My Path To Mastering Product Management/ User Experience (PM/UX)

Product Description

ApplicantDojo is a web-based platform to connect a mid-career job seeker with an experienced professional mentor to get end-to-end guidance with the job application process, understand his skill gaps, get guidance to work on the gaps, and finally enable him to apply to targeted jobs with confidence.

‘Dojo’ (/?dō?jō/) means a studio where traditionally martial arts or judo was practiced. Our vision is to make this platform a safe place for job seekers to learn, practice, and sharpen their job applications to ace their next interview, which feels no less than martial arts!

Check out our live product: https://applicantdojo.bubbleapps.io/version-test?

Here’s our final product presentation: (coming soon)

About Me

Background

I am currently a Digital Experience Manager with Robert Half, a global staffing firm. Background-wise, I am a Product & Marketing professional with 17 years of extensive experience in Design Thinking/ Product Innovation, Product Strategy, and Product Development. With a track record of managing cross-functional teams and collaborating with stakeholders at all levels, I bring a unique combination of technical expertise and business acumen to drive product vision, strategy, and execution. I have experience of working in diverse industries like IT, Healthcare, Electric Utility, and most recently Staffing. Here are some of the highlights of my career that I am proud of:

• Conceived and implemented AI-based lead forms’ feature, resulting in a 75% increased routing efficiency, reduced response time, and improved lead conversion rates.
• Led, strategized, and executed the integrated marketing (web and traditional) for a product suite of 10+ home-warranty products worth $55million in EBIT
• Added $45million worth of products in the pipeline by facilitating 8 business units at US’s biggest electric utility through design thinking sessions over a year and helped prioritize the pipeline to impact the velocity of product launches
• Designed and executed a data-driven campaign, saving the company 60% marketing cost and 3 times the closed leads by dividing channels based on user preference
• Co-founded and led multiple business functions of an eCommerce SaaS based startup, product managed and launched innovative products, acquiring 2600 active users (sales) within the first 6 months of company launch.

Why Product Management/UX

Product Management/UX roles seem to be the best place where all my learned skills over the years are needed in amalgamation to successfully oversee the entire lifecycle of the product-

• It’s my passion to solve customer pain points,
• Taking data-driven decisions is my second nature,
• I've a track record of successfully collaborating with cross-functional teams,
• I am experienced and confident in working with C-Suite Executives to help them prioritize their product roadmap to positively impact the velocity of achieving their business goals,
• Mastering Product management/UX is the missing piece of the puzzle in my product journey that brings my whole career together.

I realized that to be a successful Product/UX Manager though, I needed a refresher in the concepts and needed to learn new concepts that never came across in my career.

How PMDojo happened

I was often seeing posts from my long-time friend and a mentor at PMDojo , Priyanka Sanghvi . I had PMDojo in the back of my mind. But, with a baby/toddler in my lap for the last two years, the timing wasn’t right. This year, as soon as my toddler turned two and joined a daycare, I prioritized my career and decided to take the plunge.?

Choosing the Track

The Core Track felt most suitable for me to get the hands-on experience of launching a product 0-1 within 10 weeks while getting guidance from our wonderful mentor, Nicole J Castillo and relevant classes every week from various mentors as we progressed through different stages of innovation and building products. The Industry Track would have been equally good or maybe even better to get the experience of working with an existing start-up and its Founder as well. Please check out details about all the tracks here: PMDojo Product Accelerator

My Global Virtual Team

Here are the members of my global team including our mentor and developer:

I joined PMDojo on the day the applications were closing. The fellows who had joined before me had submitted their product pitch (ideas for product) by then. The Founder of PMDojo, Bosky Mukherjee did a great job of matching fellows from diverse backgrounds and experiences together as a team for whom the pitch/problem space was relevant. I was very happy to be placed on a team whose problem space was around a job seeker’s pain points as it’s very relevant to my most current full-time job at Robert Half, a staffing firm.

All the team members and our mentor live in 3 different time zones (EST, CST, and PST), only for our developer to join us later from a 4th time zone (EAT) making our collaboration even more challenging yet interesting. Being at Robert Half, a global company, I am very much used to working with partners from the UK and Australia. But, managing beyond office hours to work on this program was a new layer added to the experience.

Our mentor, Nicole J Castillo has been instrumental in always making us embrace uncertainty and ’improv’ as needed.?

Background of the problem

Problem Space

Our problem space is about the challenges that a job seeker faces during the end-to-end job search process. Having a very high volume of applications to apply for, feeling lost in the process, not having confidence in the profile/resume/interviewing skills, and not receiving callbacks from or recruiters ghosting after multiple rounds of interviews are some of the challenges that the job seekers face often.?

