Defining your organic habit loop

While retention is a binary measurement, 1 or 0, engagement is a spectrum about the depth of engagement.

An engaged user is an activated user that is using the product within the natural frequency that we’ve set. The habit with the product has been established.

There’s Activation, Engagement, Resurrection — start by defining engagement, then we can think about the others.

Your engagement will depend on the habit loop: trigger or cue, action or routine, reward.

Sample organic habit loops:

Pinterest I’m bored Visit Pinterest and pin/save something Found something about my interests
Zoom Need to meet someone who isn’t physically here Host a meeting on Zoom High quality audio/video, time saved, money saved
Blue Bottle Coffee Want high quality coffee at home Order Blue Bottle Coffee Premium tasting coffee at home.

In our loop:

  1. The trigger will stem from the “Problem” in our use case map
  2. The core action here should be the same core action that you defined in your retention metric. Defining retention for your product
  3. The reward should tie to the “Why” in our use case map, why did they choose us vs. the alternative?

Manufactured Loops

There are loop triggers that are created by your product. Starts with a manufactured cue that we push to the user (i.e., email, push notification, etc.)

For example:

  1. Pinterest pushes a notification or email when there’s new content around your interests.
  2. Jira pushes a notification when there’s a change (comment/edit) on an issue.

Examples of 5 types of manufactured triggers

  1. Time-based (e.g., your flight leaves in 90 minutes, or performance of email campaign 24 hours later, monthly stichfix shipment, weekly quora digests)
  2. Location: pay with starbucks app at a nearby store