Your step by step guide to building impactful products!

Why do a lot products fail, and why do some of them succeed and do so well? What is it that kickass Product Managers do that makes them get such high output in less time, that average PMs would otherwise take large amount of time, and features to achieve?

The usual process for a product manager before building a feature is the identification of the problem the user is facing through various qualitative/quantitative means(the WHAT), moving on to find the possible solutions(HOWs), and then the execution of some of the features from the list of features that they think are higher priority features. But what they pay very little/no attention to is spending on predicting which solution shall work the best. The third step doesn’t have to be a subjective, but a very objective call to achieve high output.

Apart from design, analytics, UX, business and technical specifications, this strategizing of picking the right features is a very important skill for a Product Manager to know.

The next few steps going to serve as your kickass guide, which should help you predict the impact of features well before building them. Use this guide to build impactful features, in interviews, to impress people, whatever works best for you 😉

Know your funnel

To be able to get a good and broad understanding of the user journey in your product, it is important to know the various stages of your user and the number of users in each stage. A very basic user funnel in any product can look like:

Visitor -> Lead -> Activated -> Converted

For instance, on an ecommerce platform, a user funnel can look like the one below:

Knowing the number of users in each step of the funnel will let you know where your users are actually dropping off, do the analysis on why they’re dropping off and then build your tasks accordingly.

As you can see in the funnel above, one such prominent problem is that only 3% of the users complete a purchase even after adding the item to cart. It, hence becomes an important problem for the ecommerce company to solve.

Bucket features

Before you build a feature, try to bucket them on the following lines:

Necessary: Is there a feature that has high financial impact? Is there a usability issue for the user that I need to solve? Is there a feature that will significantly reduce the effort of my sales team? If there is a feature that solves any of the problems on these lines, they need to be picked on highest priority.

Experiments: There are features that you think can make it big, because of various reasons(because of data backing it, because you’ve spoken to the users who feel there is an issue with the product, it is a hunch based decision), but are not very sure of how well they shall perform.

For features like these, it is important you perform experiments to validate the impact.

For instance, say you think launching an offers section in your app will result in higher number of people making a purchase on your app. You think so because your competitor has had offers on their app for quite a while, and have in fact given them high visibility. But because you are not sure, an experiment can help you validate this hypothesis. Showing your app with the offers section to half of your users, and without the offers section to the remaining half will let you know what upside the offers section brings to your app, and whether you should have offers in your app or not.

(Experiments can be done through A/B testing, you can read about it further here)

Hygiene features: These are features that have to be present in the product, and will most probably not have impact metrics attached to them. For instance, my account page, terms and conditions, cancellation policy, uniform design guidelines in the product, research on a new analytics tool etc. in the product. Their impact doesn’t need to be quantified, but the validation can be simple on how many users actually use the feature.

A good mix of these features usually makes a good roadmap for building a product. I typically distribute necessary, hygiene and experiments as 60, 20 and 20%. Going extreme on any of the three verticals in a given timeline is usually not recommended. Why, you ask? Say for instance, you only pick 100% validated necessary financial tasks in a quarter, because you aren’t picking any experiments. In this case, your company isn’t doing any innovation and hence won’t have a USP in the long run. Also, because you haven’t picked the hygiene tasks, a lot of priority user problems will end up staying unsolved.

Similar argument can be given for other cases.

Quantify features

Before building any feature/product, try to come up with the following statement about the feature:

“This feature will improve the X Block by Y% in the next Z months”

For instance,

This feature will improve the Visitor to lead % of the product by 0.5% in 2 months”

Remember, there is no feature in product that does nothing. If it actually does nothing, you shouldn’t really be picking it in the first place. Quantifying the impact of a feature gives you a good sense of whether you should really pick, and which ones you shouldn’t.

Looking at the impact of the features after you’ve built them will always have bias on what impact metrics you should be looking at. You’ll only end up looking at the metrics that have improved to self-justify yourself, and not at the blocks that actually matter. You don’t do this on purpose, you do it because it is human nature to really like what you’ve built and think what you’ve built is successful.

Once you’ve quantified the impact before building a feature, there’s no scope for you to do sales, even to yourself. Because you can now be very objective in the impact of the feature, and do its root cause analysis.

Most importantly, quantifying the impact helps you prioritize and pick the right features before building them.

Benchmark the impact of the features

But wait, the immediate next question that comes up is, how do I predict the impact of the features that haven’t been built? Yes, it’s a tough task, but it can be practiced and learned with experience and hard work. I use the following techniques to benchmark a feature:

1.      Identify what are the metrics you’ll impact: For instance, if you change the color of your chat head to give it more visibility in your app, it’ll result in more number of message sends which might eventually result in more number of conversions. The former is called lead metric, and the latter are called lag metrics.

2.       Predict how well your features will perform: You can use any of the following techniques to be able to do so:

a.      Previously launched features: If you have the learnings of the impact of a similar feature that was launched previously, or the same feature launched on a different platform, you can use them to predict how your feature shall perform.

