Anyone who attended this year’s SaaStr annual conference knows just how many excellent, highly informative sessions there were, and the talk by Grammarly CEO Brad Hoover was no exception. Brad shared his tips for creating a successful business and spoke about how Grammarly got to where it is today. Here’s a recap of the top three takeaways from his talk to give you insight into making a company thrive.
1 Let user feedback guide your product decisions.
To build an exceptional product, you have to focus on your users and their needs. To do this, you need a deep, granular understanding of your users. You can achieve this in several ways:
- Talk to users every chance you get. Gather their feedback and get a direct understanding of their experience.
- Employ user researchers. They can go broad and deep with users and solicit helpful qualitative and quantitative information.
- Gather ambient feedback through social media and customer support. These channels are an excellent source of input.
- Study engagement data to see how users interact with your product and to infer what’s going well and what could be done better with your product. If you rely upon engagement data to innovate, however, it’s important to ensure your current users align with those you’ll have in the future. It’s also essential that the indicators you use to measure engagement support your long-term goals.
Gathering user feedback in these ways helps Grammarly improve its current product every day. We start with a deep understanding of our users and their needs and then look for the similarities and differences among those users to find our next product horizon. This is something we’ve done from the early days, and it’s part of what helped us grow into the end-to-end AI communication assistance we are today.
2 Good writing is key to the digital work environment.
The way we communicate has changed. There’s more asynchronous communication than ever, and with this shift, we lose a lot of the nonverbal queues you get from in-person interactions. As a result, it’s harder to see how our words land and more difficult to ask appropriate follow-up questions to make sure people understand what we’re saying.
The impacts of these difficulties are particularly potent in the workplace. According to a poll Grammarly conducted with The Harris Poll earlier this year, ineffective communication costs US businesses $1.2 trillion each year. With this issue in mind, Grammarly has focused on developing tools that help companies improve their communication. One example is snippets, which lets employees add pre-authored phrases or paragraphs into their writing with a few quick keystrokes. Tools like this, along with Grammarly’s tone recommendations and rewrites, help employees write in a way that drives better results, takes less time, and is always on-brand. Good communication also helps employees build better customer and coworker relationships.
3 Make your end users your product champions.
Users—not just IT buyers—determine the success of an application or product in every enterprise. So it’s essential to make a product users love. Ensure your product is easy to use and that it integrates seamlessly with your users’ existing workflows. Additionally, it needs to be simple for users to understand the value your product provides.
When Grammarly first started, we saw that our customers were not just using Grammarly for personal and school communications; they were also using it in professional settings. As we saw more and more people using Grammarly at work, we followed our customers to the enterprise and expanded Grammarly to meet organizations’ specific needs. For example, we created a style guide to help entire teams and companies communicate consistently and an insightful analytics dashboard. Evolutions like these reinforce the value Grammarly provides to professionals and have made our end users champions of Grammarly at their organizations.
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