Designing for Retention: Product Development Insights
AMA with Ben Foster, Chief Product Officer at WHOOP
BEN FOSTER, WHOOP
“Our success is 100% tied to our members’ success, and what will make a current member stay with us for life is the same as what will attract that next new member. This is one of the reasons I absolutely love running products at WHOOP – not having to make that tradeoff over and over again.”
Full Transcript
*Questions submitted by community members
Transcript and highlights from our last Ask Me Anything.
Ben Foster is the Chief Product Officer at WHOOP. He has worked on products ranging from eBay, Opower, and Zoosk. He is the co-author of the book, Build What Matters: Delivering Key Outcomes With Vision Led Product Management. Welcome, Ben!
Hi everyone! Great to be here.
Let's get started!
Question: People think of WHOOP as a product company, but I see you as a subscription or membership company. Which is it? Does it matter?
At some companies, there might be a distinction, but at WHOOP, the product is the membership, and the membership is the product. I don’t think this is a matter of semantics – I believe it really does matter. Our language shapes our thinking. Where other companies have users, we have members. Where others have customer support, we have membership services. We need to sell (and resell) the value of membership, not of the device itself. The device is an important part of the product we sell, but the membership as a whole is what WHOOP is about.
This is great...so glad you have clarity on this question.
Too many companies are not aligned on their “Why”
I'll credit our CEO for really driving this point about language home.
"Our language shapes our thinking.” I think about this often.
Yes I love this too. It makes me think of the simple parenting advice to be careful how you label your kids because they will fulfill those labels. Words are powerful.
This discussion makes it apparent that every AMA speaker should be asked to explain "Why" their company exists.
Question: Many companies pitch the value of personalization, but it is usually an expensive effort. How do you balance the benefits of a personalized subscriber experience with the efficiency needed at a product level?
You’re 100% right that personalization is complex and expensive to deliver, but not as expensive as the cost of not delivering it. To not personalize is to take on one of two issues: (a) having a one-size-fits-all solution that is more akin to one-size-fits-none, or (b) building and marketing separate, isolated products and forking code. So, it’s something we’re willing to take on. In fact, if there is a core thesis behind our forward-looking product strategy, personalization would be it. The balancing act comes by being very intentional about what should be consistent for our members and what should be different based on who they are on the context they care about. For example, heart rate variability, sleep quality and consistency, and resting heart rate should matter to everyone as they are signals of health and fitness that are meaningful no matter your goal. However, how people relate to those metrics – why they should care – might be very different: for one member it could be that they want to feel good when they wake up every day and for another, it’s because they want to perform their best at an upcoming race. So, the app can show these metrics graphed in a consistent manner, but the explanation of the metrics would be best to vary from member to member based on their goals and physiological baseline.
It's important to think about personalization spanning the entire customer journey - including their initial introduction to the brand.
Question: Consumer need change over time and sometimes very rapidly (such as in the last 2 years). How should product development teams keep tabs on the changing needs of subscribers to ensure maximum retention?
Consumer needs change over time and sometimes very rapidly (such as in the last 2 years). How should product development teams keep tabs on the changing needs of subscribers to ensure maximum retention?
Totally agree - personalization is now the expected default experience with how ubiquitous having a Netflix and Amazon account is. Companies must personalize to their users.
Question: What are some of the metrics Whoops focuses on for focused quantitative input to measure product usage? And how did you guys land on choosing those metrics to track and focus on?
There are three major categories we pay attention to at WHOOP: (a) qualitative input, (b) trends, and (c) focused quantitative input. I’ll cover these one at a time:
Qualitative input: There’s no amount of secondary research that will make up for direct interviews. Build a process by which members of the product team regularly speak with customers one-on-one and record their qualitative findings.
Trends: Look at aggregated feedback and see how it’s changing over time. The great news is that in the modern world this is easy to obtain – categories of customer contacts, app reviews, social media posts, and so on. You can see how the sands are shifting in customer sentiment and back into what it means about changing market expectations, then develop a roadmap that will result in the right product for the market by the time it arrives.
Focused quantitative input: This can come in multiple forms. With a software product, there are often several metrics that can tell you how the product is being used. Very specific surveys on key questions can give directional guidance, as well.
I'll add that I also think that this answer can/should vary a lot from company to company.
Question: How do you balance the needs of the subscribers, the vision for a product, and the requests of sales marketing folks?