For instance, you can use the learnings of how well the offers section performed in your android app, to better place the feature on your desktop/mobile site/iOS app.

b.     Competitor analysis: If you want to introduce an offers section in your product, the placement of this feature can well be decided where your competitors have placed this feature, and why.

c.      Experiment: If an impact of the feature is not known, try and experiment your product with and without the feature. I’ve explained experimentation before, but the success/failure of the experiment shall help you gauge on how the feature shall perform if it is fully rolled out.

d.     Guesstimate: Do a plain guesstimate of how well your feature shall perform, if it’s an absolutely new feature, or space that you have no idea of. Remember the questions they used to ask us in interviews? Estimate the number of cabs in India? Similarly, try and do a rough estimate of how many users, which user segment shall use your product and why.

Make sure, keep in mind variable factors like seasonality, varying tax policies etc. that aren’t in your control, but affect the impact your feature shall bring while you do your predictions.

A snapshot of how a roadmap can look like basis the techniques above is given below:

Validate

Needless to say, once you’re done launching a feature, spend time validating the impact of the feature/product you’ve built.

Once you’re done validating, you should have an answer as to why your feature achieved what it was intended to achieve, or why did it underachieve/overachieve.

Use these learnings in the next feature/product you build. Repeat!

Phew, long read, wasn’t it? But I really hope you learnt an important aspect of strategizing and prioritizing in building impactful products. 🙂

That one common thing in all great startups!

That one common thing between all great startups
Funny how about 5 years back in school, I would press the ‘7’ button on my keypad four times to reach the letter ‘s’ in my phone, and how life has changed now. Amazing how I’m not a stranger now in a stranger city through Google maps, how I book a cab, recharge my phone, buy my grocery and what not by a click of a button through technology.
But there’s one thing that I’ve observed about all successful companies around me – time, they help you buy time. In countries outside India, where people work on hourly wages, people know how expensive their time is and hence know what the worth of their time is. And people in India are slowly beginning to realise this too; and that’s what the investors flooding their money on startups are waiting for, for us to realise how expensive our time is.
Two learnings –
1. Understand that your time is expensive. Work, invest in, taught to, laugh with people who are worth your time.
2. If you’re a company, or a startup building a product, ask yourself if your product/company is helping your users buy their time. If the answer is yes or so you believe, you’re heading the right path.

If you think you don’t need analytics, you do need analytics!

I’ve lately spoken to a large number of early stage startups to see, and understand on how they build their ideas to execution, and product. Every conversation has been a learning experience and has only given me better perspective on technology, business and life.

A few common traits that I observed on all of the founders was the great emphasis on the pace of execution, the zeal and passion in how they talked, a detailed understanding of their customer, and depth of why they’re trying to solve the problem that they’re solving; traits that excite me to bits!

But there was another common trait that I noticed when I went a little deeper in the conversations was that the emphasis on analytics in most of the startups was minimal; which was alarming, but not surprising for me. Most of the founders, though broadly know that they need the analytics in place in their product, but don’t put it to execution. But wait, why is that so?

  1. Because we don’t exactly understand how getting the product analytics in place is going to impact the business, and hence the ROI doesn’t seem worth it. It isn’t the founders to blame either; before working in Product, it didn’t intuitively occur to me either that just improving the positioning of a call to action would actually improve business.
  2. Because viewing the numbers, learning the analytics tools is a job of patience. Because getting those events in place, and trying to drive conclusions can at times take time and practice.
  3. Because getting traffic/building traction is subconsciously more important to us than engaging, and converting the ones that have landed on our product.

But why should one spend time on doing the analytics?

It’s the cheapest means to building better business right from the start

Let me give you an example here. Let’s say you’re an e-commerce company that sells products in various parts of India. You probably know that the maximum traffic comes to you from Kerala, you know this data.

But your drop down which asks for the user city/state shows Kerala in the 7th – 8th position. You’ve just added extra friction for that Kerala user before he could even move to see your product; just by hard coding the top 3-4 traffic/searched cities, your business could have increased significantly.

Now say user finally does the search successfully, but the load time of the page is so slow that the user doesn’t actually reach your product page, which is your actual offering. There can be a gazillion examples like these, but we don’t spend time recognizing them.

It’s objective

We all have our biases in who, and how are customer is and we build our product basis that. Doing so in the first attempt, but iterating on your product just by this understanding isn’t the right approach, which is what I observed a lot of startups do.

Taking the previous example, the founder had a bias that users from North India, primarily Delhi are more likely to make a purchase from his e-commerce product, which later turned out that Kerala visitors used the product more.

Disassociating your association with the bias is what data helps you do.

It’s time saving!

Though it’s absolutely important to understand your costumer, speaking to them on a regular basis, analytics is probably the quickest means to understand how your user is interacting with the product! It helps you take product and business decisions quicker, saves you time and hence saves you money. Your time is expensive afterall 🙂

So as founders, the number of users going deeper in your product funnel should be just as important as tracking those GMV/install numbers. Spend time reading, and understanding them!