Market Statistics: 1 in 3 jobseekers stop looking for job after many rejections; 60% of jobseekers quit the application because it's complex; 75% of applicants get ghosted by recruiters

The Need to Solve

It’s important to solve or at least alleviate these challenges because job rejection is one of the many leading causes of emotional distress. On average, job seekers start to lose confidence after 5 rejections. 1 in 3 job seekers stops looking for jobs after receiving many rejections. This directly impacts their personal health and indirectly impacts the country’s economy in many ways.?

A 2022 study from FastCompany found - “The average respondent (job seeker) started losing confidence in themselves after the fifth (job application) rejection, and about 64% ended up pivoting on the type of job they were applying for after losing their confidence.”

Why Now

Environment-wise, in these remote and job stability-wise uncertain times, with limited social aspects, it’s even more necessary to help job seekers for their mental health as well as the country’s economy.?

The Problem

Problem Statement

When we first drafted our problem statement, we didn’t know our target audience. Hence, it was a very vague and wide statement:

In today's highly competitive job market, job seekers (in their early-to-mid or mid-to-late careers, with limited experience in their new role of interest, need to know the probability of getting their job applications accepted, and are uncertain about how to upskill to increase the probability of getting a job (during the job application process) based on their qualifications and job preferences, to improve the impact on their mental health and minimize job application apathy due to rejections.

We went through the following iterations to polish our problem statement:

• Finding the most impacted user- Based on our survey, more than the early career professionals, the challenges faced were by the mid-career professionals.
• Understanding the overlapping reason- Within the mid-career professionals, it was mainly the ones looking for a change either in terms of transition and/or promotion within or to another company, hence giving them a sense of uncertainty about this new role.
• Eliminating the out-of-scope- We realized that the impact on mental health was usually temporary and went away once a job seeker found a job.?
• Discovering the most impactful outcome- What they really need is guidance to identify the skill gaps and be able to feel confident when applying for their next job.

After weeks of user research and iterations, our final problem statement was:

Job seekers, in their early and mid careers with limited experience in their next desired role, need help identifying the gaps in their skills and job profile to be able to apply for targeted jobs with a powerful application, with increased confidence in the job application process.

Target User

During our primary and secondary research, we realized that the most impacted users are in the following categories:

• mid-career professionals (25-50 years of age) who have the experience, but not necessarily the confidence to apply for their next dream job.
• professionals not knowing their skill gaps for a new role and hence lacking the confidence, especially when looking for a 1) transition into a new role, or 2) promotion to the next level

Why does this matter?

Our target customer is the mid-to-late career professionals who may have the confidence to interview and few years of experience but because of rejections and lack of employer/recruiter feedback about their skill gaps makes them question their ability to apply for a higher paying/responsible job and hence feel demotivated about the job application process.

To understand the user pain points, let’s meet two of our target users:

Customer Empathy/Journey Map

To really understand our users, we mapped the customer empathy map based on collective feedback from our user interviews. For each stage in the job application process, we mapped out the user actions, user pain points, needs, and opportunities for each stage. We looked at multiple personas of our target job seeker and combined their overall emotions to find the biggest pain points for most job seekers:

Major pain points:

• The high volume of applications and no callbacks from recruiters is overwhelming and demotivating for them.
• Each job application is quite lengthy and time-consuming.
• After a few rounds of interviews if the recruiters ghost out, the job seekers are completely blind-sided about their profile gaps which might have led to rejection.

Not having anyone to discuss the end-to-end process leaves the job seekers feeling very helpless and ultimately giving up.

Design Process

The Biggest Solvable Pain Point

We looked at our target customer’s pain points, very quickly realizing that the recruiters’ ghosting is dependent on human behavior, and we might have limited scope to solve it. We further realized that the length of applications is dependent on the companies. The high volume of applications and help increase the probability of callbacks was a pain point we all could brainstorm ideas for. Hence, we chose that as our focus for solutioning.

Lightning Demo for Inspiration

To get inspired for a solution, we explored other websites and apps to seek visual design & feature ideas:

How Might We (HMW)

We brainstormed possible solutions using the HMW method of Design Thinking. This was one of my favorite exercises that really helped us look at the problem in various angles to come up with possible solutions. It helps you look outside the box, go on a tangent, flip the box, bring a new resource to the box, etc.

Solutioning?

