Part Two: The product · Getting good
A product that works quietly gets no credit. People cannot tell what it has done for them or whether they are getting any better.
The better a product works, the less there is to notice. The backups ran. The spam was caught. The reminders went out on time. Nothing happened, which was the point, and at renewal the customer wonders what they are paying for.
The usual cure is worse than the problem. The product starts congratulating itself. Confetti. "You're on fire!" A weekly email with large numbers that mean nothing. That is applause, and people can tell the difference between applause and information.
There are two things worth showing.
The first is what the product did on the person's behalf, said plainly, in the place they would look. Safari has a Privacy Report that lists the trackers it stopped from profiling you on the sites you visited. It does not interrupt. It is there when you wonder.
The second matters more, and it is about the person. What can they do now that they could not do before? Bookkeeping software can say, at the end of March: "You closed the month in three days. In March last year it took nine." That is her own work, in her own units, measured against her own past. She did not need a badge. She needed to know she had become faster, and now she can tell her boss.
Comparing people with each other does the opposite. A leaderboard tells most people they are behind.
Therefore:
Show people, in the terms of their own work, what the product has done for them and what they can now do that they could not before. Compare them only with their own past.
In practice. Write the sentence a customer would say to justify the product to whoever pays for it. Then check whether the product can show them the figures behind that sentence.
Goes with. What to show comes from THE PROGRESS THEY WANT (2), and the same figures are what the company should count under MEASURE PROGRESS, NOT ATTENTION (29). They give the customer something to take to THE PEOPLE WHO MUST AGREE (33).