Product Management

Early Growth: Look for “Pockets of Demand”

Posted on by will

In the early days of launching a new product, it’s useful to think about your market in terms of “pockets of demand”.

A pocket of demand is of course another way of saying “target market”. It is essentially identifying a group, or niche, of potential customers who share a common problem that you can solve extremely well: people for whom your product is the greatest thing in the world.

The advantage of thinking in terms of a “pocket of demand” is that it encourages you to focus on that pocket, that core market, even when this is potentially to the detriment of the broader market.

But why is this a good thing? Because when you are trying to nail product market fit, thinking too much about the broader and adjacent markets can often lead to a tendency to want to solve too many problems at once. No market is completely homogenous, and you might start making too many compromises instead of focussing on what’s truly important for your core target market.

Knowing your pocket of demand can also help you optimise your go-to-market strategy to find exactly these customers, which can help lower your customer acquisition cost.

In Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One

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, Thiel talks about the early days of Paypal. Their first target segment – their initial pocket of demand – was Ebay “PowerSellers”. From the book:

“We set our sights on eBay auctions, where we found our first success. In late 1999, eBay had a few thousand “PowerSellers”, and after only three months of dedicated effort, we were serving 25% of them. It was much easier to reach a few thousand people who really needed our product than to try to compete for the attention of millions of scattered individuals.”

They zeroed in on the needs of that niche

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, and solved their problem – safe, cheap and fast online money transfers – and only after they had nailed that did they expand the value proposition to include broader slices of the market.

When it comes to growing your customer segment, you have two choices:

  1. Try to expand the penetration of your product within the pocket of demand you’ve identified, or
  2. Expand the offer to adjacent pockets of demand.

When Amazon started out, Jeff Bezos had a vision: to build the “Everything Store” – an online store far bigger, stocking more items, than any physical retail store ever could. But the first years of the company focused on a specific pocket of demand: readers. They spent a couple of years expanding their selection of books before expanding into other retail categories.

What is the pocket of demand that you are addressing?

User Experience is everybody’s job

Posted on by will

I’ve met lots of product teams who will tell you: “User Experience is a design thing.” They hire ‘User Experience Designers’ to design the User Experience

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, and generally assume that they alone are responsible for the overall UX.

I believe that simply assuming the User Experience is a ‘Design Thing’ is a very dangerous mindset, for three very important reasons.

UX is in the middle between Product, Design and Technology

Within a product, the overall User Experience isn’t delivered only through design.

Certainly a big part of the UX is the visual design, the interaction design, the brand design, and so on. But an equal part of UX is the implementation of that design through technology. The danger in assuming that UX is a ‘Design Thing’ is that it quickly leads to people from other disciplines disconnecting from worrying about the User Experience at all. Every technology decision has an impact on the User Experience, which makes every engineer who is making any technology decisions – (which is every engineer) – equally responsible for ensuring a great UX.

Too often I see product tradeoffs being made where teams decide to sacrifice the user experience in favour of saving time, saving cost, avoiding that refactor or simplifying that internal process. These are all terrible reasons to sacrifice the User Experience. Additionally, sometimes the best User Experience improvements come exclusively through technology improvements. For example performance improvements, which can have a huge impact on UX, often come from deep and complicated engineering innovation.

Engineers: The User Experience is your job, too!

User Experience is also about solving the right problems for the user, and solving them with the right priority.

The user will judge the user experience to the extent that it solves their problem. A perfectly executed product that doesn’t solve a problem for the user won’t lead to a great User Experience.

This is where Product Managers should feel in command of the User Experience: in making sure the problems you’re solving are urgent and pervasive within your market segment, and that the solutions you are delivering are differentiated and defensible. Make no mistake: this has the biggest impact on your User Experience – and the resulting product success – than anything else, so it makes sense that you should focus here.

Product Managers: The User Experience is your job, too!

The overall User Experience goes beyond just the app/website/service/widget that you’re building.

When we’re working as Product Managers on digital products, we’re all so concentrated on our app, website, widget or whatever, that it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that your app is just one piece of the whole User Experience.

The overall UX starts the moment the user first hears about your product, and goes all the way to support, fulfilment, billing, etc. In other words, the User Experience spans the entire customer lifecycle.

We hire people with titles like ‘User Experience Designer’, but then put them to work designing user flows within single apps or products. To me, there is a difference between Interaction Design and User Experience design.