Concept Sketches

For the chosen pain point of ‘high volume applications and no callbacks’, we came up with two initial solutions. We sketched out both concepts to be able to visualize what they might look like:

1. Concept-1: Shopping cart/ Kayak.com of jobs – To reduce time with applying for a high volume of jobs, let’s give customers a kayak.com-like platform (that shows flights from different airlines in one place) where they can see jobs from various job boards. Give them the ability to select multiple jobs at a time based on their filter criteria, add in a shopping cart-type experience, and apply with one-click.?

1. Concept-2: Mentor-mentee platform – We had more ideas but they weren't leading to any promising solution. That's when I took the time to sit back and think as a job seeker- what exactly would help me in my next role? That's when I came up with the idea of a mentorship platform. Based on our HMW exercise, to increase the probability of callbacks, it’s necessary that the job seekers have a strong profile for their target job as well as possibly a strong referral. It would also help to give them a community to seek help. This can be possible if we give them a platform to connect with mentors and fellow mentees that might have similar backgrounds/challenges in the past and can help them.

Choosing the Final Solution Concept

As we sketched to visualize, it pushed us to do a risk analysis. Based on the weight assigned, concept-2 was the clear winner:

• Concept-2 addressed all the user pain points of reducing high volume of applications by helping job seekers find targeted jobs with an improved profile and mentor guidance, get through lengthy applications by using smart templates, and finally increase the chances of recruiters following up through acceptance or be able to talk through the interview experience with a mentor.
• We struggled to differentiate concept-1 visually from LinkedIn and other job boards. Concept-2 of the mentor-mentee platform had limited competition and seemed to have scope to provide a better solution in the market.?
• It was technically difficult to implement the first concept because of the shopping cart feature of adding jobs from various different companies and applying to all simultaneously, skipping their traditional application process.
• Concept-1 wasn’t feasible to do within our 10-week timeframe.?
• Getting permissions/contracts from other job boards and companies to display the jobs in our platform seemed to have both technical and legal hurdles.

Based on our survey, 84% of survey respondents said that knowing what skills or experience they are missing that they could upskill will help boost their confidence.

Competitive Analysis

We also did a detailed competitive landscape analysis to see what kind of competition we would have if we went with Solution Concept-2:

Concept-2 seemed feasible and very attractive from a job seeker’s point of view with an opportunity gap in the market as is shown by the map here. Hence, we jumped into prototyping for our chosen concept of mentor mentee platform.

Prototype & Demo

Based on our concept design, we came up with lo-fi wireframe for Concept #2 in Figma. Here’s the step-wise user flow mainly from a mentee’s perspective:

Login → Enter profile information for mentee (slightly different page for mentor) including an initial service ask and a confidence tracker

• Create mentee (or mentor) profile pages, display all information from the intake form

• Once profile is created, explore database of mentor → use drop down to filter mentor list

• Let mentee select a mentor’s profile from the database page and send request → Display message in an inbox similar to the screen below

• Create a ‘Service Dashboard’ for mentee (and mentor) to be able to track all the services by mentor (or mentee). Connect the service dashboard with a confidence tracker page for mentee to be able to measure his confidence after each service completion:

We converted the wireframes into a clickable-prototype and interviewed our users again for validation and incorporated their feedback into our design.?

North Star for MVP release

Value Proposition

To define our North Star metric, we first had to decide what will be the value proposition of our product i.e. the unique benefit that our product offers to our target user and will drive customers to the platform. We decided that the main benefit is the ‘confidence in themselves and their overall job profile’ which will ultimately help them be more targeted in their job hunt approach and increase the probability of callbacks. After listing out 30+ value proposition statements and voting, we defined it as follows:

MVP (Minimum Viable Product) Goal & Build

We finally started working on our MVP. This is when we were assigned our final team member, @Denis, Karuiki, located in Kenya, Africa. We demonstrated the prototype to Denis, explaining the flow of the screens. Based on his skills, technical feasibility, and available time, we finalized our MVP features. We defined our MVP goal of connecting 1 mentee with 1 mentor.

Once our goal was defined, we prioritized the feature list, listed the use cases for the same, detailed down the user stories including the acceptance criteria, and Denis started building our product in Bubble, a no-code platform.

North Star

It took us some back and forth to come up with our North Star metric because our product is new and just #signups wasn’t enough. We decided to have two metrics to be our guiding star.?

• Currently, #signups and #matches – It’s important for us to not just have sign-ups but for mentees to find their mentor match as well.?
• In the future, #matches and %IncreasedConfidence for the candidates would be our ideal North Star. These align with our value proposition of finding a mentor to help build confidence in a job seeker, but it is too early for our product to measure.?

Use Cases?

Since our audience is both mentees and mentors, we had a relatively long list of features to list and prioritize and had to build for both.

