This document discusses how ignoring voice user interfaces led to declining user engagement for Knowmail's email productivity product. While Knowmail focused on optimizing its Outlook and mobile apps between 2017-2019, industry forecasts correctly predicted voice assistants would become mainstream by 2020. Knowmail failed to gather customer feedback showing growing demand for voice features. After adding voice capabilities, user engagement improved as the product better supported the evolving ecosystem. The lesson is that companies must consider all interaction methods and gather direct customer input to future-proof their products.

1. My future mistake: what has ignoring voice UI in
our product’s roadmap do to our company?
Retrospective by Ariel Kedem
July 2020

2. ● PM since 2005
● Started with WAP, Word and paint :)
● Focus on B2C products
● Business goals driven
About me

3. Knowmail’s product background

4. Knowmail’s product background
● Founded in 2014
● An intelligent inbox assistant
● help professionals focus, get more done,
and stress less
● B2B but consumer focused

5. The ecosystem

6. ● Email is here for over 50 years
● 300 avg. daily emails per employee
● ~60% aren’t relevant
● More than 40% of our time is spent on email
● Outlook is still the #1 platform for
corporate consumers
The ecosystem

7. Our future problem

8. Our future problem
● 2017-2019 were amazing
● ... sales went great
● MAU was pretty good
● But then 2020 started...

9. Industry forecasts from the past

10. Industry forecasts from the past
● Gartner: 30% of web browsing sessions will
be screen-less by 2020
● comScore: 50% of all searches will be by
voice by then
● Activate: There will be 21.4 million smart
speakers in the US by 2020
● Technavio: By 2019, the voice recognition
market will be a $601 million industry

11. Knowmail Product strategy
2017-2019

12. Knowmail Product strategy
2017-2019
● 2017 - Growth
● 2018 - Growth + Retention
● 2019 - Retention + “Customer focused”
● 2020 - ???

13. How our roadmap looked like?

14. How our roadmap looked like?
● 2017 - Let’s get a lot of new users and
on-board them successfully!
● 2018 - Let’s get MORE new users, improve the
on-boarding and help them use it hourly!
● 2019 - Let’s ask our users what features
they want, so they will keep using Knowmail!
● 2020 - ???

15. Where’s the voice UI?

16. Where’s the voice UI?
● 2017 - 3% 7-days retention,
we can’t focus on future forecasts
● 2018 - No ecosystem for voice developers and
our main products are doing great!
● 2019 - Outlook is amazing! Mobile apps rock!
Voice is nice, but corporates aren’t there yet
● Biz dev, marketing, sales and customer service
teams want to focus on our working funnels

17. How voice became mainstream?

18. How voice became mainstream?
● 2017 - “True Wireless” 1st gen.
● 2018 - Language models are getting better.
Voice localization improves.
Voice intents are clearer.
● 2019 - IoT is all around us.
The “Connected Me” is a commodity.

19. So… What went wrong?

20. ● 2020 MAU decreasing significantly
● We did everything by the book in the last
2.5 years:
○ Success management
○ Customer-focused
○ Outlook is still the main focus & $$$
○ Our mobile apps are constantly getting
more features
○ Funnel optimization is heavily inveseted
● Numbers are low? Let’s talk to our users!
● But...

21. SILENCE.
● We tried retention emails - no good.
● Push Notifications - 0.001% success.
● Social media campaigns - Funny :)
● Phone calls - Great! The IT guy finally
answered and told us to keep the Outlook
efforts!
● Biz Dev: “We’re doing it right!”
PM: Right? :-|

22. Where’s the customer’s voice? Oh...
● We couldn’t find anything
in our analytics for
Outlook, mobile apps
● We tried to find data to
shed some light
● So we checked our voice
assistants BI/DB and...

23. “I need my urgent emails from my boss!”
“I have a meeting in 5 minutes,
can u share my top emails?”
“Can you plz remind me to
email David M. later today?”
“Hey, I have 30 minutes to work on emails.
Any updates?”

24. So we changed things...

25. ● Added a voice designer to our team
● Moved from A-Sync communication to real-time
voice emails
● Worked on our PSP
(personalized summarization platform)

26. ● Opened our voice API to all messaging
platforms. Yes, even Google’s Allo!
● Adding more tools and resources for our
biz/sales/marketing/CS teams
● Voice thinking:
When -> Why -> What -> Predictable action ->
User feedback

27. Moved from trying to improve “screen time”
to improve “quality time”

28. Lessons learned
● It’s all about data
● Focus on your end-users
● Talk (like real convo) with your potential
and churned users

29. Lessons learned
● Product vacuum is bad for your company
● Communicate product ecosystem insights and
strategy to all stakeholders to onboard them
● Be open-minded
● Tactics are good but may kill you in 2-3
years

30. Thanks guys!
If you need anything from
the future you can ICQ me!
Arielkd@gmail.com will work as well...