investing like on the communication. It's a different discussion, but like how you do product release, like how premium the visual assets you're gonna produce are is also like an interesting topic. Like Framer is really going hard on like having, they build a video team to do like really good videos, nice 3D animations and really kind of make it feel premium and delightful everything, every single thing that they release. Yeah. Yeah, it's a very, very interesting one. ⁓
Amanda (1:02:25)
and
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (1:02:35)
Yeah, on this one last question from my side, ⁓ which is not really related to process and so on, it's more of a personal one, is what's your favorite SAS product at this moment and why? Outside of buffer.
Amanda (1:02:49)
Ooh. It's...
Jim Zarkadas (1:02:51)
What is tool
you find yourself being, like, this is really cool. I really love it. Maybe you're using it every week or day, maybe not. And it just stood out. So yeah, I'm curious what comes up.
Amanda (1:03:01)
It's like the ones I'm thinking of right now are the ones I use a lot for work. ⁓ But so linear was one that I discussed in my presentation. ⁓ It's kind of like the antithesis to JIRA. And they're a very opinionated product about how project management should be. at first, so they don't offer a lot of flexibility in their product. But I think that's a good thing. Because when you go down like the Atlassian JIRA route, like there's so much complexity and
Jim Zarkadas (1:03:04)
Mm-hmm.
Amanda (1:03:31)
⁓ flexibility that I think for the average user, including myself, like I was, I'm quite technical and I also struggled to get like everything up and running in JIRA. So I think we transitioned our team to linear ⁓ early this year and the learning curve was like much less and we're a far more productive team because of the opinionated product decisions that their team has made. It's like a very simple interface. Like we're using it for almost all of our project management right now across the board.
Jim Zarkadas (1:03:39)
Hmm.
Amanda (1:04:00)
And they also are similar to Framer, constantly improving their product and communicating the things that they're fixing. So we're not only modeling our project management stuff around linear, but we're also trying to take from them how they approach their bug backlog because they're also very transparent about resolving bugs. So we're like, we would love to be like linear. But also outside of this.
Jim Zarkadas (1:04:23)
Right?
Amanda (1:04:25)
We are building our public API right now, and we're also looking to linear for some of their best practices for how they structured their public API. So I think that they're definitely one of my favorite SaaS products at the moment, just because of how much influence they've had on my life recently with like not only my day-to-day tasks, but how I'm thinking about product decisions more broadly beyond just like me using the tool. It's really inspired me to be like kind of pushing the boundaries and like.
Jim Zarkadas (1:04:45)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Amanda (1:04:55)
not being so defeated when we hit a limitation. I'm now starting to think about things more like, okay, well, why can't we openly communicate our bug triaging process? Or why can't we kind of default to transparency around some of these things in linear? Did a great job of that. So trying to model some of our work after that.
Jim Zarkadas (1:05:07)
Yeah.
love it. Yeah, love all the things that they sort and I'm a huge fan of leaners as well. It's like linear framework things like my to like a top such products at this moment as well. Yeah. And remember you mentioned your presentation, like how they approach the bugs with AI and so on and aiming to become bug free company ⁓ as well. And I feel like for you that your product manager, like linear feels also like a bit of a fresh air because like
Amanda (1:05:42)
Mm.
Jim Zarkadas (1:05:42)
Jira, I don't wanna talk about the SaaS products, but how to, it's like, I use it in other companies, it's nightmare. I'm not a big fan of Applesian, have to be honest, as a designer. Of course they produce valuable products, that's why they also make so much money. But yeah, not fun to use Jira. And it's really what I said, a lot of customers ability. If I have to maintain this product, it's really hard to make it.
Amanda (1:05:47)
Thank
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (1:06:09)
very fast, very productive and so on because the complex is insanely high as well.
Amanda (1:06:13)
Yeah, yeah,
well I think you know there's reasons why there's like GRS certification courses and like like it's the standard right?
Jim Zarkadas (1:06:19)
Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Amanda (1:06:23)
That's where it left a lot of space for disruption and linear kind of took it and ran with it. And now that's kind of seen as like a, especially like for us, we're not a huge company. It doesn't make sense for us to have like an enterprise level software for some of our stuff. For some companies, it may make perfect sense to have a more complex setup. But in a lot of those situations too, like they have scrum masters who like just manage the JIRA backlog, but a product manager functionality is like much more than just being like chasing people on JIRA for things.
Jim Zarkadas (1:06:26)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Amanda (1:06:53)
linear is like a small part of my day and I'm happy that it is a small part of my day versus being like what it was with Jira where I had to just like be so actively involved in all the tickets and stuff. yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (1:06:57)
Okay.
100%. Yeah. Yeah. I fully, fully hear you. Yeah. And it's like, I really like the ideas that when people say what is the best tool use on something, I find it like a very bad question because the answer is always depends. Depends on what you need. Depends on your culture. Depends on your values. Depends on your team and what you're used to. It's like, there is no best tool. It really depends on every company, which is really what you said is we're not enterprise. It doesn't feel right or make sense to use an enterprise style product to run.
Amanda (1:07:31)
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (1:07:32)
like all the two organize a roadmap and plan all of our product development work. yeah, these were my questions, really interesting insights. Thanks a lot for joining me today. Yeah, yeah, anytime, anytime.
Amanda (1:07:37)
Yeah.
Thanks for having me as well. It was nice to catch up.