Overview: Advanced Product Management: Vision, Strategy & Metrics course on Udemy
I have been actively reading about Product Management from the last 6 months. An Advanced Product Management course seemed the right step forward. My expectation out of this course was to get the working knowledge of topics like cohort analysis, product metrics, developing business strategies for a product but this course falls short on providing that. It’s like a quick bus tour which shows you all the buildings inside a city but you don’t get to know the city’s history.
Hence, I decided to write a small summary of this course and added a few lessons which I learned from Y combinator videos:
1. Vision & Strategy:
Vision provides direction for future developments in the company.
As a product manager, you will define the future vision of the product, the vision creation should involve all the stakeholders because once the whole team has agreed on the parameters they will be more focused and aligned towards achieving it.
Example:
Facebook global vision is:
- In the near future, all people on earth are connected to the internet.
- AI affects everyone.
- AR/VR is in common.
Hence, Facebook’s company vision is to connect all humans to the internet by 2026. For which Facebook made strategies by developing technologies like internet.org which provide basic internet to developing countries where there is no internet.
Regarding completing their AR/VR vision, Facebook acquired Oculus in 2014 for $ 2 billion dollars.
When employees believe in something bigger than them (company’s vision), they work together to make it happen.
Since vision can sometimes too long term for each individual to fully grasp it. Hence, some companies like (Adobe, Amazon, Google, etc) rely on something more short-term and measurable:
OKR — Objective & Key results:
OKRs comprise an objective — a clearly defined goal — and one or more key results — specific measures used to track the achievement of that goal.
The easiest way to understand this is with an example:
Let's say Google’s Business Strategy is to increase its revenue by 20% in 2020.
A rough OKR’s for Google can be like:
Q1-Q2:
- Increase ARPU(Annual revenue per user) by 20%.
- Increase user retention by 10%.
Q3-Q4:
- Increase user acquisition onto new products by 20%.
- Launch the self-driving car program and outsource it to 5 car manufactures.
- Partner with Spacex and provide cheap internet for everyone for at least 1 billion people.
2. Product Metrics:
Q. Why do we need Product Metrics?
Sol: Because in order for the company to grow we need to know where we currently stand.
Let’s explain product metrics with an example of Amazon e-commerce business and what metrics they might use to track its growth:
- Conversion Rate: Of the total users coming on Amazon how many buy something from it. If this number is low, the company can understand people are not finding what they were looking for or maybe the price was high.
- Daily Average Users(DAU): To see how many users come on their website each day. If there is a sudden downfall, the company can know there was some problem with our website or the coronavirus outbreak is going on.
Yes, 1.6+ Billion people use Facebook every day.
- Average Cart Value(AOV): The average amount spent by the user whenever they buy something on Amazon.
- Bounce Rate: How many just open the Amazon website and go to another website without clicking anything. This helps the company understand whether the homepage is not relevant enough for the customer to stay.
Since there can be more 50 metrics to track and most people tend to get distracted with them, expert advice by Suhail Doshi, CEO of Mixpanel(a data analytics firm) suggests following 1 north start metrics and 3–5 metrics for supporting it.
How to find those 3–5 metrics?
Here, a quick 3 step process:
- Is your website easy to understand?
- The customer might not understand what you’re offering and go back. Hence, track the bounce rate of an individual page, find aberrations in data and correct them.
- Perform A/B testing on the signup page to see whether copywriting is working.
2. Is your website easy to get started?
- Speed of doing the valuable thing.
Example: If you have 15 steps process for the user to complete some activity, there is a higher chance user might quit.
- Measure a funnel of your user’s initial experience. How’s the drop off rate in between conversion steps.
3. Are people coming back?
According to Suhail, a lot of startup founder do this mistake of not tracking user retention daily/weekly basis, just creating a product doesn’t mean the end of the software development lifecycle.
- Measure people who use your product every day (DAU instead of MAU).
- B2B revenue churn — Monthly lost $ in a given month.
- New users who come back 1 week to 30 days to do a valuable action.
Continuous iteration over the user experience is needed. For which you need to take feedback from users.
Suhail’s company Mixpanel has 100+ million dollars of ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) and he says that when there were less than 50 customers he used to talk to every single one of them and wrote everything down. Same story with Indian Hyperlocal service Dunzo who had a Whatsapp group for its customers in its early stages and now has raised over $81 million.
Feedback is the key to growth and retention.
Thank you for reading.
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