[Product Book Series] Chapter 2: Strategically Understanding

One of the first things a great product manager should do before even thinking about a product is to understand the company that makes it. Every company is a little bit different, and they have different priorities, values, strengths, and weaknesses. Knowing these details about a company—understanding the full context of its current situation—is the starting point to find and evaluate product opportunities and make strategic product decisions. We’ll build upon how to leverage these details in the following chapters.

Persona

For example, IT Tech Tom might be very busy his entire workday with customer support tickets. He would likely favor a new automated machine deployment system over one that involves lots of manual intervention

MAKING PERSONAS REAL WITH EMPATHY

With ~20 years under my belt, I’ve noticed the consistent trend is for product managers to define personas with 90% demographics, and 10% wants/needs/emotions. Maybe less. For example, it’s easy to create Jill—a 23-year-old in a major metro who has a roommate, loves travel, and is very into the DJ scene. Jill is thinking about buying her first car. That’s a great starting point. But it’s barely the tip of the iceberg. Does Jill care about what the car says about her, or does she care about fuel efficiency? Is Jill focused on saving money, or on resale value? Does Jill care about the car tech, or just that it gets her places? Further, does Jill enjoy the research process, or does she just want to be pointed in the right direction? Is she going to make a little comparison spread-sheet for herself, or just wing it? Far too often products are coming to market without considering the needs of the individual, as opposed to pure demographic fit. All of the above scenarios are valid to a product manager who is designing a site/ app to cater to car buyers. But a simple review of car-buying websites shows a distinct lack of consideration for emotional needs versus purely practical ones.

When the TV industry tried to bring 3D technology into the house, they showed a distinct lack of empathy. Sure, 3D movies were performing well in theaters, so it made logical sense to bring that kind of tech into the home. But an empathic product manager could have easily predicted the poor reception: movie theaters are primarily solitary (though shared) experiences, whereas family/living rooms are primarily social experiences. And no family wants to sit on the couch wearing a bunch of goofy glasses (not a problem in a darkened theater).

Great product managers can put themselves into the mindset of the persona, and really get into his/her skin to understand the wants and needs and, most importantly, the emotional triggers of their users. And truly great product managers will cycle through many different personas as they consider the product’s core needs. This process determines the subtle differences that can take good products and transform them into exceptional ones.

Use Cases

UC provide the context to let you understand the link between your personas and your products.

Day to day, a PM will need to think about what use cases they want to support for their product, which helps in finding and prioritizing opportunities. The use cases will affect everything from what features you prioritize to solve your customers’ problems to what customers you’ll market your product to

HOW DO WE KNOW IF OUR PRODUCT’S GOOD?

Example metric:

| Awareness metrics will include number of downloads of your app, visits to your website, and so on: metrics that indicate people are aware of your company and products 

| Engagement Of those who downloaded the app, how many complete a core task? How many customers do that task each day/week/month?

Tavel - Pinterest’s founding PM

three distinct strategy phases startups, and by extension new products, go through:

• engagement
• retention
• self-perpetuating

Engagement

first phase is to get customers using your product and completing the core action, like posting a photo to Instagram. This is a sign they’re engaged with your product, and we could say that completing the core action is a success metric that supports an engagement goal

Retention

how frequently those customers use the product in a given time period. The idea is that if the product gets better for users over time, they will keep using it and they’ll miss out if they leave

Self-perpetuation

The final phase that Tavel describes is when your goal is selfperpetuation. This means your product has various loops that keep the customer engaged, and encourage other customers to get engaged. Your success metrics will be around how often people complete these loops. Pinterest gets better when more people post pins because this leads to better discovery of new, relevant things to pin. And sharing notifications encourage both new customers to pin something and existing users to return to the product.

Tavel goes on to describe cohort performance as the ultimate success metric your company should look at over time, encompassing all three of these stages. Specifically, look at the number of weekly users completing the core action and the percentage of weekly active users completing the core action over time. This shows growth from the size of the cohort, engagement from the ratio of users completing the core action, and retention from your performance over time