"Producting" — I Had Only Heard the Rumors

Experiencing It Firsthand Proved Exactly Why It's a Big Deal

Since around the summer of 2022, I started hearing the term "Producting" quite often. Much like the "performance marketing" boom around 2015 and 2016, somewhat vague declarations that "we need to do producting" began echoing everywhere. Broadly speaking, "producting" carries the following meaning.

Marketing and product should not be siloed; they must be delivered to the user as a single, cohesive experience.

From the user's perspective, both marketing and the product are just parts of one seamless journey, so the idea is that we must keep this in mind to provide a consistent experience. Well, I unexpectedly got a taste of the impact of this highly-talked-about "producting" during Q2 this year.

And it turned out to be the most memorable experience of my entire career... I'm writing this to share my reflections.

Overview of Our Producting Project

Alarmy's 11th Anniversary 11-Second Mission Challenge

The user experience targeted for this producting endeavor was the "11-Second Mission Challenge." This game-like mission challenge rewarded users with prizes via a raffle if they hit a specific time threshold. They could only participate once a day, but if they wanted to try again, they just needed to invite friends. The goal of this product spec was to drive new user growth through friend referrals.

On the marketing side, we promoted this mission challenge to users in various ways. We produced and distributed a wide range of content solely focused on this mission challenge, such as content that stoked competition, content that highlighted the appeal of the prizes, and content that emphasized the fun or storytelling of the challenge itself.

The Journey from Marketing to Product

Throughout the journey above, users go through a consistent experience. A user who discovers the "Mission Challenge" through an ad channel or a link from a friend will also read about the promotion when they visit the app store. Drawn in by "fun," "competitiveness," and "prizes," the user installs the app and encounters the mission challenge entry on the very first screen after onboarding. Entering the mission challenge promotion screen, the user quickly learns how to participate and takes on the mission. Feeling a bit disappointed they missed the target time, they want to try again, so they share it with friends to continue the challenge. The friend who receives this link then goes through the exact same flow.

Project Results and Retrospective

[0] Wow, This Actually Works

Through friend referral links alone, we brought in 7,000 users over two weeks. When calculated against the cost of the prizes, this came out to a CPI of around $0.35. Among the users who participated in the promotion, a whopping 77% reached the very end of the funnel and performed the "share" action. With nearly 900,000 participants in total, it was a massive success both quantitatively and qualitatively, from top-of-funnel acquisition all the way down to completion rates. Out-of-product marketing performance was also fantastic. Content marketing run during the same period brought in 31,000 users with a CPI of $0.55. This efficiency was better than most performance marketing campaigns. By combining forces between product and marketing, we drove a total of 40,000 installs in two weeks at a unit cost of $0.51 each. (This excludes influencer marketing performance.)

[1] Discovering the Levers for Success

Even better than the immediate, one-off results was the fact that we more or less identified the success levers that drove this project's performance. We discovered the key variables—what makes users participate in a promotion, complete it, share it with friends, and keep coming back the next day. Some variables were confirmed because they were applied this time and delivered an impact, while others were ironically confirmed because they weren't applied (thanks to that?). Here are a few memorable ones:

a. Competition x Near-Misses x The More the Merrier

Even though we were just raffling off prizes based on a specific time threshold, it naturally turned into a competition among friends based on that time. We deliberately set the missions to a "near-miss" difficulty level around 11 seconds, and that tuning worked brilliantly. Allowing multiple entries—where the more you entered, the higher your chances of winning—also played a great role. In that regard, I do regret that we didn't show the current competitive standings on a leaderboard. Additionally, if the missions weren't fixed in difficulty but had a slight element of randomness mixed in, users might have kept participating with the expectation that "if I get an easier problem, I might beat my record." Especially for the typing mission, what if we had added a few variations of birthday congratulation sentences?

b. Increasing the Average Number of Participations for Retained Users

Although we saw incredible participation, completion, and sharing rates through the "Competition x Near-Misses x The More the Merrier" formula, another characteristic we found was that users only engaged intensely at the exact moment they were triggered. On this note, setting the daily sharing limit to 3 times was quite regrettable. Users who were just getting hooked would participate exactly 3 extra times and then stop. We put that constraint in place for technical reasons, but next time, removing it altogether would likely drive a bigger impact.

