Hi, I’m Tanguy and I write about successful feature launches from the best product teams ⚡️. This post covers Superhuman’s most requested feature: calendar event creation. Ever since its start in 2014 Superhuman has been relentlessly focused on building the fastest email experience. It met that goal and then some. And then it set its sights on bringing delight to calendars. I interviewed Ketki Duvvuru who leads product at Superhuman to find out how!
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How Superhuman built better calendar invitations
Staying close to customer needs
The Superhuman team encourages our customers to converse with us anytime about questions, feedback, ideas. At the beginning of every customer's journey with Superhuman, they engage in a 30-minute live session with an onboarding specialist to deeply understand and improve their email workflow. After that, anytime the customer connects with us, our Delight team reads and follows up on each response, typically within just a couple hours!
When someone gives us feedback, not only do we make sure to document their request in our customer feedback system, but also we ask follow-up questions to ensure we truly understand what they mean: what are you trying to achieve? Would a workaround like X solve that for you? What other products do you use that do this well?
We also take a lot of pride in closing the loop once our team completes the requested change or fixes the bug. Sometimes we even get back to customers a year or two later! That can be a fun moment for customers, and they respond “Wow, you actually remember that I asked for this!?”
The benefit of carefully tracking every customer request is that when the Product team begins to investigate a new problem or product area, we have rich resources of customer feedback to learn from.
The insight
As much as one third of email is focused on calendar scheduling and coordination.
As users of Superhuman would enter a state of flow triaging their emails and getting through their inbox faster than ever, one key workflow that would break that focused state would be the calendar. Customers would say, “I’m in flow in Superhuman, but then I have to switch apps and open my browser to go to Google calendar for sending event invitations.”
Calendar event creation became the most requested feature from our customers. We heard over 660 different customers asking “Please, please bring Superhuman to calendar!”
When we began the discovery process for the feature, we had this treasure trove of direct customer commentary that guided us toward the right solution. Customers would share their specific scenarios, like “I’m exchanging emails with someone to schedule a 1:1. All the information is in there: the person’s email, the date, the time. Can we bring those two worlds together?”
Going back to product principles
Our product philosophy is about more than just solving customer problems, but actually crafting amazing product experiences. It’s not just recognizing a need or gap and addressing it, but about going above and beyond to create delight and deliver to a remarkable degree of quality.
We want our customers to feel: “I didn't even know I wanted this, but now that I have it, I absolutely love it.”
That's delight: an element of pleasant surprise and joy.
When we started developing calendar events, we leaned on our product principles and understanding of what customers love most about Superhuman. These guided us to the calendar experience you see today in Superhuman.
"Visually minimal, yet surprisingly effective" is the principle at play when you observe that Superhuman's calendar experience isn't a wall of form fields staring back at you and making the task feel like work. Instead, you focus on just the minimal set of details - what, when and with whom - and move through them blazingly fast.
That speed is enabled by another principle, "keyboard over mouse." You can create an event in Superhuman all without touching the mouse, beginning with hitting B (for "book a time") to open the calendar experience in your right sidebar.
A third Superhuman product principle is "little details matter." This came into play as we tested early prototypes of the feature internally in our daily use. The nice thing about productivity software is that our team uses it every single day, so we have many opportunities to understand how the product feels and make tweaks accordingly. We found that when you're creating calendar events, hitting enter to move to the next field is really satisfying. In Google Calendar, you have to use tab to move through the different fields (if you use the keyboard at all!). In Superhuman, you can use tab, but you can also use enter. It mimics the feeling of using the terminal command line and hitting enter to continue the program and take the next step.
Crafting
When it came to the actual design process, we studied existing tools out there, including Outlook, Gmail and Fantastical. We focused on understanding the experiences our customers were used to, and then thought deeply about what worked well and what didn't. Creating calendar events often consists of a form with a bunch of fields, and you point, click and type in information over and over.
Gmail's calendar event creation process begins with a page of 15 blank form fields staring at you, with little indication about which ones are absolutely critical and which ones aren't. It can be overwhelming to parse all of that information, and creating an event feels like a lot of work.
As we leveraged our product principles to create an experience that felt fast and fun, we also carefully considered the information we already had from your email conversations. Many a time, reading a message in your inbox is what triggers the need to create a calendar event. That message already contains the details we want, so we pull it into your event for you. With a single keystroke, you can invite everybody in the current conversation to your meeting.
This is one of the ways we make the event creation faster and deeply integrated with the email you're already doing in Superhuman.
Releasing
A product announcement email accompanies each feature launch, and we often ask our customers to respond with their thoughts upon trying out the feature for themselves. Customers do actually reply to our product announcements with very detailed and thoughtful feedback.
One of the ways we know that the feature was successful was that the refrain in our satisfaction surveys changed from “I really wish that Superhuman would allow me to create calendar events” to “I really want Superhuman to incorporate X, Y Z features inside the calendar event.”
That's the marker of success: usage! When we deliver what customers need, they show us by continuing to the next most important need or want.
Thank you Ketki!
Learn more about Superhuman
If you're already a Superhuman user, you can try the calendar feature out yourself by hitting 'b' or Cmd+K → Create Event
User interviews
Ketki uses Reduct to interview customers. This article explains how it allows her to stay focused on the user and share insights with her team.
Figma, Notion and Airtable are also important tools in her arsenal. Ketki and her design partner Teresa Man collaborate on user interface details using Figma. The engineering team documents their technical plans for each project using Notion. The Delight team tracks customer feedback using Airtable. Superhuman's satisfaction surveys are sent to customers with Typeform (see article here).
Hiring
Superhuman just opened a product marketing role for the first time. Apply here.
They’re also now looking to hire remote workers.
Finding product market fit
Now a classic, this article from Rahul Vohra explains how the Superhuman team optimized development for product market fit.
Thanks for reading!
Tanguy
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