Interaction Design is concerned with the design of discreet experiences – interactions – within customer experiences. How does the user interact with this feature/product/widget?
User Experience Design takes a holistic view of the entire end-to-end user journey – from their first contact with the product via a marketing message, the app store or even a word-of-mouth recommendation, all the way to customer support, billing, delivery, etc.

But it’s not only the job of the User Experience Designer to think end-to-end. Everybody working on the product should have the entire end-to-end flow in mind, to understand the unique context of each user, why they are there, what problems they have and what they are hoping to achieve.

Marketeers, Support Engineers, PR folks, Delivery technicians, Logistics technicians, etc: The User Experience is your job, too!

Why this matters

Users have more ability to discover and switch to new services than ever before. Traditional lock-in effects like platform dependencies and data ownership are eroding thanks to open platforms and data portability, and there are great alternatives in every product vertical. The thing that keeps people using your product or service is the quality of the user experience, from end to end.

Companies that become great and enjoy great customer loyalty do so by developing a culture of unwavering customer focus. Sure, many companies say they are customer focussed, but actually being customer focussed is more than just a mission statement – it’s a deeply embedded culture that everyone lives and breathes from the CEO down.

A couple of examples:

  • Facebook prioritises the customer experience over everything. Facebook understands that their business model depends on gaining more and more users who each spend more and more time using Facebook. Their business is cultivating user attention. Everything else in the business comes second to user engagement.
  • Amazon is another company which was founded and grew on the fundamental premise of making the experience great for the customer. When Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com in the mid 90s

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    , he knew that the key to scaling massive consumer adoption extremely quickly was an unwavering focus on a great customer experience, and he considered the customer the most important thing in the business. He built this customer-first attitude into the company’s DNA from day one, and every innovation they have delivered – from 1-Click ordering, to personal recommendations, to the Kindle eReader to the voice-controlled Echo – has been about making a great customer experience and making it easier to shop and interact with your content.

A few ways to make sure you’re thinking end-to-end about UX

  • Do you share a common set of User Personas across all departments, including tech, QA, product, design, marketing, comms and support? Having a common set of personas ensures that everyone has the same user in mind when designing their solutions.
  • Does your QA team test the entire acquisition and on-boarding funnel? It’s important, but insufficient, to focus your QA efforts on the app/website/etc. You need test coverage of the whole end-to-end experience. If you don’t QA your marketing or your support functions, you should consider doing so. For example, you can test your support team with the ‘secret shopper’ approach.
  • Consider a ‘Stop the line’ policy for the User Experience. It’s a familiar concept to your engineers – certain situations within the build environment, such as test coverage dipping below a certain level, or open bugs exceeding a certain threshold, will trigger a ‘stop the line’ where no new check-ins can occur until the situation is resolved. What if you did the same for User Experience? What if you gave everybody in the product team – from Product Management and Design, to Engineering, QA, Marketing, Comms, Support, etc – the permission to Stop the line? To put a pause on building anything new until the UX issue is resolved? What impact would that have on your customer focus?

Ultimately, the User Experience is the culmination of every touchpoint you have with your customers. This experience can, and should, be designed from end to end. But it’s not just the ‘job’ of Design to get it right.

UX is everybody’s job.

Growth Product Managers: You should learn to code Python. Here’s why:

Posted on by will

Python code

<tl/dr>

Growth Product Managers and Growth ‘Hackers’ should learn to code Python: it saves time by automating reporting and analysis, and it will make you a little less dependent on your data science team and a little more confident to go looking through your analytics data yourself.

I run Growth and Monetisation for HERE’s consumer app business. We have an Android and iOS app, a mobile web app and a desktop web product. We are collecting a ton of app usage and attribution analytics, but they are spread out across multiple places: mobile attributions in Adjust, mobile analytics in Amplitude, web analytics in SiteCatalyst, and so on.

The dashboards provided by the analytics tools are great, but I found myself logging into multiple web dashboards every morning, exporting CSV files and importing them into an excel file to get just the view of the data that I wanted. I was spending 30 minutes per day just cutting and moving data around to get the view I wanted, and I decided there must be a way to automate it.

There are a few options when it comes to scripting languages to let you easily pull and manipulate data sets. Your data science team probably uses R, but for Growth PMs a great place to start is Python. Python is a general-purpose interpreted scripting language that is both extremely versatile and easy to learn. It is inherently great at working with data sets, but there are also a ton of additional libraries available designed especially for data science that make fetching and analysing large data sets, like your app analytics, really easy.

