Engagement

Summary

The website content discusses the importance of engagement in product design, emphasizing that highly engaging experiences are essential for creating products that users love, leading to increased retention and growth.

Abstract

The content explains that great products captivate users by providing engaging experiences that entertain and leave a lasting impression, akin to the immersive feeling of watching a gripping movie. It outlines that engagement is not just about user enjoyment but also about delivering value that results in frequent use, higher session counts, increased time spent on the product, and ultimately, daily active usage. High engagement is linked to better retention rates, which in turn drives sustainable growth. The article also notes that the nature of engagement can vary across different types of products, such as user-generated content platforms, professionally generated content services, marketplaces, and messaging apps. It suggests that understanding these nuances is crucial for building engaging products and announces a series of upcoming posts that will explore engagement frameworks for various product types, including News Feeds, Content Production, Connections & Inventory, Activity Feed Ranking, and Consumption. The work is attributed to Sequoia Capital’s Data Science team, and readers are invited to engage with further content from The Startup publication on Medium.

Opinions

Engagement is a key factor in a product's success, as it leads to users truly loving the product and becoming more active and retained users.
Engaging products create a sense of entertainment and value, making users lose track of time and space.
The level of engagement can be measured by metrics such as the number of sessions per week, time spent on the product, and the ratio of daily to monthly active users.
Engagement is closely tied to stickiness and retention, which are critical for a product's growth.
Different product types require different engagement strategies, and understanding the nuances of each is important for product teams.
The article suggests that the goal of a Product team should be to create a product that users love, which inherently drives engagement and growth.
The content is positioned as the beginning of a series that will provide in-depth frameworks for understanding engagement across various product types.

Engagement

All great products have an element of magic and provide true value. They deliver highly engaging experiences. You are alone and bored one Saturday morning and thinking about what you want to do. You ponder over your choices and eventually decide to go see a movie at the theater. It has your favorite actor in it which motivates you. The movie is gripping. As you are watching the movie, there is a constant feeling of suspense. You are staying upright and you have lost sight of time and space. This type of experience is engaging. It entertains our senses and leaves us with a special feeling!

Strong products deliver such engaging experiences multiple times a day, providing inherent value. When users truly love your product, they will come back to it more often, increasing number of sessions per week (L5+/L7 in Figure 1), spending more time with it (time spent, or TS), and eventually becoming daily active users (DAU).

Such users are also highly retained, which increases a product’s retention (say, D1 and D7). And because DAUs continue to be weekly active users (WAU) and monthly active users (MAU), as well, they increase the intensity of engagement for each group (i.e., DAU/MAU and DAU/WAU). In other words, engagement drives stickiness, which drives retention — and that, in turn, drives growth.

Thus, engagement is necessary to achieve both sustainable growth and true product-market fit, and getting people to truly love your product should be the goal of your Product team.

ENGAGEMENT AND PRODUCT TYPE

The nuances of engagement vary based on the type of product. For example, the production-consumption framework of user-generated content (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube) is different than that of professionally generated content (e.g., Netflix, HBO). Similarly, engagement for marketplaces like eBay, Amazon and Airbnb differs from engagement for messaging products like iMessage, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. The consumption surface (like News Feed) and device (Mobile versus TV versus Desktop) also play a significant role in engagement.

Therefore, to provide thorough guidance on building highly engaging, data-informed products, we plan to provide frameworks for understanding engagement in the context of various product types: News Feeds, Professionally Generated Content, Marketplaces and Messaging. In the next several posts, we will delve deep into News Feed engagement, Content Production, Connections & Inventory, Activity Feed Ranking, & Consumption.

This work is a product of Sequoia Capital’s Data Science team. Jamie Cuffe, Avanika Narayan, Chandra Narayanan, Hem Wadhar and Jenny Wang contributed to this post. Please email [email protected] with questions, comments and other feedback.

Engagement

ENGAGEMENT AND PRODUCT TYPE

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