This is an age-old product management problem that affects all companies. I’ve never met a company that had enough engineering staff to do everything they wanted. The key here is to never lose sight of the _customer_. In product management, this requires what I call “playing offense, not a defense”. Rather than trying to appease disparate stakeholder groups by attempting to balance across them, seek to understand what the customer really needs and is willing to pay for (which may or may not be exactly what they tell you, btw). Then synthesize it into a cohesive and clear vision for where the product needs to go and share this vision with the stakeholder groups. It’s amazing how many of the inbound requests will just go away once the void of a solid product strategy has been filled with something meaningful, defensible, and inspiring. I write about this effect more – and provide specific actions you can take – in my book, Build What Matters.
I wonder how precarious this is for marketing/acquisition when your product IS totally personalized but the effort to get people into the product experience is less so – it’s like an inverted brand gap.
In product management, this requires what I call “playing offense, not defense”. Rather than trying to appease disparate stakeholder groups by attempting to balance across them, seek to understand what the customer really needs and is willing to pay for (which may or many not be exactly what they tell you, btw). Then synthesize it into a cohesive and clear vision for where the product needs to go and share this vision with the stakeholder groups. It’s amazing how many of the inbound requests will just go away once the void of a solid product strategy has been filled with something meaningful, defensible, and inspiring. I write about this effect more – and provide specific actions you can take – in my book.
This is often overlooked when marketing teams are focused purely on acquisition numbers and not on the actual retention (or at least modeled LTV) of those they acquire.
It's amazing how often this void exists and the sense of responsibility to react to inbound request rules. It’s amazing how many of the inbound requests will just go away once the void of a solid product strategy has been filled with something meaningful, defensible, and inspiring.
Question: I see you have two levels of membership with the addition of WHOOP Pro, do the retention efforts differ between those two?
We launched WHOOP Pro along with our 4.0 device in September 2021, and WHOOP Pro is only available on an annual subscription, so we don’t have retention metrics on it yet. There will ultimately be competing forces affecting this number: it’s a higher price than a non-Pro subscription but the value proposition is quite strong for the incremental membership cost and there is a selection bias in which those already most deeply engaged are the ones most likely to buy it. I expect that our retention rates will net out higher for WHOOP Pro members than for others. Wearing the device at 28 of the last 28 days, using the app 28 out of the last 28 days, and utilizing specific features in the product at least 7 of those days.
This definitely speaks to how closely retention correlates to value even when costs are higher.
We chose these because (a) they correlate to retention, (b) it's believable that that correlation is a reflection of actual causation, and (c) because there's a sufficient volume of those who show this behavioral pattern and those that don't that we can have a meaningful business impact by moving people up the ladder of engagement.
I wish more acquisition efforts were tied directly to retention metrics
Totally! It's by far more common for companies to lack vision and strategy than to actually have one in place based on my experience.
Love this!
That’s awesome, makes a lot of sense, thank you!
Question: What methods do you use to never lose sight of the customer?
Being very intentional about what should be consistent for our members and what should be different based on who they are on the context they care about. For me I think about what's also recommended and what can I manually control (eg tailored notifications, stopping podcast recommendations on Spotify when I am there for music) At least for me, it would be mostly those items from the previous question. (a) qualitative input, (b) trends, (c) focused quantitative input. Curious about what others' best practices are...
Question: The current Value Proposition of WHOOP seems targeted toward athletes. Is there anything on the product roadmap for non-athletes?
It’s important to separate marketing from the value proposition itself. WHOOP is an elite product with an elite brand. From a marketing perspective, we focus on the aspirations of our future members rather than the nuts and bolts of the product features, and whether people are particularly focused on athletics or not, there is a strong sense that if the product meets the needs of top athletes (which it does), it will meet their needs, too. However, we build our product to help all our members, not just those who are more athletically minded. When new members join, we ask whether their goal is athletics, fitness, or general health and wellness, and it’s about even across those categories. Consider some of our most recent big product feature launches: respiratory rate alerting, health monitor, smart wake alarm, menstrual cycle coaching for sleep and activity, etc. These are relevant to all WHOOP members, not just those focused on shaving a few seconds off of their one-mile time.
Question: The fitness and performance tracking category FEELS crowded, maybe because the VP is more complicated than competitive? What do you struggle with in articulating your Value Proposition?