Here are a handful of things you can build yourself with a bit of Python scripting knowledge:

  • Automate checking your dashboards and compiling data in the way you want to see it.
  • Save time manually exporting CSV files from different sources and creating an Excel file to see the data how you want to see it: use python to pull all the data sources automatically and crunch them into the right format.
  • Perform basic analysis automatically at regular intervals and email yourself and your team the results.
  • Create an automated ‘early warning’ system: if any of your key metrics start changing (going up or down) at a certain rate, create an alert email. This is a script that could run automatically a few times per day to monitor key stats and email you and your team when any key metric starts changing drastically.

Example
As an example, I uploaded one of my basic scripts to GitHub. Take a look here.
This basic script does a couple of things:

  • Allows you to specify a couple of frame variables at the top for how you want the data returned: you can specify the period, the channel grouping, and choose between active or new users.
  • Pulls app analytics data from Amplitude for an Android and iOS app sequentially.
  • Adds two columns to the end, one for the standard deviation and one for the % change between the last two complete periods.
  • The script prints out the channels that have gone up or down by more than 2%. (This variable is configurable at the top of the script as well, allowing you to adjust the sensitivity).
  • For data that is grouped by Country, it will also print the % change for a list of pre-defined ‘Key Markets’.

This is just one simple example for one particular analysis – but you could write a script to pull and combine data in any way you choose, depending on the analysis you want to perform/automate.
(This post is not intended as a ‘how-to’, but if you want help, you can contact me. Also there are some resources for getting started with Python at the bottom of this post.)

The best Growth PMs live and breathe their data. Learning to manipulate and analyse your product’s data with Python will save you time by allowing you to automate many reporting and analysis tasks. The act of working with your data at a raw level will also help you fully understand it.

Your data science team are of course the experts

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, and you’re not likely to become more competent in programmatic data science than they are – but you can learn enough to make yourself just self-sufficient enough to be able to answer your most burning questions immediately, and you don’t rely only on your data scientists and analysts to create the reports and dashboards you need.

Resources and getting started
There are a ton of great resources out there to help you learn Python. Some assume previous programming experience, and others are designed for absolute beginners. It really doesn’t matter if you’ve never programmed before (although, of course, it certainly helps). If you have a good understanding of data manipulation in Excel, for example, you should be able to pick up data analysis with Python with a bit of patience and practice.

Some resources to get you started:

  • datacamp.com is a great place to learn the basics of Python for Data Science. The basic python course is free, and $25 will get you access to the intermediate course, which covers the most important things you’ll need when using Python for data analysis.
  • A more general Python beginners course is available at codecademy.com.
  • The O’Reilly books are relatively expensive, but they’re the classics.
  • Of course, stackoverflow.com is a gold mine for budding and advanced programmers.

Note
Although I studied Computer Engineering I don’t consider myself a programmer. My scripts focus on simplicity and getting the job done

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, and in so doing break occasional rules and programming best practices (I use global variables a lot, my conventions are sloppy, etc). But that doesn’t matter. As Growth PMs, we’re not contributing to a large codebase with lots of other developers: we’re programming just for us. So don’t get caught up in conventions, unless they help you write code that you can understand.

The Complete Product Manager

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Being a great Product Manager in tech is more than shuffling roadmaps and writing user stories.

Great PMs are first and foremost masters of their market: the segments, the customers, and their needs, and they spend a great deal of time talking to customers themselves and conducting field research.

Great PMs are the walking embodiment of their product and their vision. Great PMs want to build great things, and naturally inspire people to join them.

Great PMs understand how their product idea will become a product business, and they understand what needs to get done to get there.

Great PMs know and respect their competition, but they are not intimidated and focus on solving users’ problems better rather than comparing feature lists.

Great PMs are masters of their domain of business and are thought leaders of their industry.

Great PMs are driven by intuition, but formulate hypotheses and test them using rigorous analytical methodology.

Great PMs understand how technology can help solve customer problems in new and delightful ways.

Great PMs have a natural sense for design and focus relentlessly on the end-to-end User Experience.

Great PMs have a growth mindset

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, and build a platform for systematic growth for their products from day one.

Great PMs are natural born leaders. They inspire and motivate, rather than dictate.

Great PMs are passionate, resourceful and curious. Great PMs are relentless in the pursuit of a better product.