For MVP Release

For both Mentors and Mentees

• Sign Up / Login into account - we need the basic functionality to sign up new customers and login existing customers, with the added functionality of them identifying as a mentor or a mentee.
• Enter profile information including media (image, document) - this is basic mandatory profile intake for mentors and mentees for identification purpose, especially of one audience to be able to learn a bit about the other to get interested in reaching out. The background description (to find communities and be able to connect emotionally), LinkedIn URL, timezone (for global time management and expectations), service ask/offering, and initial confidence tracker for a mentee are crucial here to set a baseline.
• Mentees to explore mentor database and vice versa for mentors - once a profile is created by a mentee, the first expectation would be to see who all mentors are in our database who can help. Being able to narrow down and find the right mentor based on a filter criteria is crucial here to avoid mentee feeling overwhelmed. We also wanted to give the mentors a way to explore any mentees and reach out to offer help. This is a place for mentors as well to sharpen their mentorship skills and give back to the community.
• Select profile to send request to connect - In our core functionality, we limited to sending request to connect establish the first connection. The actual connection can happen over LinkedIn which is a mandatory field. The email address isn’t displayed for confidentiality purpose. In the very next phase, we plan to bring the whole communication within the product. This limitation was because of time as well as bubble platform’s ability.
• Dashboard with list of mentors/mentees, services, status of service - If a mentee sends request to multiple mentors for different service asks, we need a place to be able to track all the asks and the status. For the MVP, this is more of a nice-to-have for now.
• Inbox/chat for mentor/mentee communication - this is basic inbox for now to send automated requests to connect for now and will be fully developed in the ‘next’ phase.
• Confidence Tracker- to align back with our value proposition, we need to capture the initial confidence (we do that in the profile intake) and the final confidence change after each service. Eventually, we might have a broken down confidence for each service as confidence in interview versus in resume might differ and add an “overall” confidence tracker.

For Future Consideration:

• T&Cs for inclusion and diversity and non-compete - We want to make sure that no mentor or mentee discriminates based on gender/race/location because we want to have a global offering without judgement. We also want to protect our platform from paid mentorship programs and mentors who might come and steal away our audience. Hence, these terms and conditions are necessary.
• Profile page to support multimedia - We’d ideally like to make sure that mentors and mentees are able to upload Audio/Video (A/V) for introductions & multiple docs. The A/V was part of the core functionality initially for us to differentiate from others. But, Bubble platform’s limitation made us move this to future.
• On-demand time booking option - being able to ask a mentor to help guide right before an interview or any crucial stage is a feature we want to build it to stand-out from competition. No one we know in this product space offers this feature. Timezone is a key feature that will help show which mentors are “available” right now.
• Shared interactive resume/document feedback for mentor & mentee to work async - Async mentorship is again a feature to compete with other similar platforms. We visualize having a shared document where both mentor and mentee can add comments without leaving the platform. This will also help the platform know the service ‘progess’.
• Badging (gamification) for both mentor and mentee to display accomplishments - Gamifying is known to bring back audience. This very well ties back into our value proposition of building confidence. We plan to use badges for mentees like- Received 1st interview call, Accomplished >50% raise in confidence, Active Mentee, Fast Learner Mentee, Mentee of the Quarter, etc. We plan to have similar badges for mentors to nurture their confidence too e.g. Served 5 mentees, Served 10 mentees, Top-rated mentor, Experienced Mentor, Mentor of the Month, etc.
• Mentee/Mentor rating page - beyond a basic vetting, it’s important for us to hear from our mentees how they like a certain mentor very much like doctor reviews. This instills trust in other mentees and also helps us remove spam users from the system both ways.
• Referral system - this is a key piece we want to develop to be able to grow organically based on trust. Any mentor and mentee can invite more people to the platform. This way we ensure that every single person in the platform knows at least one other connection within the platform.

User Stories?

The main goal of our MVP is to build the core features. Hence, based on the above use cases, we listed the following user stories. Time and resource crunch caused us to move the Service Dashboard feature to future:

Getting Feedback from Beta Launch?