It is crowded in the sense that there are many players in the market, including all the big names of Apple (Watch), Google (Fitbit), and Amazon (Halo). However, the market is also enormous: health and fitness apply to literally everyone. My take is that no product (or even brand) can be all things to all people. Generally, a product needs to choose between being some things for most people or most things for some people. The big players all choose the former because the market is theoretically larger and all compete with one another there. WHOOP has no plans to reinvent Siri or be a fancier watch. We want to coach people to be their best selves, “unlocking human performance”. That’s both our mission and our value proposition. Our target market is everyone who is motivated to do so, recognizing that “performance” means different things to different people. There’s always a difficulty in articulating the population when you do something different, even if it’s better because people’s mental frameworks are built from the familiar. In our case, customers are pre-programmed to think of a wearable (device), while WHOOP is more of a digital coach that requires data only our wearable can capture.
This is totally my problem - variables in tracking, variables in training, too many sources and points of view to fulfill the promise of software-as-a-coach or DIY coaching
And the best sound-byte award goes to!
Question: How many fitness tracking applications does one person need, and what's the idea combination - have you found a 'sweet spot' in your segment personas for the number and type of complementary products?
I think it depends on what that person is trying to measure or accomplish. Each product has its relative strengths and weaknesses. For example, WHOOP doesn’t have GPS tracking – we rely on the phone’s GPS, which helps us maintain a slim profile and long battery life. Apple Watch has a wealth of functionality and apps, but battery life is so short many people are forced to recharge during sleep, causing them to miss out on that analysis. Strava has a strong community but is highly focused on only running and biking and captures no biometric data directly. Peloton has awesome content, but it provides no personalized coaching. We don’t focus attention on other product usages as we break down our personas, but we recognize that there is an entire ecosystem of connected devices and apps and are investing heavily in APIs and partnerships to allow our members to get the best of whatever combination of apps and equipment and see it all in one place.
Makes me think of the Venn diagram between health and performance, very interesting
It's funny, we were just discussing whether it's really a Venn diagram or actually a pyramid where health underpins fitness and fitness underpins performance. You could think about it, either way, I suppose, but I kind of liked the pyramid model.
Question: Maintaining a relevant value proposition for the entirety of subscribers' engagement over time, ideally a long time, can be challenging when hardware enhancements are required along the way - how do you make that easier for subscribers so hardware enhancements don't create churn?
As long as we don’t compromise on the features of any next generation of hardware, I have a hard time seeing how providing new hardware would cause churn. Instead, I would be concerned if WHOOP were to stop investing in hardware because as consumer expectations increase, our prior versions which were groundbreaking at the time could become lackluster. As WHOOP is a membership, it’s our responsibility to stay innovative on behalf of our members and continue to craft new hardware that not only meets their changing expectations but also sets a new set of standards in the industry raising the expectations on our competitors.
Wow, you may have just won over more customers today
Thanks for your transparency with this one - super helpful to see how engagement metrics are valued by peers
So you don't see the additional expense of new hardware as a hurdle for existing members? I know you've been lauded for the 4.0 launch so I'm curious to understand the thinking and member insights a little more
Hardware upgrades have to be monetized somehow. On the one hand, you want to include it in the membership to differentiate vs. the competitors selling devices. On the other, it essentially means having to have a higher membership cost which might price some people out. It's tough to get right but we try.
Question: How do you decide between adding new features to attract/acquire more users vs. iterating on the existing niche?
Ah, this is the one I'm most passionate about...For most companies, this is a challenging tradeoff, especially in our industry where most competitors sell devices. Consider how Garmin makes money, for example. They sell a piece of hardware and then provide an app. After their customers have bought a device, how do they further monetize that customer? By making yet another device that has more bells and whistles and competes against the device their customer just spent money on. They have little incentive to invest in their app experience. Software is essentially a cost center. Contrast this with WHOOP where our revenue is completely dependent on the quality of the experience and the hardware is just included. We have every incentive to build new software features, power new use cases, and make what members have already been paying for that much more valuable for them. Our success is 100% tied to our members’ success, and what will make a current member stay with us for life is the same as what will attract that next new member. This is one of the reasons I absolutely love running products at WHOOP – not having to make that tradeoff over and over again.
Bringing it full circle, with evidence that the membership IS the product
So true...looks like Peloton is trying to get on this train also with their new subscription offering that includes the bike (vs making you purchase the hardware
Our success is 100% tied to our members’ success" I love when leaders think this way, thank you - also appreciate recurring theme of who WHOOP is and who WHOOP is not.
