7 Comments

This is exactly the issue with every email marketing team in the planet. Buy something online and be ready to receive multiple emails per day! Send 1 million emails and you’ll get a handful of sales, but no one is measuring unsubscribes and angry customers.

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Absolutely. Do you think you can solve this culturally? Meaning as a leader, letting the people know that not all performance can be measured with metrics, and you need to all be responsible for making the whole customer experience good?

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I love that idea, and your example of "what would Steve Jobs do?" however I don't think there are many leaders who have the courage or care to weigh in that way. There's just not many founders running companies. They give way to "managers" who are focused on the near term goals or OKRs on their little piece of the puzzle.

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Very insightful! You have identified the disease of feature bloat and its cause!

Another idea would be to let the user control the new or upsell feature presentation. In setup the user would say “just minimal features” and not be fed the upgrades.

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Yes i suppose that's the "unsubscribe from email" route which had to be legislated into existence.

But the ideal outcome seems like it is to make the product elegant enough that the user wants to explore all of it.

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I wonder if Amazon knows that they are being pushy, but they've made a calculation that they'd prefer to increase the entrenchment/activity from more loyal Alexa customers at the cost of pushing out customers who use Alexa in less depth (like yourself).

I personally don't own an Alexa, but I imagine most of the profitability lies in selling data on its users, a potential future subscription cost, and getting users to buy Alexa compatible smart devices.

I agree it sucks as a consumer though, especially when it may not be fairly advertised from the purchase point that you're going to be pushed like that. Feels like every new piece of tech nowadays has a hidden motive that is never included in advertising!

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That's possible, I hadn't really thought about the other forms of monetization. Maybe it is an explicit calculation but it feels so clunky that I kind of doubt it

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