Product Agility

Léa Samrani: The Art of Positive Friction: How Adding Steps Can Unlock Revenue - Productized 2025 TalkInTen

• Saloni Seth-Watkins, Ryan Lane, Léa Samrani

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We’re honoured to partner with the extraordinary Productized conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Productized consistently brings together the sharpest product thinkers and builders, and it’s a privilege to record our Talk in Ten series on location for the third year running.

In this short, sharp conversation Lea Samrani (Director of Product Growth, Aperture) explains the Growth Paradox: why adding friction — the right kind — can increase conversions and unlock revenue.

Key topics discussed

  • What is positive friction vs negative friction
  • How surfacing user intent increases trust and conversion
  • Real-world examples across D2C and B2B flows
  • When friction helps: onboarding, sales calls, acquisition funnels
  • How to test and validate friction without hurting UX

Guest Bio:

Lea Samrani is Director of Product Growth at Aperture. With a decade-plus experience exploring user intent and growth, Leah researches and applies what she calls "positive friction" to boost conversion and revenue across both B2C and B2B products.


Thank you to our sponsors, Bobcats Coding - a Budapest digital product studio specialising in AI engineering and end-to-end product development. Download their AI economics guidebook at bobcatscoding.com.

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast where we explore the ever changing world of product leadership and org design, helping you navigate complexity and build better outcomes for your people and your customers. This week we're coming to you live from Lisbon for the third year in a row at the Productize conference where I'm grabbing 10 minute conversations with product thinkers, leaders and innovators from around the world. These quick fire chats are all about what's shaping our industry right now, from AI and product strategy to the human side of building great products. Now a huge thank you goes out to Bobcatz Coding for making this Lisbon series possible. Bobcats is a Budapest and Lisbon based digital product studio specializing in AI engineering and end to end digital product development. They're also on a mission to educate the market, exploring a new topic every six months and this fall is no exception. Their latest AI economics guidebook is out now and you can download it for free@bobcatscoding.com now here's your talk in 10. Okay. And welcome back to the wonderful Productize conference in sunny Lisbea. We are Product Agility Podcast and yet again, this is not Ben Maynard, this is Saloni. Seth Watkins coverings with hopefully a much prettier voice and clearly better looking, but because there's no video, you can't check that one out. So next to me I have the wonderful Ryan Lane, who's the CTO of our sponsors, Paul Bobcat Consulting. Would you like to say hello? Yes, hi. Good to be here. And we are interviewing today Leah Samrani. She is the director of Product Growth at Aperture and she's going to talk to us about her talk which was Growth Paradox, How Adding Friction Unlocks Revenue, which was this morning. So how did it go? And would you like to give us a few a rundown of what it covered? Yes. Hi. It went really well actually. It was a really nice engaged audience. So nice to be in a room where people had so many questions and are curious. And yeah, it was really, really good. My talk was about how we actually did something that felt counterintuitive. So on most product you usually told that you should remove friction and we actually did the opposite of that. We added friction, we added steps in the experience and doing that resulted in significant increase in revenue, not once but multiple times on multiple products. And so I went into the details on why is that and what's the difference between what I call positive friction versus negative friction and what do you need to know to build positive friction into a product. Fantastic. And were people genuinely curious about this because it does, like you say, it feels, it feels counterintuitive to the way that we've always been taught how to run projects. But of course there must have been some aha moments in the session. Right. I think the numbers spoke for themselves. I showed a lot of actual real product example with real stats that were, I mean, even to my own surprise, like that good that I think that, you know, that's enough to trigger some curiosity about it. And people are really curious about the application of it in. Because I shared D2C example and then obviously there's application of that in B2B as well and software. So there were lots of curiosity around. How does that translate into different areas of product as well? Can you give us a very basic rundown of how to identify opportunities for positive friction versus negative friction? Yeah. So the vast majority was about how we tend to be quite product centric and talk about our product, you know, our feature or onboard people to our product. And actually in the definition of positive friction that I'm presenting, it's really not about your product, it's about the user. We want to be very user centric. And so the entire point of it is you're facing user intent. It's actually showing them that you understand where they are, where they're coming from, what they want to achieve. It's demonstrating to them with friction that you are the right product for them. And so there's a series of tactics that you can apply that helps you do that as