We successfully launched our beta sign-up page. We received 13 sign-ups though more from mentees than mentors. Due to resource availability issues and Bubble’s feature constraints, our beta product launch was delayed. With limited time at hand, instead of doing a beta launch and promotion, I suggested that we reach out one-on-one to some of our beta sign-up audience and interview them for feedback. We received feedback from 4 users and interviewed an additional mentor. Some highlights of the feedback are:

• Navigation- 3 out of 4 found it easy to navigate
• Technical difficulties/ bugs- 2 out of 4 didn’t have any technical difficulties. 1 had issues because of an ad-blocker on their page, the other was confused about seeing both applicant and mentor page which was unclear because we couldn’t reproduce the issue.
• Desired features- One user wanted to be able to sign up as both mentee and mentor which is part of our product roadmap and the other would like mentor training resources which is something we ended up adding to our future map to attract budding mentors. The user we interviewed suggested adding a way for mentors to receive emails/notifications when their mentored job seeker gets an interview call and/or eventually bags a job – “Seeing the mentees succeed is the biggest achievement”. The user further suggested having a community of mentors and mentees which is part of our future roadmap.
• Overall experience- We received comments like- “The platform looks simple and straightforward.”, “90% satisfied”, “Overall a great product”.
• Does the product seem to accomplish the problem space- 4 out of 4 said “most definitely”. One also mentioned that it has potential for not just mid-career professionals but any job seeker.

Key Outcomes?

Our MVP goal, in connection to our North Star and what we achieved from our beta launch was:

When setting our North Star metric, we missed to consider the fact that once users signed up from the beta sign up page, they will need to create their profiles later. Those who signed up for early access, when reached out again during the beta launch, didn’t necessarily login and complete their profiles. Hence, we added “completed profiles” as an additional metric. Eventually, we saw all completed profiles. Further, we created an inbox for mentor and mentees to connect. But, missed to add a way to track the connections. Hence, connections have happened but we don’t know how many. Overall, we did better than our initial MVP goal.

Product Roadmap?

The product roadmap strategy was designed and prioritized based on the impact on both user needs (mentor and mentee), competition, market trends, and available resources:

• The initial focus is to build the core functionality,
• Then focus on expanding the functionality to ensure that both users stay within the product,
• Finally, enhance the solution to retain our existing customers while expanding to new ones.

We also discussed about some disruptive technologies with AI dominating the market these days. The scope of future expansion is endless.

My Individual Learnings So Far

I have learned much more in a short time span of 10 weeks than what I can list here. Here are some key learnings from the program that I will always remember:

1. Improv – Being flexible, dealing with uncertainties with a positive attitude, and pivoting as needed are what makes a successful product/UX manager. There will be many situations which won’t go as you planned. Improv is a key characteristic that a product manager can develop.
2. Yes, and.. – Open-mindedness and acceptance are key to a successful collaboration across differing ideas. Replace the ‘but, if..’ with ‘Yes, and..’ to build further. Please refer to my LinkedIn post here for my detailed thoughts on this.?
3. Ask 5 Whys – as a Product Manager, whenever you are stuck, ask “why” 5 times to get to the root of why you should be doing a certain thing. If you don’t, you need to reiterate and reconnect.
4. Ask the right questions – we learned and practiced this a lot as part of the user interviews that it’s crucial to ask ‘neutral emotion’ questions. Leading the question with a negative or positive emotion will result in skewed results.
5. Be your team’s biggest cheerleader – recognizing the different skill sets that each member can bring to the table, having empathy towards life that happens for everyone, celebrating the small and big achievements while lifting and supporting your team is crucial for long-term success of you as an individual as well as for your team.
6. Follow the Customer’s emotions, success will follow – you might have the best solution in mind but if it doesn’t impact the user the right way, it will fail. Iterate as much as you can keeping the customer pain points in mind.

Conclusion

Last 10 weeks' journey was nothing less than a roller coaster. Overall, I’ve learned a plethora of product management/UX as well as soft skills that I will keep with me for my entire career. I am absolutely grateful to Priyanka Sanghvi for introducing me to PMDojo, to Bosky Mukherjee for creating this amazing platform for the aspiring product managers to come and get both group and individual guidance along with hands-on experience, Nidhi G. one of the PMDojo mentors who walked us through hands-on exercises & case study on Product Design and without whom my whole experience wouldn’t have been complete, and our amazing mentor, Nicole J Castillo for her everlasting support! Last but not the least, a big thanks to my wonderful team members - Andrew Joe , Favour O. , Arnav Bindra , and Denis Kariuki for being on this roller coaster with me and giving me an unforgettable experience!?

Contact

If you enjoyed reading about my ‘Path to Mastering the Product Management/UX’ journey, have questions about this course, or my career path, or if there is any way I can help you, please feel free to connect on LinkedIn -? https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/richagarg11/???

Appendix

Tools Used:

• Figma - wireframes and prototype
• Miro - brainstorming at every stage
• Google Forms - surveys
• Canva - presentation
• Slack - team & cohort communication & async collaboration
• Bubble.io?- product no-code platform