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Product Management for Startups and Understanding Growth #Playbookrt52

It was a rainy Monsoon Delhi day with heavy downpour, traffic jams and water logging but these couldn’t keep a bunch of entrepreneurs from making it in time to the Product Nation Roundtable focused on Product Management and Growth Hacking.

Led by Round Table veteran who has done it all and scaled Slideshare to great heights, Amit Ranjan, the excite bunch got together in the lovely office of Posist.

The round table kicked off with discussion around Product Management with Amit discussing his learnings and unfolding carious aspects around it step by step.

He defined Product Management as the function that manages the product life cycle through activities like planning, forecasting, production, marketing and has flavours of engineering, design, sales, marketing, data etc.

No matter what the stage of the company is, Product management is relevant, it is carried out by Founders is small startups (say less than 10 in strength) and then there are multiple product managers in big companies.

Important takeaway: “A Product Manager should be the CEO of the product” – Amit Ranjan

443b5ffef7b5079d7b20822404fd3124“A great product manager has the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer, and the speech of a diplomat”

The group further analysed many examples of startups such as Uber, Twitter, Slideshare etc. around a model shared by Amit depicting 3 pillars of Product Management which are:

  • Vision
    • align org goals with market conditions & user needs
    • ‘get’ the pulse of the product (think movie directors)
  • Design
    • give shape to the product: feature mix, user experience
  • Execution
    • work with engineering, quality, marketing to deliver

However, a common issue cited by many founders was the issue of making the right hire for such role. The group identified and discussed the various aspects that must be considered while making a hire for the role :

  • Strong product sense/instinct
  • Carries multiple points of views
  • Communicates clearly
  • Simplifies & prioritizes
  • Measures & iterates
  • Understands good design
  • Writes effective copy

The second half of the Round Table was focused around Virality and the art of Growth Hacking with Amit sharing many interesting anecdotes and case studies.

Amit defined Virality as “Marketing built into the product…if the product is viral, it will market itself.

It is different from Word of Mouth, Marketing, Buzz etc and is simply the ability of the product to spread on its own. The role of a Marketer is to enable the product to do so and leverage different mediums to do so.

In Slideshare’s case, it was widgets that worked out very well for distribution. Amit emphasised to a great extent the importance of cracking and working on distribution right from the get go. The ideal scenario of working deeply on product (engagement) as well as channels (distribution) is hardly realised. It is a call that the entrepreneur has to take and has its own pros and cons. In Slideshare’s case, the heavy focus on distribution instead of deep diving into product development to a greater extent helped them erect barrier against new competitors/clones who tried to differentiate with added media support but could not pick up. As a negative, Slideshare faced issues in motivation as it never made users compulsively log in or create deeper engagement on the platform.

1e742688c80a7e0d19ccbafabe8ee071Amit emphasised the importance of tracking the product’s viral coefficient which is the number of additional members every new member brings. It should be greater than 1 for the product to become viral.

Viral Growth

The participants at the Roundtable were:

  1. Ashish Tulsian @posist.com (Host)
  2. Shashwat Srivastava @iflylabs.com
  3. Saurabh Arora @airwoot.com>
  4. Siddharth Deswal @wingify.com>
  5. Rahul Batra @getwalkon.com>
  6. Sujan Deswal @adpushup.com>
  7. Ankit Singh @aprogift.com>
  8. Amir Moin @contify.com>
  9. Sudhanshu Aggarwal @fizzysoftware.com>
  10. Amit Ghasghase <[email protected]>
  11. Mrigank Tripathi @qustn.com
  12. Udit Sajjanhar @splashmath.com

Founders share their own growth hack stories and channels’ learnings. For majority, in the B2B scenario, content marketing has worked well to boost the acquisition and few discussed the idea of generating leads from fake Linkedin profiles!

Amit cautioned that one should always be looking out for new channels as a channel that’s working for you today will saturate soon.

The group got some great insights and takeaways to implement from product management and growth’s perspective. Ashish’s hospitality at Posist with amazing Cholley Bhature was cherry on top of the cake

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The Most Important Metrics Immediately After Launch

Just released or about to release a mobile app? Do you have a checklist of which metrics you should be tracking?

Deciding which metrics to track is simply deciding which questions you want to answer. And the key is in asking the right questions.

Getting information about your app usage shouldn’t be like this.

1. User Acquisition

The main activity after launch is user acquisition. Even if you are flying under the radar to iron out bugs and optimize primary user flows, testing main acquisition channels should still be a big part of post-launch ops.

  1. Which channels are getting you the most users?
  2. What is the average acquisition cost per user of each channel?
  3. Which channels to focus early marketing efforts & budget at? (a combination of low cost + quantity and quality of users)
  4. Which channel was a particular user acquired from? Being able to identify this later becomes important in knowing which channels are driving the most valuable (loyal, paying, etc.) users

2. Retention

Retention tells you whether your users are coming back, or leaving you. Issues with retention, unless fixed immediately, can quickly translate into a survival problem for the app.