 

 
The Complete Product Owner

 

 

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Amazon Kindle and the Perfect Product Vision

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In the recent fantastic piece on The Verge covering interviews with the top brass behind the Amazon Kindle, the ultimate product vision behind the Kindle series of eReaders is articulated beautifully. From the article:

For Amazon, paper is more than a material for making prototypes. It’s the inspiration for the Kindle of the future: a weightless object that lasts more or less forever and is readable in any light. “Paper is the gold standard

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,” Green says. “We’re striving to hit that. And we’re taking legitimate steps year over year to get there.”

The beauty of this is its simplicity. Amazon are striving to create electronic paper. “Paper is the gold standard. We’re striving to hit that.”

There is nothing here about the joy of reading, or empowering people through instant delivery of information, or making money. The beauty of this is that all of those things flow naturally from the core premise: to make better

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, electronic paper.

This is what the Kindle team says about itself. It’s clear, it’s inspiring – and it’s impossible to misunderstand.

Compare that with this:

“Reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting everyone to their world via our information sharing and distribution platform products and be one of the top revenue generating Internet companies in the world.”

That mouthful appeared on a slide at Twitter’s first analyst day. Inspiring? Do you even understand what the hell its trying to say? It could mean anything and everything – and that’s the problem.

Imagine your first day on the job at Amazon in the Kindle division. You ask, “So what is our mission? What are we trying to do?” In answer, someone might hand you a piece of paper, and tell you: “We want to make that.”

A good product vision is inspiring and motivating; an irresistible imagined future that pulls you towards it like gravity. But a good vision is also impossible to misunderstand. Everybody should share the same view, and be pulled in the same direction.

Product Manager in the middle

Posted on by will

The Product Manager isn’t just a middle-man.

If you’re a PM, and your answer to every question is: “I don’t know, I need to go and ask ___”, then I’m afraid you’re doing something wrong.

You might not be able to give engineering estimates, but you should know your team and your technology well enough to give an educated guess; even if you have to follow up by saying “I’ll double-check that with engineering and get back to you.”

You might not have a slide prepared on every possible strategy question

Thus

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, but you should be able to form an opinion immediately if somebody throws you a strategy curve-ball.

You might not have the answer – but you should at least have an opinion.

Good Product Managers don’t wait to be told what to do by stakeholders. They anticipate stakeholder needs and suggest new ideas.

Good Product Managers don’t push decision-making up to senior management. They take responsibility, and if anything push decision-making down. Either way, they stand accountable for the decision and own up to it.

Good Product Managers never say “I don’t agree with this decision, but…”. Even if they think it.

No company needs more middle-men.

Companies need passion, vision and conviction. Grit.

What the Whatsapp deal can teach all Product Managers

Posted on by will

There are lots of lessons behind the curtains of the $19 BN Whatsapp acquisition by Facebook. There’s lessons about the scale and value of social, about the continually evolving mobile platform. There’s of course the rags-to-riches story of the founders going from food stamps to being billionaires in just a few short years, and a casual reminder that investment bankers are greedy.

But a few layers deeper there’s another lesson. It’s simple:

Whatsapp was not the first mobile messaging app.

When talking with Product Managers at lots of different companies I often hear sentences like these:

  • That’s not ‘new’ enough.
  • No, there’s already an app that does that.
  • If we could just find a completely new idea…

The problem is:

“There are no new ideas under the sun.”

Whatsapp was not the first mobile messaging app, and Facebook was not the first social network.

So what is the lesson? You don’t need to be first to win.

In fact, often not being first is an advantage. Look at Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg was able to learn from the failings of all the social networks that came before him. He learnt the importance of scaling from the failed Friendster, whose incredible pains scaling under rapid growth ultimately killed it. He learnt about network interactions from MySpace, which was still the biggest social network in 2006.

Another particularly good example: look at the category of To-Do List apps. There are literally hundreds in the app stores

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, and more pop up every month. Some are more successful than others, but the most successful ones, such as Wunderlist (currently #44 on the iOS store, and #29 grossing app), have only been around a relatively short amount of time. There were countless To-Do list apps before Wunderlist

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, and there’ll be countless more. What makes Wunderlist successful?

The value in a new product or service is seldom that it finds a completely unmet need. The value is often solving a known need in a new and innovative way.

When looking at product opportunities, the question is not if there is another product that solves the problem you intend to solve. The question is: can we be different? Can we be better?

A Very Simple Model for expressing a Customer Value Proposition

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There are many frameworks available to help product teams develop and express a customer value proposition. One of my favourites is this Value Proposition Canvas, which was based on the canvas from the creators of the Business Model Canvas.

