5 Things We Do Differently at Keeper Tax
At Keeper Tax, we’re not just building a product. We’re constantly building and iterating on processes that are both rewarding and fun for the team, and critical to the success our business.
Below are some examples of the practices we’ve been incubating.
#1) We watch user recordings weekly
While building a lightweight user research practice is important, it’s not enough. Traditional user research calls are abstract, and time-inefficient. There’s often too much people-pleasing and ego involved to get to the truth. Between scheduling, no-shows, and prep, user research is also incredibly time-consuming. This often leads to a single person doing the calls and then summarizing the results to the rest of the group, which is even worse since 2nd-hand empathy is rarely powerful.
That’s why — at Keeper Tax — we’ve built a different kind of user empathy practice: every Friday at 4 pm we all sit down and watch recordings of people using our app. Prior to the meeting, each team member is assigned two users and asked to watch every single interaction they’ve had in the past week with our product. Then, as a group, we all show off our users’ journeys and share insights into their experiences.
Not only do these sessions uncover bugs, they generate discussion of actual user behavior, unadulterated by HIPPO or the narratives we all invariably tell ourselves as product-builders. Whatever new features we launched last week are typically the focus of the sessions, which is helpful since it allows every team-member to build empathy and product intuition.
It’s also a lot of fun! As the saying goes — the user is drunk. When (they think) nobody’s watching, people’s behavior quickly humbles even the most conscientious designs. There’s no substitute for watching someone rage-click an inactive button, or misunderstand the meaning of the new delete button we added.
#2) Every team member is a product analytics expert
At every company I’ve ever worked at, product analytics has been a walled garden, guarded by “analytics specialists”. This happens for two reasons: (1) the data tools & infrastructure are not set up for ease-of-use, and (2) the expectation that everyone should “self-serve” isn’t there.
At Keeper Tax, we treat product analytics differently. Every member of the team — engineers, data scientists, operations, customer support, and marketing — are all fully “product data literate”. Our tool of choice is Amplitude, and everyone uses it every day. It’s how we track our progress against goals, it’s how we make design arguments, and it’s how we keep each other honest as a team.
Note: to set up this culture requires an incredible amount of data infrastructure work. Without having the right foundation, it’s nearly impossible (believe me, I’ve tried). For starters, event naming conventions are key. But on top of that, it’s important to use a data pipelining service like Segment to ensure that there’s only one “source-of-truth” data stream powering other functions like lifecycle marketing, advertising, and more.
#3) We practice “humble design”
The problem with nearly every product design process I’ve witnessed is ego. It happens because a product designer’s job is incredibly difficult. There are near-infinite permutations, and open-ended “step-backs”, that could be applied to every decision they make. But someone needs to make the call. The natural human instinct is to adopt a frame of invincibility and design expertise … “I’m the designer, and I say this”. That attitude results in demotivated stakeholders (e.g. engineers), bad product decisions, and an unwillingness to revert them.
Instead, there’s “humble design”. It still requires deep thought and intuition, but also acknowledges that whatever you’re going to launch is probably going to need to get fixed. Every design comes with 2–3 “close calls” — tough design decisions that will be re-evaluated after the initial release. After a week passes and the team has looked at the data, the answers will be obvious.
Note: “Humble design” is NOT an excuse for shitty MVPs. Great design is always opinionated, and great designers must trust their intuition. There’s always a way to make something amazing with less resourcing, and there will always be room for a followup that doubles down on what works.
#4) We align marketing with product, as much as possible
Some companies are required to build two businesses: one that retains and monetizes the customer, and another that acquires them. This is often true for products like insurance (partnerships), or enterprise software (giant sales apparatus).
While there are many celebrated examples of where this has worked (e.g. DollarShaveClub, Airbnb), I believe that this splitting of attention results in a worse product experience long-term, and dangerous misaligned incentives. To build something amazing requires focus, and so at Keeper Tax we try (as much as possible), to re-use our product for marketing.
We try to evaluate every distribution channel not just by its effectiveness at acquiring customers, but also by how aligned it is to creating product and user value. Some channels — like content marketing and referrals — go hand-in-hand with improving your user experience. They should get extra points. Others — like partnerships and ads — can work really well, but create dangerous rifts in priorities.
The way we think about it, the best marketing is the most transparent and shows what the user experience will be. That’s why at Keeper Tax we invest a ton into our free resources — like our “Tax University” series and our tax calculators — which are the same resources we give our existing customers.
That’s also why our ads are just montages of user research clips. Here’s an example:
#5) We align revenue with user value
When people talk about having product-aligned revenue models, the most common culprits is enterprise sales. When the person buying something is not the one using it, that obviously creates issues.
But even within a consumer business, revenue models can easily slip into misalignment with product and user value. When we considered this at Keeper Tax, here’s how we mapped out our options:
At Keeper Tax, most of our revenue comes from a monthly subscription. However, as we’ve been adding new features and surface area (like tax filing), we’ve resisted the urge to include it in a higher-priced plan. That’s because we want to make sure that each new feature we add is valuable enough that customers are willing to pay extra to get it.
Another example is that we resist the urge to force our customers into an annual plan. While this can be great for reducing payback period, we don’t want to artificially create too many barriers for churn. It’s important that we know how many users consciously decide to stop paying us every month, in the same way that we don’t want to over-optimizing payment screens and cancellation flows.