opposed to negative friction where you basically asking them a bunch of questions because you as a company want to answer this question because you want to make your product work so better, but there's nothing in it for the user. It's actually like a very boring form they have to fill. So that's kind of like what we went, we went on about and I shared example of product that have 30, 35 additional screens in their onboarding. So very long flow, lots of friction. But every single one of them is focused on surfacing user intent and it's focusing on helping the user understand that this is the right product for them and building trust and demonstrating that you're the right product for, for them. And so it performs really well. Wow. The art of friction. Who knew? But it does, it does sound like an art form. I mean, it's that delicate balance. Right. Of. Of whether it's going one way or the other. So how did you come to this? I mean, of course this is years of experience to sort of refine this. Yeah. So the first, the first time I came across that was almost ten years ago now. And it was pure coincidence. It was. It was a product where we had a fairly long onboarding flow and we removed stepped and we realized it didn't increase conversion rate. And so we did the opposite. We added stepped and it did increase conversion rate. And so we started wondering why and how come. And I didn't have words back then to explain what was happening, but it was just what is happening. The more I'm asking people to work for me on my product, the more likely they are to convert. And so over the year, I came across the job to be done methodology that goes a lot into user intent and how people make decision. I had the opportunity to work on multiple products that experimented a lot with that. And so we started testing it and every single time the results were consistent. And so now I'm at that point where, you know, it's almost like, prove me wrong. Because I've seen that so many times that I really genuinely believe now that the concept of friction is completely misunderstood because we were historically just building negative friction in our products. But actually, people are willing to spend more time and more effort on your product if you're talking to them in, if you're sharing, if you're meeting them where they are, if you're talking about their experience, what they want, how you can help them, rather than, here's my product, here's my feature, here's who I am, here's why you should use me, right? And that really changed the results. That's fascinating. Do you also have examples that are outside of the onboarding or product validation components? Yes. So I love this principle because the format of onboarding is one format. But you can apply the exact same principle in your acquisition funnel, for example, like in advertising to your payroll. You can apply that in B2B if you have things like flow that trigger a sales call or a webinar, if you have emails, an email flow that's supposed to like warn your user, the exact same content, the exact same underlying principle about surfacing the user intent, reducing their mental load. Like really showing them that you understand who they are, where they are in their journey, and how you're going to help solve their problem applies. It's just the format is slightly different. I gave an example earlier about how I purchased a product after a sales call. And the sales call is a friction point. It's a very strong friction point. Especially in D2C, you know, you'd expect to just book on a website. I did not talk to a person on the phone. I hate talking to people on the phone. But actually I bought because that person on the phone was able to demonstrate that they understand my intent, they understood my emotional intent. They answered all my question, all my doubts and fears. And I talked about that a lot in the, in the talk as well. What are those fears that prevent us from purchasing? They build trust. They show that they have experience with people that had the exact same experience as me. And so by the end of that friction call I was in and I paid a product which I may not have done without those information. So it was a positive friction. That's fascinating. Have you seen any difference in data depending on age, demographic, sex or countries cultural. Are there any differences that you're seeing here? Yeah, I haven't myself been able to measure that specifically but I was one of the conversation I was having was someone that was telling me that they've noticed that there's some country that are a bit more willing than other that some countries are a bit more transactional. Germany may have come up as a country that actually may want answer maybe a bit faster or less not patient, but maybe less sensitive to longer flow. But I haven't tested that myself, so I don't really know. I'd love to test that actually. It would be really interesting. Perfect. So I think we're sort of coming to the end of the podcast anyway and we'd love to maybe catch up with you again in a few years time when you've done that bit because You've already been 10 years in this journey and you said like you're at the point where you're saying prove me wrong. So I'm really excited to follow the journey, Leah, and see where you go with your research. So thank you very much for spending some time to explain that. It's absolutely fascinating to me. I thought that was wonderful. Thank you again Ryan for being part of this and we will speak to you again at the next talk at 10. Thank you very much. Bye.

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