Posted on

Experiencing the product, or productizing the experience?

About 6 months back, I saw a print advertisement from a well-known job portal (I will call it SiteZ): “Free webinar and live chat with well-known Mr. X”. When I visited their site, they helpfully informed me that I need to be a registered user of their site (which meant I had to be someone looking for a job, which I was not), but it would take only 30 seconds to register. I didn’t mind giving 30 sec and a few bits of personal information to attend this webinar so I proceeded with registration. It took me about 2-3 minutes before I realized that this is going to take quite some time – they wanted all kinds of details about my profile, what kind of job I was looking for, what I had been doing so far in my career, etc.; simply uploading my resume didn’t SiteZ. So I abandoned my effort and tried to find a way of deleting this account I had just created. I couldn’t find it, so I just navigated away from the site and made a mental note not to use SiteZ again since they misled me with their advertisement and were not helpful when I changed my mind about creating an account.

Little did I know that it was not the end of my experience with SiteZ. A few weeks later, I started receiving email ads/spams about properties and other stuff. Spams are nothing new, so I kept ignoring them, till a few months back when I cursorily went down the mail and saw that it (helpfully!) mentioned that I was getting this mail because I registered on SiteZ. It also offered an unsubscribe link, so I was happy. I clicked on it and was informed that I have been unsubscribed. However, that didn’t change anything; mails kept coming. I tried unsubscribing couple more times, with no result. I tried to write to the email address mentioned on their site, the mail bounced. I again searched their website for any link to delete the account, but couldn’t find any. Finally I found that even though the mail sender text says some developer’s name, it actually is sent from a @sitez.com account. So I could block this address, and have some peace of mind.

To be clear, this is not some no-name company, this is one of the top 4-5 job portals in the country. So you would expect them to think more holistically about their product offering and put more efforts in avoiding frustrations for their users, not to talk of delighting them.

In case of SiteZ, incremental tasks/thoughts like below might have gone behind the experience they finally offered to me:

  1. Product Management – We want to be like #1 job portal site, so we will build all the usual features.
  2. Engineering – Let’s not give a delete account button, it is too hard and can be depriortized since these users are anyway leaving the site.
  3. Marketing – Great idea about not giving delete button, this way our metric of # of accounts keeps going up and we can keep using their data (or get them to call us and we can upsell them)
  4. Sales/Marketing – Let’s make sure we enroll all our users into our promotions email list, and also make sure they don’t notice it when they are registering.
  5. Sales/Marketing – We need more users, so let’s run some promotions like free webinars. We will use it to get the user into registering for the site.
  6. Engineering – It is too hard to build a 30-second registration page, so let’s drop the user into the regular registration flow which takes 10 minutes.
  7. Sales – Let’s make some money with all this personal data that we collect by selling email campaigns to 3rd-party.
  8. Engineering – It is too hard to implement unsubscribe, can be deprioritized since these users are anyway leaving the campaign.
  9. Sales – Great idea engineers. This way, our mailing lists will always have lots of subscribers.

Why am I writing this?

First, it left a very bitter experience in my mouth and now I am very skeptical of any site that asks me to register; I have started reading terms and conditions of the sites that ask me to register, which is a painful process!

Second, and more importantly, I want to make the point about considering end to end experience (including support) as the product, rather than just the core feature set you want to offer to the customer. In this case, my experience with SiteZ was what made me to abandon them, not necessarily the core feature I was looking for (webinar, which I could never reach!). To be clear, SiteZ is not an isolated case, there are a large number of products out there which suffer from this problem of focusing just on the product and not on the experience (see ‘experience is the product‘). Product Managers need to exert more control (and influence) over the overall experience and not just focus on core product, otherwise they will be leaving a lot on the table. Maybe the way is to start from experience when building/changing the product, and embrace ‘experience is the product’.

What is your take on product vs. experience question?

Posted on

Notes on Product Management – insights from Slideshare / MMT / ex-Google PM

Avinash Raghava, who is doing a wonderful job of getting product start-ups together all over India, organized a product management roundtable with the help of Aneesh Reddy(CEO, Capillary). They invited Amit Ranjan (Cofounder, Slideshare – acquired by LinkedIn) and Amit Somani (Chief Product Officer, Makemytrip, ex-Google) to share their insights with a small set of entrepreneurs.

Credit for all the good stuff goes to Amit Ranjan, Amit Somani and Aneesh Reddy. Notes are rough. If anything is unclear, feel free to comment.

Here are some quick notes/thoughts from the event:

Who would make a good product manager?
Someone who can do 70% of everything (coding, design, listening to users etc.)

Best way to find a product manager in India is to find someone who did a startup but failed – he/she is likely to know all the various aspects that go into managing a product.

