Defining A-Ha Moments is Product Management

Ken Babcock is co-founder and CEO at Tango. 

As CEO of Tango, a startup that allows users to create how-to guides in seconds, Ken Babcock considers himself the “chief capital allocator.” “Building a startup is a huge scarce-resource allocation exercise. You just have to be really thoughtful about getting [user] feedback. Who’s the feedback coming from? Whom are you building for? Which sounds a lot easier than it is sometimes, and then that dictates where you go next.”

He also relies heavily on lessons he learned at Uber, where he served on the launch analytics team and the marketplace data science team. 

“Digging into data, uncovering insights, that’s definitely a sweet spot for me,” he says. “When I have free time, which is rare, I’m digging in on Sequel, our mix panel dashboards, just to try to uncover some insights that help our product development cycle.”

Those insights come directly from users, as Tango employs a product-led growth approach — something he prefers to call “bottoms-up adoption” or “end-user adoption”: “For us, it’s really thinking about what’s going to get that individual to see the value in our messaging, understand what problem they have and how we’re going to solve that problem, and then ultimately, what’s going to make them download our Chrome extension?”

“You really want to know how quickly can we get people that a-ha moment,” he adds. “And defining that a-ha moment is also an exercise in and of itself.”

Learn more about the importance of a-ha moments (plural!), as well as how Tango tracks user engagement (hint: they use “Monday Metrics” and “big rocks”), and why the company is out to democratize documentation, on this episode of This Is Product Management.

Download the transcript: 

Here are some highlights: 

• Applying product-led growth
• Talking to users
• Monday Metrics and big rocks
• Democratizing access to documentation