Lumosity – A Lesson in Effective Project Management

First rule of product management - understand what your product truly aims to accomplish. This may seem simplistic but as your product becomes more complex, it’s a hard rule to follow. In wanting to boost the popularity of their product, product managers often forget this rule and end up compromising on the very factor that made their product helpful. 

It is important to understand that every tried and tested product management method is not going to help your product specifically. Let’s take a look at a company that turned the tide and actually used unconventional means to boost meaningful product engagement.

Lumosity has always been about exercising the grey cells

If you were ever interested in “strengthening your brain”, you must’ve definitely come across Lumosity. Lumosity is an app that contains several games that are meant to test and improve your cognitive skills and abilities. They firmly believe that these games can improve cognitive functions such as Memory, Attention, Processing time/ speed and Problem solving.

Now the concept of using interactive games on a mobile app to improve one’s mind was quite a revolutionary concept at the time Lumosity was launched. However we’re not here to discuss or dissect the app or its concept. We’re here to talk about the sign up process that was not traditional, but actually helped them retain long term consumers.

Simpler the sign-up process, more the users, right? Not always.

Product management has always been about making the user journey easy, and it starts with sign-up. The rule has always been that simpler the sign-up process, the more users they’ll eventually get. 

Lumosity, in the start, believed this to be a good rule to follow. After all, their games, while fun,  are already complicated. Further, they also need to be played on a daily basis in order for the customer to actually reap their benefits. Therefore, they kept the sign-up sheet simple, so as to not drive away more customers. 

But that’s not what they ended up following eventually. Once they started complicating the sign-up process by adding survey questions along with questions about the person's demographic, they learnt that the people that signed up actually wanted to be there, and would most likely stick to the programme and be regular at their daily tasks. 

Embracing complexity yielded results.

This admission process wasn’t conducted in vain. With the information Lumosity obtained, they could make the games more personalised and further boost engagement with their consumers.

Their surveys were extremely extensive, detailed oriented and a whopping 5 pages long!

They collected information about the industry the user worked in, what they wanted to improve upon, or what they expected out of the app. 

Now their original concept of getting more people to sign up with a simpler admission process did test to be true. But the second process proved to be more useful, since it gave them a chance to explain their brand's philosophy and science behind training one’s mind. The survey method also saw an increase in subscription rate - i.e the people willing to pay for their services.

Lumosity continues to experiment with their sign-up process, whether it is the flow of their questions or the amount of difficulty they provide in their sign up-sheet. But the core belief of adding friction and complexity to their brand remains undisputed. 

And it’s the reason they are still perceived as a product that makes people brainier by the day.