Someone who can lead by influence and manage to juggle all the balls in the air. Should be someone who can say NO.

It’s a very tough position to hire for – you need to have patience – you might go wrong the first few times. Once hired, give them around 5-6 months to get the hang of the whole thing.

What does a product manager do? What is his role about?
A good product manager would understand the requirements from various constituents and write a detailed specification, plan for bugs, testing, urgent requests and then create a product roadmap/deadlines.

A product manager has to identify and write down what metrics will move once the product is launched (e.g launching the mobile app will increase our repeat orders by 9%) – in some cases it is just to ensure that people work on things that matter but overtime it also brings more accountability.

User specs should have – what all do you need, who will use it and why – need to be elaborate it before you give it – need a hypothesis that will it move an X metric. Read thetwo page spec document that Joel Spolsky wrote for a fictional website What time is it? It should also have non-goals – what the product does NOT try to do.

Engineers tend to underestimate the time it’ll take – product manager needs to be able to correctly estimate how long something should take. And you will get better at it with time.

Use the 1/1/1 rule – sit with the engineering team and plan what needs to be accomplished in 1 week, 1 month and 1 six-month period.

People want to see the product roadmap – it is important for the CEO / Product Manager to communicate this to their team mates since a lot of people feel uncomfortable if they don’t have a clear idea of where the product is headed. (Amit Ranjan mentioned that people may even leave if they feel that the founding team does not have a clear vision – but the nature of start-ups is such that it is bound to happen that the product roadmap keeps evolving)

You need to hire coders who have a design sense (that eliminates 70% of work later).

Role of special data or analytics person has become very important (Amit Ranjan said that he could see that products of the future will be decided and influenced by data scientists). It is very important to get such a person on board early. Someone who has crunched SQL and nosql logs etc and can find trends and look up aberrations. Read up on Hal Varian and DJ Patil to understand more about this.

Difference between customer requirements and product requirements – customer requirement only becomes product requirement when more than 3 people require it (it’s a rule of thumb) – (People shared various tricks they use to ensure that the customer requirement is serious – “just wait for a few days and see if they come back with the same request”, “ask them to email it and not take feedback over the phone” etc. – these are situations where there is too much feedback coming your way. In most cases, it is best to make it as easy as possible for people to give you feedback).

Keep product engineering teams small – Amit Somani mentioned Jeff Bezos Two Pizza rule i.e. if the team cannot be fed by two pizzas alone, it is too big. Read more here.

Try to do daily scrum – gives everyone a sense of what everyone else is doing and ensures that people are making progress

Everything is a 6 page document – another Jeff Bezos funda for getting clarity. So a specification or a product request could be a 6 page long form document which ensures that the person achieves clarity before building anything.

You need to benchmark your product against other products especially in enterprise. When starting a product from scratch this can be a really useful exercise.

Amit Somani suggested a mental trick – before building a product, write a one page press release for the product that comes out upon product launch – what will this press release have? What the key features? The target audience etc. This PR drafting exercise could help you decide what to build, what is critical, and for which audience.

Don’t ignore email as a channel for activation and returning visitors

Product activation – Use banners on your own website – do get them to take action – on landing page – on other parts of the website

Track at your mobile traffic – people at the roundtable reported some crazy growth numbers for mobile internet usage – huge sites are now getting 20% to 60% of their traffic on mobile. Mobile traffic is split 50%-50% on mobile browser (including WAP) and mobile apps. This was a big eye opener for many people.

Tools people recommended

Use Trello (a Joel Spolsky product) to manage your product

Use Zapier business tool to connect various sources of product input (e.g. taking Zendesk tickets and automatically creating Github issues)

Use Clicktale or Inspectlet to record user sessions

Use Morae for recording users’ reactions when they are using your product ((Amit Somani mentioned how they put a live usage recording on a LCD screen in the technology room so that engineers could understand how their products were being used – it lead to a lot “can’t he just click on the button! Why is he scrolling up and down!”). One way to get users for such recordings is to ask interview candidates who come to your office to use your product and see their reactions.

Use a call-outs software when introducing new product features (like Cleartrip / WordPress / Facebook do).

Concluding notes
This was one of the most gyan-heavy sessions that I’ve attended. It was useful to hear things from people who had been there done that. Aneesh (even though he is based out of Bangalore) had taken the lead to do this with Avinash and our hope is that the group meets every 6 weeks to keep the conversation going. We’ll keep you posted.

Feel free to email me at ankur AT Akosha dot com if you’d like me to give more details to you.

On a related note, there was some basic debate about what a “product” is. We didn’t get into it at length because everyone in the room intuitively understood what a “product” was. However, we had internally debated about it – if you are interested, do read –Understanding Product v. Service [ThinkLabs Notes 1].

Reblogged from the Akosha Blog by Ankur Singla