Product education goes interactive

The challenge

Product people: what keeps you up at night?

Do you really know your customer? Are you marketing your product's value well, or are customers getting tired of the same old hat tricks? (As Mbappé learned, they're not enough to win the game.) Are you keeping people invested, entertained, coming back for more?

Product marketing can be a very cut-and-dried game. Even the most thrilling digital products on the market are easily broken down into an incoherent ramble of high-strung tech jargon and boring demos. A once clear value proposition ends up scrambled across page 32, figure 1.8a and video3_V6_FINAL_FINAL.

That's the very thing that keeps John Cutler of Amplitude (and hundreds of product people like him) up at all hours and dedicated to his craft. How do you create endless, renewable value around your product without force-feeding it to people?

Or better yet: how could you create a product that markets your product by teaching people about product?

Who we were working with

John Cutler is the product evangelist at Amplitude, a product analytics company that helps businesses understand how their digital products perform. He's also a prolific content creator and thought leader in product management and product thinking.

On any given day he's speaking at conferences, coaching clients and non-clients, producing content, writing entire books. He is also, to our delight, obsessed with music, having been a touring musician in a past life.

Long story long, John's a busy man with a deep desire to share his product knowledge, and very limited bandwidth to do it with.

John tweeted his community looking for a partner to co-create a new type of learning experience, one that could package, distribute and scale this expertise on demand. We answered the call.

Our starting provocation: How might we support John and Amplitude in producing learning content and experiences that are distinctive, engaging, repeatable and extendable?

What we built

Our 8-week mission was to develop a suite of educational "Product Bet" modules that would give customers (from a senior product leader to an internet hobbyist or up-and-coming product manager) a structured, actionable curriculum based on John's expertise.

Ideally, it would repeat the best of John's work at scale, recreating a 1-1 session with him and capturing his gemiest product gems without relying on his bandwidth or presence.

Long term, Amplitude could rely on the program to:

• Serve as an evergreen lead generation tool
• Build a network effect around the work, preserving John's and Amplitude's lifetime value
• Create an experience and production pipeline whose success wasn't tied to one person
• Identify a foundational model that could be repeated across the organization

How each module was made

After several rounds of content ideation, topic development and learning objective iteration, we picked three core module topics as critical priorities. Each module then went through eight phases of development, from ideation to implementation.

The three modules

Module 1: Advocating for Amplitude

Making the case for self-service analytics (and so for Amplitude) as a concept first and foremost. With on-demand video, "The Curiosity Test" self-assessment, and a Miro workspace where users identify how much friction their companies face when tracking analytics events.

Module 2: The Curiosity Test

Assessing the productivity, efficiency, precision and capabilities of your current product analytics stack. Plus, sowing the seeds of what it could be. With a custom-designed quiz, industry insights and interactive exercises.

Module 3: Avoiding the Analytics Freakout

Preventing the inevitable. Teaching product teams to resist number-induced breakdowns and find productive ways through. With a fully produced, 3-character skit for a touch of comic relief (it was John's brilliant idea to use puppets; yes, we were entirely sober), and 30 prompts aimed at 30 different Freakout scenarios.

What shifted

John and the Amplitude team are deploying this program as we speak, so our lips are sealed, but check back soon for an update.

What we took away

• The best products make the content, not the containers it lives in, indispensable
• Becoming an educator is a powerful, transferable skill set
• Hand holding can only get you so far. If you love something, set it free!
• Never underestimate the power of the newsboy cap, or of stuffed animals as on-screen talent
• James Cameron better watch his back. Avatar who?

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