With endless factors to keep in mind, verb scoring can help turn a company’s priorities into a product strategy. Note: This is part two in a two-part series on verb scoring. If you haven’t already, I recommend you read the first installment, An Introduction to Verb Scoring, before reading this one. Standing up a product with a proper mix of free and paid features is no small feat. Free features are great for acquisition, but give away too much free value and you risk carrying a bunch of free users who never convert to paid. Paid features are an important part of monetization, but some products have value that’s hard to realize without users at least trying the full feature suite. I’ve often felt that there’s a lot of nuance to feature-gating that goes unspoken. This is in part because we don’t have a great taxonomy to discuss it. That’s where verb scoring comes in. If you read last week’s article, you’re already familiar with verb scoring, a method we developed to evaluate actions that users can take in your product and then score them based on the limitations and entitlements required to perform the action. Here’s a refresher on the six verb scores. Before undertaking a verb-scoring exercise, you’ll have to build your verb-scoring vocabulary. Then, you can move on to scoring your and your competitors’ verbs. Once you have a verb scoring matrix, the artifact that comes from your exercise, you can use it to address your product strategy. But, with a verb scoring matrix in hand, there is still an important unanswered question on how to use feature-gating as a way to encourage user conversions. How to gate features has never been a simple equation, and there are several factors to consider when deciding what to offer users. Feature Complexity: While some features will only matter to users with a niche use case, others are built to acquire novices. As such, product people can use information like a feature’s target audience to make thoughtful choices about what verbs to give away for “free” and which to guard more tightly. Maturity: The maturity of your product and your brand’s reputation plays a role as well. Newcomers in an established product space might be looking to increase brand awareness, while a legacy brand with near-market saturation might care more about improving retention and reducing churn. It’s easy to imagine how a company’s status as either a newcomer or a market leader might impact their feature-gating strategy. Up-time and integration complexity: The complexity of your product’s setup can also impact your strategy. Significant up-time or complicated technical integrations might factor into whether you give away any or all of your product’s features in a grace period during the setup window. Novel technology: Many industries are shy of truly differentiated competitors. But for companies that have truly novel tech, restricting access to paying customers is a much easier decision than for companies with clearer competition. Feature complexity, maturity, up-time, and novelty are just a few examples of what we might consider when standing up a paywall strategy. The list goes on. It can be overwhelming to consider the seemingly endless number of factors that may contribute to a strategy. While it is crucial to keep these considerations in mind, it can also help to review specific scenarios of how verb scoring turns a company’s priorities into a product strategy. How can I use verb scoring to craft a meaningful product strategy? It starts by understanding your goals. Let’s take a look at nine use cases for verb scoring guided by common digital team goals. If you’re struggling to get in front of relevant audiences, you might want to consider if there are Anonymous verbs you can offer. Especially for web-based products, search engine results pages (SERPs) are a frequent gateway for those looking for a feature. Take, for example, online PDF conversion. One Google search yields big players like Adobe Acrobat, but it also shows leaner companies like SmallPDF and e-signature tools like PandaDoc. Example: PandaDoc uses an anonymous conversion tool to get their document signature products in front of those with PDF use cases. From a Google search, PDFConvert promises Free Online PDF Conversion. On the website, users can take the action for free as many times as they like. Each time they complete the action, they see an offer to try PandaDoc for free. By giving away a bit of value to users in their target audience (PDF users), PandaDoc is able to compete with big players in the PDF space and increase its visibility among people who have demonstrated a need for PDFs. Subscribe to our newsletter, Good Question, to get insights like this sent straight to your inbox every week. While Anonymous verbs are good at building share-of-voice and awareness, limited Limited Anonymous Use (LAU) verbs can also transition top-of-funnel website visitors into registered users. https://output.jsbin.com/muyuvubese/ : Language learning app Duolingo allows users to complete their first few lessons without creating an account. Once users have completed one or two lessons, the app then asks them to create a profile to save their progress.