Question: How do you determine your businesses' key metrics to track for your retention efforts?
Retention is the leading indicator of long-term revenue. We needed to identify the leading indicators of retention. These vary for every product and sometimes for each persona the product is targeted to. Leading indicators must be causal, but it’s hard to identify causal factors through metrics alone. Retention drivers are discovered by identifying correlations but also need to be validated through common sense and qualitative research. At WHOOP we take two approaches: (a) quantitative precursors, which are necessary but not sufficient for deriving product value, and (b) qualitative “magic moments” that members should experience through their journey. Both are important for keeping the team focused on retention but doing so in a way that keeps us honest by delivering real member value that they will feel.
That definitely sounds like a more sustainable business model!
hm I’m interested in these “qualitative ‘magic moments’ that you speak of” - what are some examples of these? and how do you track that?
A magic moment might be something like, a member seeing the impact of a daily behavior on their fitness and deciding to change that behavior specifically because of the insight provided by WHOOP.
You can ‘attempt’ to track these using "compound metrics" like member used feature x, then used feature y within z days, then their underlying performance metrics went up by 5% or more. What % of member trigger that combination in the first 6 months? What can we do to double that number. Some "magic moments" are easier to measure than others though.
Question: How much do competitors play into design?
Honestly, not much. We feel we are trying to build a business and a relationship with our members that is intentionally different. We look evaluate them to develop a strategy to maintain our edge, but we don’t have any interest in replicating their features or design elements for the sake of parity. We’d rather innovate on the behalf of our members and force our competitors to upend their roadmaps to get to parity with us. This isn’t to say that we don’t respect our competitors’ products – we do. We’re just trying to create something different than they are, and perhaps if we each focus on delivering our own value to the same market, we’ll find we’re less competitive than we thought and better potential partners for one another.
Question: We have time for a couple last questions...saw your ad during the super bowl...was the product team involved in that effort?
Directly, no. Indirectly, yes. What I mean by that is that the Marketing creates all our ads and they do a great job. I don’t think that product should be a dependency for them to get their job done, since business moves at the speed of trust. However, the Product and Marketing teams coordinate regularly. The CMO and I and our deputies have a weekly sync where we discuss strategy, target market, value proposition, personas, etc. – essentially everything where we know we need to operate off the same playbook. In that regard, I feel the product team was involved enough, and feel confident that what Marketing delivers is consistent with what Product would deliver if we had the same skillset. I believe they would say the same about our 2022 product roadmap.
I am not sure my brain can handle much more of these amazing insights!
Question: And finally - What is next for WHOOP?
Of course, I cannot publicly share our detailed product plans. I can speak to two, though. First, we acquired PUSH last year. They had built some amazing technology and algorithms for strength training that we were excited to embed in our product and refine for the consumer market. I cannot get into the specifics, but weightlifters have a lot to look forward to. Second, we aim to provide our community with the types of insights and recommendations they already get inside the WHOOP app but spanning across data members collect through other apps and equipment in the fitness and wellness ecosystem. Imagine seeing how meditations, workouts, etc. performed on other platforms affect recovery and being able to make informed decisions inside of other systems based on WHOOP analytics.
Thank you so much for your time today. I know we hit our 30-minute mark but you provided us with hours of insights....so grateful for you to be featured in this AMA and look forward to your continued participation as a member of our SubscriptionWorks community!
Thank you so much for your time today
Thank you so much Ben for taking the time to be here and to answer these questions.
Of course, glad to participate. I have another 10min right now in case others want to keep going…Thank you for hosting me! I've loved all these great questions!
wow, so generous of you!
We loved hosting you...thanks so much for being here and sharing your knowledge with our community.
Question: Sure! Thanks! What new product design/feature has had the biggest impact on WHOOP retention?
Along with WHOOP 4.0 we launched two major new features: smart wake alarm and health monitor. We’ve seen very strong engagement with both but particularly with the health monitor feature, It provides alerts when biometrics are outside of their normal range. To be clear, WHOOP is not a medical device. However, it empowers members to take better control of their own health by providing them with information to make smarter health decisions. At the end of the day, that’s a win-win for us and our members. If we can give them insights that help them make better decisions every day, then they become dependent on WHOOP to make them. That’s the basis of our retention strategy.