Title: Building a Personalized Feed

Building a personalized feed is crucial for retaining users in digital products by enhancing user experience through tailored content. Here are key insights and approaches from trusted experts on how to create effective personalized feeds:

1. Dynamic Personalization:

   • Sarah Tavel from Pinterest emphasizes that products should improve with increased user interaction. At Pinterest, a feature called 'picked for you feed' was developed, which tailored recommendations based on user activities, such as pinning to a board. This not only made the feed more personal but also gave users reasons to keep using the platform as it became a valuable repository of their interests and activities 1.

2. Engagement and Information Delivery:

   • Aravind Srinivas aims to make knowledge engaging and readily accessible through his app, envisioned as the "TikTok of knowledge." The app plans to offer real-time information and personalized insights, catering to those who seek to enhance their knowledge daily. This involves expanding and automating content curation to suit individual interests and knowledge levels 2.

3. Algorithmic Personalization:

   • Adam D'Angelo, CEO of Quora, discusses the complexity of personalization on the web. Their algorithm incorporates various user interactions and preferences to deliver a highly personalized experience. This system uses the user's followed topics, followed people, and past behaviors to predict and present content that is likely to be relevant and engaging for each specific user 3.

     Building Retentive Products

     Lenny Rachitsky

     Sarah Tavel

     Sarah Tavel discusses the challenge of retaining users after they complete the core action in a product. She emphasizes the importance of making the product better the more it is used and shares examples from Pinterest and Evernote to illustrate this concept.

     

     Lenny's Podcast

     The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest)

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These insights underline that successful personalized feeds rely on continuously adapting and enriching the user experience based on individual interactions and preferences. This strategy not only enhances engagement but also significantly increases the perceived value of the product to the user.