Building an internal use-case dashboard for product-led content
Give complete visibility of your product's use cases across teams, remove knowledge silos, empower team members
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Product-led content is great until you have:
siloed teams that create disjointed customer experiences,
inadequate use-case (not product) knowledge internally,
accumulation of technical debt that interferes with content production,
Every product can be distilled into simple use cases or job(s)-to-be-done. And until your team can understand how each use case functions independently and collectively, you’re likely going to run into the issues mentioned above.
These challenges are not only an internal problem but directly translate to lower conversion and activation rates.
Having a single source of truth (SSOT), aka a use-case dashboard, that includes all of your product’s use cases along with use-case mapping, real-life examples from existing customers, potential workflows, and most importantly, how you can position your product for every single use case (and thus improve your conversion and activation rates) is important.
To help you flesh out this idea of a use-case dashboard, I put together some best practices, tools, and frameworks to get you started. You can take inspiration from the data shared below to create your marketing use-case dashboard, identify the highest-leverage lever(s) for conversion, and put more resources behind it.
1. Create your top-level messaging building blocks
Before you start creating a deck filled with your product’s different use cases, you should make sure your entire internal team gets your product’s messaging.
Even if your sales team is winning deals every quarter, you could make the time to win faster, align sales with marketing better, or align product with marketing better. This would directly impact your conversion rates across the spectrum — organic channels, paid ads, demand generation/creation, lifecycle marketing, and sales inbound & outbound calls.
The good news: There’s only one simple framework you need to adopt. Whether you’re smack dab in the middle of finding product-market fit and iterating your messaging frequently or have already nailed down your ICP and their pain points, this simple framework can be applied easily for product-led companies.
How to use this framework
Top-level messaging building blocks help align different internal teams so there’s no leaky bucket between them.
Let’s say, your marketing team drives high MQLs this quarter but the SQLs are low, that’s a problem that needs to be addressed. Or let’s say the following quarter, you want to double down on LinkedIn outbound via the sales team and your social selling is in full swing, but the activation rates are low, then it could be another leaky bucket in your funnel. Whatever the case may be, it’s important to have your top-level messaging building blocks in place — and update them regularly (most likely on a quarterly/half-yearly basis) — to ensure your messaging around your product is leakproof.
Note that messaging is not equal to content.
Messaging is the idea and perception of your product in your customer’s day-to-day life. It’s the foundation on which every single piece of your content is designed, written, and distributed so your customers know exactly what your product is meant for and how it can solve their challenges in a realistic way.
- I feel weird quoting this to myself so I’m just putting “Yours truly”
The easiest yet most effective way to identify your top-level messaging building blocks is to break it down into seven different (simple) steps.
Use case:
Like most product-led growth startups, chances are you solve multiple use cases for different target personas like Kajabi. Or, you might be solving a single use case for multiple target personas like DocuSign. Either way, when you’re creating your messaging building blocks, identify all the use cases you solve for your target persona(s).
Work from outwards to inwards: Start by speaking to your prospects and existing customers to understand how they use your product in day-to-day ops and the context in which they might use the product. Then, once you’ve collated data externally dive into product demo calls/sales calls, salesforce, or other tools to identify patterns and trends in terms of “usage” and “use case”.
Keep an eye and an ear open for social listening: Monitor social media and online forums to see how people talk about the product category and the problems they wish to solve.
Review competitors’ offerings to identify what use cases they are addressing and where there might be gaps for new use cases.
Current way customers use:
Understand how customers are trying to solve their problems before they use your product.
Identify what percentage of their current method is manual vs automated vs AI-powered. Then, identify if there’s a process or workflow your product could improve in the tech stack.
Figure out the exact methods/tools they’re using at the moment: is it your competitors? is it a mature product like Google Sheets that’s intertwined extensively with the core of their workflow or day-to-day ops?
Challenges customers face:
Specify the most pressing pain points your products solve for your identified target customers.
Start by identifying the smallest of wins your product can give your customers. Then, move on to the larger, long-term solutions your product can have.
Think about your product’s competitive and contextual advantage. For example, “Is your product more advanced than X because it offers Y features?” OR “Does your product save Z amount of hours for sales reps every week?”
Dive into testimonials or success stories from early adopters or beta testers.
Limitations of the current way:
Focus on the specific drawbacks of the existing methods that prevent/delay your target persona from achieving the best outcomes. For instance, existing tools might not integrate well with their core tech stack, leading to fragmented information, issues in data sync/cleanup/aggregation, and inefficient workflows.
A good idea is to create a pie chart and based on your analysis, divide it into different limitations so you can visualize exactly how much weightage each limitation has.
Without data points to support your pie chart, you can easily overestimate or underestimate the true impact of your ICP’s current way.
For example, it might not be a huge dealbreaker for your ICP if their existing way doesn’t integrate with some tool. But if it has a poor UI, lack of user access controls, or real-time collaboration tools, those limitations could severely impact their day-to-day ops.
Product capabilities:
Think of this step as an inverse proportional to the step above aka “limitations.” At this point, you want to figure out the functionalities or capabilities of your product that can overcome the limitations of current solutions.
Map out the relationship between your target persona’s existing way and your product capabilities. If your customer is struggling with time management, can your product improve it in any way — improve productivity, reduce manual tasks, streamline workflows, and integrate across tech stack for better ops?
Product features:
From product capabilities, reverse engineer back to the specific product features that imbibe these functionalities.
Benefits/Outcomes:
List down all the benefits and outcomes of using your product for a particular use case.
Congrats! You’ve done the hard part now. It’s time for a bit more polishing up and you’ll have your use-case dashboard ready in no time. I promise.
2. Implement use-case mapping for different ICPs
You’ve probably already heard about use-case mapping as a marketer. And like anything in marketing, it’s highly subjective — the definition, the process, and the outcome of use case mapping — all of it.
The diagram below is a good place to start doing use-case mapping for your product.
3. Choose a tool to build your use-case dashboard
Creating a use-case dashboard doesn’t need a fancy tool. You could start with Google Slides, Notion, or Figma depending on your level of familiarity with the tool, its adoption across teams, and budget.
To err on the safer side, if you’ve got a small team, I’d recommend you work with Google Slides. It’s the easiest and most budget-friendly option at your disposal. As your and your team’s expertise builds out, you can venture into more complex, visually advanced tools.
4. Write a copy for each use-case using your building blocks
A use case dashboard is only successful if you get this last, critical step right. When you do this step right, it becomes much easier to figure out your messaging and value propositions that can change the trajectory of your PLG business.
Here’s how to do it:
Deeply understand your audience before anything else
Identify your product’s unique capabilities and tech stack integration
Uncover and acknowledge common objections/existing challenges in the market
Design your core narrative or the “perceptions” you want to drive.
Use your messaging building blocks to fill out your use case dashboard. Here’s an example use-case dashboard:
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Next Week: Difference between sales-led and product-led marketing
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