I also realized we need to intentionally design additional triggers in our product specs. Looking at the data this time, it seems highly likely that even if we removed the sharing limit, users who participated intensely for one day wouldn't come back the next. What if we had sent a simple push message? "Your rank has dropped. Just enter 2 more times today to shoot up the leaderboard!"

c. US Users Are Different from Korean Users

The biggest disappointment was the poor performance among international users, especially in the US. Given our usual marketing or organic user volume, we should have made a much bigger impact in the US, but we didn't. First off, the prizes were different from those in Korea. While Korea had iPads, AirPods, and Starbucks gift cards, overseas users got Apple Gift Cards and Amazon Gift Cards. It's just a hypothesis, but the consensus was that for a similar cost, a more tangible and intuitive prize might have worked better.

On the other hand, another hypothesis is that the sharing flow itself might not have been suitable for international users. Compared to Korea, where the participate-to-complete funnel was only slightly lower, the acquisition after a link was shared with a friend was remarkably poor. Perhaps they lack a culture of sharing in group chats like we do in Korea (such as KakaoTalk), or maybe they use channels where immediately installing something after receiving a link feels awkward. The truth is, we lacked an understanding of the general "sharing culture" among overseas users. Next time we run something like this, we've decided to research this aspect thoroughly beforehand.

[2] The Importance of Unifying Ownership

While it was great to see decent results and identify sharp success levers, the actual process of running the project was extremely chaotic. Since it was our first time "producting," we were clumsy in every aspect. Although it resembled producting in the sense that marketing and product were collaborating, it felt much more like two separate teams cooperating rather than a single team driving the project forward. The workflow basically consisted of the marketing team doing most of the planning, and the PO taking the baton only when it came time to implement it into the product.

a. Communication Mix-ups

From the very start of design and development, there was confusion over who the main decision-maker was for specs that needed adjustment, and misalignments between the two teams kept piling up. We incurred massive communication costs along the way, leading to a lot of unnecessary rework.

b. Lack of Understanding the Goal

Without properly syncing on the "Why"—such as the target metrics we wanted to achieve with this project and where it sat within company-wide impact priorities—we were too busy sprinting, buried under the "What" and "How." There were incredibly complex reasons for this (the PO being overwhelmed, the project being time-sensitive, lack of engineering/design resources, etc.), but I think the biggest factor was the subconscious thought that "the marketing team plans, and the product team executes." To put it nicely, it was "delegation and division of labor," but in reality, we completely failed to think about the goal itself. Consequently, even on the product side, we merely focused on developing the promotional features and failed to deeply consider the broader journey leading up to those features.

Looking back, producting isn't a relay race where you pass the baton; it's a three-legged race where you run together right from the starting line. If marketing and product had discussed goals and strategies and divided roles together from the very planning phase, there wouldn't have been communication mix-ups. Motivation toward the goal would have been much stronger, and the journey within the product feature specs would have been designed much more smoothly.

The concept that marketing and product should not be siloed; they must be delivered to the user as a single, cohesive experience.

For this to work, the team should have been unified first...
Ownership should have been unified first...

Reading this sentence again, it hits completely differently.

Producting, something I had only heard and read about.

Beyond the actual user acquisition results, the two biggest takeaways from this project were acquiring undeniable success levers and realizing just how crucial unified ownership is. If we do producting again in a similar format, I think we could aim for over 400,000 users in two weeks, rather than just 40,000. The lessons we reaped this time are more than enough to drive that kind of impact.

That concludes my review and retrospective on a highly educational producting experience!

A huge shoutout to the marketing group who sprinted alongside me (Leo, Sophie, Coco, Judy),
and the product team (Smith, Sue, River, Noah), as well as Bom who jumped in for urgent design support.
And to the POs and engineers who were so accommodating in many areas.

Thank you all so much!