Product Management 101- Part 1

Over time as my career has taken a trajectory, I have been discovering this field called product management more. However, most of us do not land on a new off the bat product that we evangelize. Most of us will work on a product that is either Internal, B2B SaaS or B2C, is already established and running somewhere, and we would be the next product owner/manager in line. With this comes the scenario of what do we do first.

I believe what is necessary before stumbling on the product roadmap and all the potential gaps we might see with the product is to firstly take stock of what is already happening in your product space. Are all users using all the features in your space. Of course not! How do we get that number to go up?

The number of a product's users can be easily found by spending a few minutes running basic queries. The best way to do this would be to plot out all your features on two axis and then plot out how many people use those features and how frequently. Note: Features login, registration, forgot password, user profile, etc. should not be a part of this plot. This is a layout for the main features of your product.

Your graph might end up looking something like this.

A typical usage graph might look something as shown above. Each dot here might represent a particular feature. Our goal is to have as many features move from the left hand side to preferably the top right quarter of the chart. The core value of your product would be in the top right hand section while the remaining feature are what they come to get in the middle. Any features on the top left provide us either scope of improvement or sunset.

However, if your product's features look like this the one above, then it shows potential area for disruption since all your users seem to be using the product for it's one feature alone. This could lead to potential disruption of your product if anyone is able to create that one feature in a better fashion say lower cost, increased benefit or offering or improved user experience.

For any feature that has a limited adoption, your have a few options

1. Kill it (if your feature is just not cutting it, it is alright to call it quits. e.g. hangout)
2. Intentional improvisation: Make it better for your core users.
3. Increase adoption: get more users to use your application
4. Increase frequency of usage: Get users to use the application more often

The most simple way to improve a product is to add new features. However, before this is done, it is important to get the existing features working right or to increase their adoption or frequency of usage so that new features can also see the cross benefit from it. If your core offerings aren't great, adding new features might create more debt in the long run.

Intentional Improvisation

This is a step where you improve the core highly used features of your product. e.g. you could improve the design of your main feature, make them easier to user or provide add on enhancements. However, the risk with this method is also that this is a very high risk high return method. If your idea works, and the current (significantly high portion of your user base) like the feature, you would see higher CSAT. However, if they do not like it, there is high risk of losing user traction on the feature.

Increase adoption

Adoption increased aims to increase usage of features that currently witness low usage. Typically, it would be good to understand why the feature sees lesser utilization e.g. if your reporting feature does not get enough utilization, then it is important to ask the 5 why's.

Increase frequency of usage

If some of your product's features do not get utilized enough and are accessed only maybe a few times a week, you could make improvements to the features to increase the frequency of their usage. These improvements could be made in one of the four below areas:

1. You could improve the external triggers associated with the usage of the feature e.g. an email on the latest pins, an email regarding retweets added, etc.
2. Simplify the touch points with the feature: e.g. make the scrolling easier, suggest similar pictures, etc.
3. Improve the reward that the user gets from the feature e.g. ability to see all their friends and their posts.
4. Ensure some CTAs are acted upon by the user before he leaves based on which a new trigger can be initiated. E.g. user retweets something, or pins an image.

Continuous Improvements

At some point, you cannot add any additional enhancements to existing features. You would need to add new features and ship their continuously. This is especially true for smaller companies where innovation and incremental shipments need to happen constantly. With larger organizations and B2B products, these launches need to be more scheduled and accompanies with literature or appropriate documentation to improve ease of adoption. However, with B2C and early adoption to growth companies, new features and changes need to be introduced continuously. However, this should happen in a structured manner so that there is significant improvement seen with any feature at a time.

In next article, we will go over introduction of new feature.