  1. What is your retention? D7 and D30 retention are popularly quoted numbers, but make sure they are the right numbers for your app. If your app is a messaging app, D2 retention is more important: you want your users to chat with their friends the next day, not 7 days later.
  2. Does any acquisition channel have a significantly lower average retention rate for users from that channel than from the other channels? If so, early marketing efforts are better focussed on the other channels.
  3. How are your users coming back to your app? Does some other app drive them to your app (like how tapping on an Instagram URL in the Twitter app opens the Instagram app)? A notification from your app? See if you can leverage that channel to further improve retention. A word of caution: there may be overlap and double counting here, if the same user comes back to your app from different channels at different times.
  4. When looking at retention rates over multiple days: D1, D2, D3, D4, etc, is there a cliff on any day where a large % of your users drop off and never come back?

3. Engagement

Engagement metrics tell you more about your retained users – how loyal they are and what keeps them loyal.

  1. How often does a user open your app? The number of active days in a week or the number of sessions per week are good indicators to distinguish between your most loyal users and less loyal users.
  2. How long does a user stay engaged with your app? Measuring this using a count of actions or progress in your app is more useful than actual time spent.
  3. What are the most popular actions carried or content consumed by users?
  4. Or any actions that you thought would be popular but aren’t? It is important to quickly validate assumptions about user behavior made while designing the app.

4. Revenue

If you are charging users for subscriptions or in-app items, revenue metrics become even more important to track upfront. You need to be able immediately identify problems and fix them before the revenue loss adds up.

  1. Conversion rates: what % of users become paid users?
  2. Compare average conversion rates for users from each acquisition channel. Is any acquisition channel performing significantly worse than others with regards to this metric?
  3. What % of your payers pay a second time? How much time (or sessions or progress) in between their first and second payments?
  4. What are the retention and engagement numbers for the payers? How is it different from non-paying users?

It may be useful to start tracking LTV (Lifetime value) of users and keeping tabs on the gap between the early LTV and user acquisition costs. The goal would be to close the gap as soon as possible.

Virality is another big area to keep track of, if your app has viral loops, and we will address that in a later post.

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Learnings from the 4th #PNMeetup – Making your product go viral on a low marketing budget

They say lighting does not strike twice, but it definetly did at Kunzum café where the 4th #PNMeetup  was happening. The theme “Making your product go viral on a low marketing budget” got over 40 people to the venue all intent to desipher the Virality dilemma. We had Amit Ranjan from SlideShare’s, Pathik Shah from Hike & Bipin Preet Singh from Mobikwik.

Amit from Slideshare started off first by asking What is Virality? The ability of an object to self replicate.

He took examples why sites like facebook are viral, the basics of virality being- the ease and ability to get referrals from existing users. Increasing the Viral co-efficient – for every additional user how many additional users do you get.  If it is greater than 1 than we get unbounded virality and if it is less than 1 then it grows to a certain level and then stops. The different Channels of Viral Distribution being Newsfeed, Widgets, Notifications, Email and Inviting a friend – any one will get you more additional business. These Viral channels are not the same as features, features essentially keep existing users happy, Viral channels are vectors that grow your business. He stressed that Design, Convenience, Speed of the app or website matter, to create a good user experience which has a impact on the virality of the product.


Pathik from Hike then takes over and talks about how Hike touched 2 Million downloads in two weeks of launch, he goes on to outline some basics for a startup product to go viral. In his view the product needs to truly be a great product addressing a real need thus building a strong core value for the product. Once we have a good product the Desigining and the U&I needs to be of very good quality thereby getting eyeballs to the product. The next stage will be to have a large Distribution channel focusing on Growth and Retention of all new Customers. Smart Marketing will play an important role in being able to get the message across to the user base in a fast and simple manner. This may include offering free talk time, additional storage space on referring etc, anything to spread the message especially through one customer to another. An Innovative business model will ensure that the longevity of the product is maintained.

Pathik then goes about to explain the concept of Growth Hacking –  a new process for acquiring and engaging users combining traditional marketing and analytical skills with product development skills. In the past, marketing and product development departments were often at odds where marketing groups would be spending significant amounts of money to acquire users but couldn’t get any development resources to build something as simple as new custom landing pages. And on the other side, product development teams would often build what they think users want and will attract users without deeply measuring and understanding the impact of their changes. This concept of “growth hacking” is a recognition that when you focus on understanding your users and how they discover and adopt your products, you can build features that help you acquire and retain more users, rather than just spending marketing dollars.

Growth Hacking is one very fast way to get Virality of Sales vis-a-vie the traditional Marketing Channels.

By being able understand the needs of the customers you reach the A-HA point with the customers which is essiantialy the main reason of the product going Viral.

Bipin from Mobikwik then takes over and talks about Virality. He emphasis on the 3 basic things, First Product Innovation is the key for any product. The Product needs to be disruptive to create new positive impacts for the users for them to get hooked to it. Secondly, Cheap Acquistion for a startup is essential. The Aim needs to be able to target a large audience for the product at a low cost. Thirdly, their needs to be high rates of Retention on the client base which has been acquired enabling you to ensure the client base continues to grow.

We then moved onto the session where we featured a new company, this time it was Zest.md. The company offers saas based platform, providing eclinics for medical practioners. The participants shared their product and got feedback from the audience in relation to scaling their businesses.

After a very interactive 3 hr session the time was just right for everybody to interact with the speakers and network with the audience. It was a session which helped people share some interesting conversations and am sure all the people who came gained a good insight .


We eagerly now await the next #PNMeetup in April.