Expressing the proposition on this canvas is a great way of forcing you to think through the whole proposition, from beginning to end, and it is particularly useful for helping you identify problem-solution fit – that is, identify and articulate which needs or problems your product is addressing, and how.

While this model has worked very well for me, I would like to share a different, (even!) simpler model. It’s a well-known idea that any product or business should be able to be expressed within a single sentence. This model is all about getting to one sentence.

It’s as simple as answering three questions about your product:

  1. What it IS
  2. What it DOES
  3. HOW it does it

Step 1: Answer the three questions

What it IS

This describes the broad product category. What IS this thing you’re building? An app? What kind of app? Is it a service? What type?
Examples:

  • A messaging app
  • A maps app
  • A customer relationship management service

What it DOES

What does this product actually DO?
Or to put it another way – what are the benefits that this product provides to the customer? What needs does it solve?
Examples:

  • Send a text, image or video message to anyone you want, instantly, for free.
  • Find new and trending places to try that match your tastes in your neighbourhood.

HOW it does it

How does this product deliver the benefits you’ve described in the section above? What particular features or experiences are key to how your product will do this?
Examples:

  • Extremely simple interaction model with delightful user experience.
  • The fastest, most robust messaging cloud service.
  • Recommendations based on the activity/history of your friends.

Step Two: Prioritise

Do you have multiple answers under some or all of the questions above? If so, prioritise them. What is more important? What is critical? What is core to the whole product, and what is secondary?

Which items, if removed, would result in the product not being viable any more? These are your core propositions.

Step Three: Circle the differentiators

Which items you’ve circled are the ones that differentiate your product from others on the market? Which ones make your product truly different from the competition?

Step Four: Your proposition in one sentence

Now, try making a single sentence out of your answers in the three columns, focussing on a) what is top 1-2 in terms of priority, and b) what is differentiating.
(Hint: you don’t need to use every column!)

The formula for the sentence is as follows:
This product is a x (what it IS) that y (what it DOES) by z (HOW it does it).

Example: This product is a messaging app that allows you to send a text, image or video message to anyone you want, instantly, for free.

If you find that you cannot get everything you want into one sentence, or if your sentence is more than two lines long, start cutting. Keep cutting until you reach one sentence. What is really core? What is truly differentiating?

Why does this model work?

This model works by forcing you to prioritise. What is really important? What is really core? What is really differentiating?

It is also helpful because it helps visualise where your product’s differentiation lies. Some products differentiate on the benefits, or problems solved, and others differentiate on the solution to those needs. Knowing which is crucial when formulating your value proposition.

Try it, and see. I am interested to hear your feedback and if this model works for you.

Mobile strategy in a rapidly evolving industry

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Benedict Evans, the well-known mobile industry analyst, has posited that we actually have no idea what it will mean in five years to “install an app on my smartphone”.

The market and the technology that powers it is changing and evolving so fast that there is no way to know how the industry will look in five years time. Will a smartphone still be a rectangular device with a screen that you carry in your pocket? Will it have already been absorbed into an invisible network of embedded, connected, wearable devices? What will be the form factors that define ‘mobile’ in five year’s time? How would you develop experiences for them?

For everyone in the business of creating and distributing mobile experiences, the dependency you have to the mobile ecosystems is the single largest pertinent factor in your strategic profile. How does not having a clear view not the future impact your strategic planning? What will your business model be in five years? What will your business be at all in five years?

It is an interesting lesson in strategy definition to be able to separate the WHAT from the HOW.

The HOW is a constant evolution of the environment you’re operating in. The WHAT is much more constant, and can absorb even large changes in the environment.

The WHY… it could last perhaps forever.

Are you in love with making software, or making products?

Posted on by will

Software is a solution to a problem. Or rather, it is a part of a solution to a problem.

A product is more than just the software, and it’s more than the solution. A complete product encompasses an entire product business: a consumer value proposition, a profit model, resources, processes and tools. Marketing and channels. Suppliers and customers.

If a tree falls in the forest and no-one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

If a product is designed, built and released, but no-body can find it and no-body uses it, does it exist at all?

Building products is a responsibility. Not just to create a great experience (great software, great hardware, great whatever), but to get that experience to your customers. Maybe also to their customers.

And most of all, to generate value for your business.

If you put on the hat of Product Manager, you’d better be ready to think bigger than just your software, because a product is much, much more.

So what are you in love with?

(If you’re not in love with either, then a career in software product management is maybe not for you.)