Obsess Over Things that Approach Infinity

Timeless Methods: Secrets from The Lost Product Management Manual

There are a few heuristics, rules-of-thumb, that are high leverage. If you get these heuristics right, you win and win regularly. You’ll get promotions over others, deliver results more than others—and ultimately, you’ll have an accurate scorecard of where your product is in the marketplace. I aim to share my heuristics with you, hoping you do the same. This week, it’s about obsessing over things that approach infinity. 

Timeless Method: Obsess over metrics that approach infinity.

Some numbers approach infinity, while others approach 1—any metric with a max value of 100% is a metric that approaches 1. These metrics are often critical, but they aren’t the goal. You can have a 100% conversion rate and a customer base of 1.

Sidebar: “Approaches” in math means a value gets infinitely close to a specific point or grows without bounds. For example, x approaches 1, which means x over time will get as close as possible to 1 without exceeding it, and x approaches infinity, which means x increases without limit.

Your goal is to grow customers and increase the intensity of use of your product. These numbers “approach infinity” (or the total addressable market, whichever number comes first), meaning the upper limit for what you can accomplish with these numbers approaches infinity.

Why does this matter? Metrics that are truly meaningful “approach infinity” and keep your focus on what matters, the unlimited opportunity to serve your current and new customers without getting lost on the finite potential in your current product. Too often, people can get lost in metrics like the conversion rate on a download page or the successful onboarding rate. In challenging environments, new investments like Marketing campaigns are gated based on successfully improving these metrics.

Here is the thing. If your product is genuinely confusing, you’ve got to fix it, no bones about it, and it will bear out in your quantitative and qualitative data. Unless you’re inventing a new category or are in a complex industry or category—your product can’t succeed without clear value delivered early.

But if you’ve got users coming through the door, you’ve got to develop the market for your product continuously. Keep the main thing the main thing: your product’s number of high-intensity users.

Focus on efforts that move that needle. You’ll find that improving your “customer/product win”—the extent to which your product “wins” customers, is far more valuable than optimizing metrics approaching 1.

Some things approach 1; Some things approach infinity.

Here are some things that approach infinity and some things that approach 1:

These things approach 1:

• Activation rate
• Conversion rate
• Retention rate

These things approach infinity:

• Total customers
• Passionate advocates
• Transaction volume
• Expanding the market

The implication is that when you focus on things that approach infinity—the opportunity for growth increases; when you do things that grow your total customers, you expand the market. When you do things like improve conversion rate—your opportunity decreases; there is less room to improve the closer you bring that value to 1.

Focusing on things that approach infinity—usually brings you back to big levers; how can you strengthen your value proposition and increase the number of people (and organizations) that experience your value prop?

Focusing on things that approach one often leads to debates about reducing friction. And much of that friction—exists because it enhances your value proposition. You can eliminate only so much friction without changing your product’s complexity. But you can stimulate an unlimited amount of motivation for a person to use or desire your product.

Simply put, drive user motivation to unlimited bounds by strengthening your product value. Keep score by counting the total number of core customers on the way or the total meaningful actions they take with your product: for example, Netflix, total entertainment hours, Uber, trips, and Salesforce deals closed.