Crafting the World’s Easiest E-Signature Product: Our collaborative journey with users
If you were to develop a product with over 400 competitors globally, and one of those competitors holds about 70% market share, what would be your first step? (Would you suggest not to developing it at all?)
This is the question that started a journey began almost 2.5 years ago with Jotform Sign, Jotform’s e-signature solution. And in my product management career, it’s the biggest product I’ve been involved in from conception to delivery to growth. The process has been full of excitement and stress but also involved achieving some significant goals.
To provide a realistic answer to the first question, I dedicated about 3–4 months solely to working on, thinking about, and researching this topic. I conducted competitor analyses, market analyses, interview sessions, and many more activities. Then, by consolidating all my answers, I wrote on the whiteboard the thing I needed to look back at throughout the entire journey: “user-driven approach.”
When conducting market and competitor analyses or planning to invest in a product, the first thing you need to do is assess exactly what ingredients you already have in the kitchen. Because making the best dish also depends on how you use the ingredients at your disposal.
From my experiences in starting several startups in the past, I have some insights into what can be achieved even with just “passion” as your main ingredient.
Now, in my kitchen, I have all the resources of a large company like Jotform.
Startups often have to figure out how to compete with big competitors. My answer is generally simple: if I respond to their sluggishness with agility, then I can generate value for the users.
In another blog post, I talked about how product management and entrepreneurship are very similar and that the main difference is that entrepreneurship involves some significant challenges to deal with compared to product management.
If you have more than 400 competitors in the market, and some of them are large companies with significant market shares, your biggest strength comes from your “users”.
“User-driven methodology” is not a concept I invented, but it’s one that large companies often struggle with, and that they tend to move further away from it as they grow.
Understanding your competitors’ weaknesses and building strength in those areas can be your biggest competitive advantage in the product-development process.
Developing a product solely with traditional methods may not be sufficient in such scenarios, and you may need to invent more unique methods.
I can say clearly that our biggest strength during this time has known our competitors‘ deficiencies from the perspective of users.
We achieved this by listening to users almost every day. Most large companies have pre-made plans and a somewhat cumbersome workflow. These characteristics make it difficult to listen to users enough and respond to their changing needs.
If you are developing a product from scratch, your biggest strength is listening to users, whether you have one user or 100, or even if you know who your potential users are.
The users who use a product create its value, so a product developed collaboratively with users usually doesn’t include unnecessary features and focuses only on meeting users’ needs.
You may have heard of the Maximum Viable Product concept. Here, instead of adding thousands of features that are not needed, the idea is to create a product that will actually be used.
Design philosophy
When developing Jotform Sign, we repeatedly shaped almost all UI and UX with user feedback. The most important rule for us was that a feature should be intuitively usable to be included.
After about a year of development, when we opened the product to beta testing, I spent nearly 15–20 hours a week analyzing user behaviors, conducting user interviews, and thinking about how to interact more with users.
To be honest, a large company cannot read and understand every user’s feedback. This was a process I had experienced before.
When developing my e-procurement startup, before we launched the product, we met with different procurement professionals face-to-face or online every week, and we wanted them to use the product. We took notes while using the product and learned the users’ ideas. So, we were able to create an incredibly intuitive product there as well.
Frankly, many of the products developed now are made almost the same because they are all made in reference to the largest product in the market. Although this may be considered an advantage, I actually think it ultimately leads to dozens of products failing from the user’s perspective.
Because the biggest players don’t always make the best product, sometimes the product is developed without prioritizing the user experience due to the size of the company. And then the company can use large marketing budgets to create a user base. So, in fact, the biggest player in the market may not have done everything right, and the mainstream might be very wrong.
When developing Jotform Sign, the ideas users gave us often surprised us. In fact, we saw that some crucial points of user experience that our competitors in the market had either done wrong or not at all.
During this process, we learned a lot about how to develop a product with users and tried many new methods. I won’t go into all these methods, but I think the summary could be “do everything that can be done to get to know the user.”
Now we are celebrating the first anniversary of the launch of Jotform Sign, and according to G2, we are among the top five e-signature products in our first year.
We continue to receive dozens of pieces of feedback daily and our CSAT score is almost 4.5 out of 5, with tens of thousands of responses.
You can try Jotform Sign here.
Finally, I need to express my gratitude to all the colleagues working in every department at Jotform for their contributions to developing such a successful product in its first year. Great teams make great things possible.