Learning business from Yo Yo Anda King

Egg Seller, Entrepreneur
Yo Yo Anda King
In the past 30 odd days, we’ve all seen the amount of buzz and ruckus the demonetization has created. We’ve all been in long queues, felt that sense of pride everybody we got rid of a Rs 500/Rs 1000 note, and felt miserable everytime we got one.
But what I’m going to talk about today is a ‘business case study’ of one of the thellas near my place called ‘Yo Yo Anda King’. Needless to say, he is a Yo Yo Honey Singh fan. But apart from the pretty obvious swag he has in his thella name, he does have some pretty awesome business sense to learn from, despite being not very educated.
The very next day after the decision of demonetization was announced, while everybody was afraid of the Rs 500/Rs 1000 notes, this thella owner had opened his own wallet where he was taking Rs 500 notes in advance from his customers for the andaas/omlettes they had in the coming days. But wait, what? Why would he do that? These were the metrics that he managed to solve!
Retention: People who had given a Rs 500 advance kept coming back to him for the next 15-20 days because:
1. They didn’t want to end up forgetting their balance if the money stayed with him for too long
2.They saw a prospect of getting rid of another Rs 500 note, just in case this advance got over quickly.
So people who would’ve otherwise tasted a poha, biryani or momos on different days ended up being only half boiled, bread omletted, half fry, and bhurji fans for the next few days.
Organic marketing/Referrals: People working in nearby companies ended up talking about him, and kept coming to deposit their Rs 500 advance. That’s some free marketing!
He obviously explained the above to me in layman terms. 😛
Though he had a pretty humble smartphone, he made sure he had Paytm on his phone, and the Paytm barcode on this thella the very next day! Don’t know what Paytm is? He’ll explain it, and market it to you so well that even Vijay Shekhar Sharma would go weak in his knees. The very next day, you’d see the same customer making a payment through Paytm.
Immediately after his Paytm wallet would elapse, you’d see him train people on the Justdial pay the very next day! Why Justdial pay, you ask? Because he knew the Justdial office was quite near to his thella, and the possibility of his customers using Jusdial was a lot higher. This was when the nearby thellas were finally considering having having a paytm account, but Yo Yo Anda King with all his swag and brains had already made a lot of money by then.
Learning? Speed, understanding the need of your customer, a bit of guts and adopting technology quick can take you places. “Tax customer ko bhi bharna tha, ab hum bhardenge. Fark itna, ab thoda sahi se dhanda karke bharenge”, is what he says. Oh by the way, don’t call out any other rapper’s name in front of him, he hates it.

Things about TVF Pitchers that you shouldn’t be swayed by

27th May 2015 – the internet was welcomed with the trailer of an online series that portrayed the Indian youth slightly differently from how Bollywood/Roadies/Splitsvilla has over the past few years. It talked of the youth that is the entrepreneur, the youth that wants to solve problems that affect you and me, and not just party and get drunk on “Chaar bottle vodka”. Little did anyone know this series by the end would take the internet by storm, and be so relatable and inspiring to the entrepreneurs, and the aspiring ones.

Pitchers
TVF Pitchers

Similar to everyone’s unanimous view on TVF Pitchers, I too totally loved the series! It has easily been one of the best things that has happened to the Indian entertainment industry, and I’m sure has also encouraged a lot of people to startup! But if you’re too inspired by the series and wish to startup, and get funded and live happily ever after,  think again. Because life of an entrepreneur isn’t as rosy, glamorous as it looks like. Here are a few points that the you should keep in mind, if you’re too moved by the series and immediately wish to startup like Naveen Bansal and team.

1) Most of the episodes revolved around their startup getting funded. In fact, the season ended on a happy note with their startup getting funded.
However, that’s not how it is in real startups. The startup’s  success is determined by the quality of the product, or the kind of response the company gets from its customers.
Funding is a mere external factor that helps accelerate the growth of the startup, and it shall come if your product is good!

2) The product of work was not talked about at all in the entire season. This is not how startups work really. People do give a fuck about the “What”, which is the product/service that you’re building. Focus on the product and the funding, revenue shall follow.

3) Reality check – You will never get funded, or be able to impress the investors by giving a senti conversation about you, your friends and/or the hardships you’ve faced in the due course of building your company. The only thing investors give a shit about is growth, and how much will they be able to earn on their investment. If it had been an investor for real, he would’ve funded the other startup since it would reap him more profit, and as the investor put it, he could literally own the company.

4) It’s not always going to be a happy ending to your startup. It is very probable that your startup might fail, in fact the chances of failure are way more than chances of its success. You should only go ahead with the idea if you genuinely believe in it, and are willing to put your heart and soul in it, and more importantly be willing to fail. The learning through the entire journey, shall be insane however. 🙂

Again, I reiterate that TVF Pitchers was a beautifully put forth series, and I would love to see more of such content, top notch acting and direction like this on YouTube and on my TV Screen. Keep the great working going TVF. Cheers!