What I’ve Learned From Rohan Angrish — Action at a Distance Framework for Magical Product Experiences
Every once in a while, a product comes along which makes you go, “How the F*ck Did They Do That!”.
This post is about a framework created by my mentor, Rohan Angrish (Head at ICICI Labs & Ex-CTO at Capital Float). He’s a super humble product person who built and leveraged this framework during his time at Chalo which exited to OpenTable in 2013.
For context, Chalo was a payment system for restaurants which would allow diners to tell the waiter their order, eat their food and then leave without the physical act of paying the bill. Their card would be stored with Chalo, which in turn would capture orders from the waiter via a simple order management software. When a patron was done dining, the waiter would check “done” and the payment was made. To patrons, this was a magical experience, it made them go “How the F*ck Did They Do That!”. They told their friends about this super cool new way to pay at a restaurant and the rest was history.
So, in this framework, we try to deconstruct and form a (what we hope is) repeatable pattern out of seemingly magical product experiences. I believe this could make your product a word-of-mouth machine.
Here we go:
1st Step: Who is the User?
Product 101, a product must have a specific user persona.
2nd Step: How’re They Impacted by Their Problem?
I hate the vitamin-painkiller method of looking at problems. It makes things too binary and squeezes out creativity. A better question in my opinion is, “Does it suck some energy out of their day?”.
3rd Step: How Much Do We Need Them to Change, To Solve Their Problem? (Hence Referred to as Delta)
Of course, a new solution would require the user to change their ways a bit.
Rohan’s logic is simple, don’t add more steps than it would take otherwise to solve this problem. In other words, if we expect people to change, we should have taken away more steps between them and their goal. Otherwise people reach a point of frustration where they say, “forget about it”. That is the point of no return, so no matter how cool your promise is, people just won’t take the effort.
In the case of Chalo, if the app generated a payments approval page after dining, then it would be the same as the waiter bringing a cheque to the table. It would just be over the smartphone versus paper. Would this change be worth it for the diner? It’s subjective but in most cases, no. So, it had to be a seamless experience, where the diner had their final bite of food and could just walk off. Fewer steps between her and her goal.
The sweet spot is Delta is Less Than Equals to Excessive Effort.
Now, once you have a product which is adding energy to the day of a specific user there’s a trick you can use in how your product works to make it a magical experience. This trick is called “Action at a Distance”, it needs to look like magic.
In other words, do the painful thing users want to avoid, for them, and just show them that it’s done.
Here are some examples:
We all hate entering our UPI Pin, Lazypay shows us the Payment Done Page In 1-click.
We all hate hailing a taxi on the street and being rejected half the time, Uber made that 1-click.
We all hate calling the restaurant to ask for the whereabouts of our order, Swiggy embedded a real-time map with time till delivery.
These are all examples of products that understood the painful part of an action that a sucked the energy out of a user’s day and demonstrated doing it for them. In these situations, the customer delight is soo high that people can’t help but share this experience with everyone.
Put more brashly, it takes people from an “Oh Cool” to a “Oh F*ck! That’s Soo Cool”
That’s all. Implement these steps and hopefully you too will be a product magician like Rohan.
Thanks for reading this long post. Do share any products you feel are in the magical territory. I know I haven’t covered B2B products at all, due to lack of exposure as a user there. Please do share any recommendations.
