Create a Mobile Bill Format for Product Management Seamlessly

Mobile bill format for Product Management

which would add cost complexity add to the weight of the device and make it generally harder for manufacturers to build these kind of devices what is being built today is these experiences are being enabled by bluetooth pairing your headset to your phone and then it's essentially routing everything through your phone and it's illness essentially Alexa enabling your headset so you can in your headset say hey play this music or stop playing that song without having to do any of the heavy lifting and lifting that would have normally come by again if you didn't do it through the phone so this is going to become more and more common with wearables generally speaking whether those are smart devices later to healthcare clothing and other things so that's something to think about as you're thinking about depending on what domain or context you're in how you want to leverage that and how you can use that design pattern to enable experiences at a lower cost and then generally speaking assistants are getting faster and smarter on devices and that's going to continue happening and you want to think about how you can use that in your context and it may be either using the assistant or maybe using voice itself as a core capability of the day off of whatever product you're building and then 5g data is getting faster and hopefully cheaper with lower latency higher bandwidth and there's a couple of other trends but you know at a high level these are some of the things you want to be thinking about as you're thinking ahead of what you want to build and where you want to go not just trying to build for something for today this is an approach where people want to build everything in react native and say hey let's build everything in react native and you want to step back and make sure that that's the right strategy for you right you want to think about why you're building things in react native and depending on what your goals are you want to prioritize what you want to build and react native in our case our reasons for doing react native was some amount of code reuse which essentially meant faster time-to-market and better more features the second was being able to do over-the-air updates for features and bug fixes with apps you have to release it to the App Store there's a delay and then people slowly adopt and there is you know that takes time when there is in the case of a bug when there is a bug that is crashing the app or something you know that has a high impact to customer experience being able to react quickly is important our ability to do these over-the-air updates not just for bugs but also even for features and get features quickly to customers was important to us that was the second reason the third is it depends on some of it is your your own context in this case I'm talking about your organizational context the way we are structured is the app is a completely separate team completely independent from the rest of the team that builds the browser based experiences and those are completely separate teams and we wanted to create an environment where we didn't have two sets of people that are working on the same thing and especially for the app we did not want the app product managers doing future priority like I said or building same things that other teams have experimented and learned and have built and then we're just building that we wanted to focus the time attention investment on building experiences that are truly mobile you know whether it's AR or really thinking deeply about customer behavior as it comes to mobile and how we can leverage hardware and that's where we wanted to invest by building things in react NATO we allow these other teams to then build these components that get integrated into apps so that was the third reason for us to do that depending on your context and as we're thinking about that we're thinking maybe we don't want the whole app to be react native it's really prioritizing which ones of those experiences we want to start handing over to the web team things like pricing we don't want we do not want to replicate all the domain knowledge and the expertise that goes around understanding how pricing works and all the backend integration and we wanted there to be a single team we prioritize that but you have to make a deliberate choice and there has to be a prioritization around what you want to be react native in what order certainly we didn't want it to be everything is react native whether or not it made sense because we're not letting somebody else build everything react native you're speaking specific components it really depends on your case and then in some cases we want faster performance in some cases we do want hardware access so it's not always in all or nothing decisions usually decisions are more complex than that and if it is a simple decision you probably want to stop and pause and think about whether you're thinking about all the different things that you would want to think about in the constraints not just for the now but kind of looking further out you know two three four years react native was something built by is a set of libraries javascript libraries built by Facebook that allows developers to use javascript to write code and create components that can be reused across platforms in a mobile context that's kind of a quick and short summary I can go more detail from an engineering perspective if you want but essentially these are JavaScript libraries that allow you to build mobile experiences and then reuse them across different platforms it does two things one is if you have to build for mobile you have to relearn objective-c or Swift for iOS and you know for Android you want to you know Java and JavaScript and other stuff as a other languages you could also do is then compiles it differently javascript allows you to write everything in JavaScript and you don't have to worry about learning Objective C and all of that you still have to do some native because for hardware access but again it allows you to do stuff in JavaScript where which more developers are familiar with and then the second part of that is really again as you do that it allows for reuse between platforms so normally when you're thinking about what do you want to build you start with customer problems in this case it didn't start with that in this case we first started with let's invest in ER you know we're a mobile team we're thinking about how can we really leverage what our truly mobile unique experiences so we said AR is cool let's build something in ER that's where we started so not ideal but the next step we took was and we said let's not build AR for the sake of AR let's not build cool shiny things that people won't use or that don't solve real problems it has to solve a real problem and then we went around starting to look for what are problems that a Arkansas so we didn't start with what our problems what our problems customers have and then try to think about how we can solve it we started with what are some real customer problems that a Arkansas and as we started investigating this TV sizing was something that emerged we get a huge huge huge number I can't reveal the numbers but a huge number many many many millions of dollars what the returns of TV's because they're the wrong size many people don't realize that they could buy a bigger TV in you again you're buying a TV after five years in five years technologies have improved bezels have gotten smaller and you could have gotten a bigger TV or you know you didn't realize the TV wouldn't fit there you thought a bigger TV would fit in there so that emerged as a problem for customers and we saw that in returns data and we said yeah you know a Arkansas that you can place physical TV see if it fits toggled through the different sizes and see what you want and our hypothesis was by doing that it will do two things one is it will reduce returned rates and potentially improve conversion rate we didn't expect conversion rate to improve that much more we expected that if somebody is buying a TV or you know people are not going to decide to buy a TV because hey look how cool that I are thing look they're gonna buy a TV because they're gonna buy a TV and we ran this in an a/b test to our surprise we actually saw a significant lift in conversion rate from people who engaged with the AR experience and then counter intuitively we felt that our hypothesis was when people do purchase TVs and when we have the AR experience people will purchase bigger TVs you know they're like oh I can buy a bigger TV I didn't realize I could do that because I know it fits and we figured that the average selling price of the TVs we sell will increase for people again who engaged with that experience interestingly we didn't see that we saw that ASB actually reduced slightly but the average order value went up which basically means people were purchasing additional things with their TVs but the asp of the TV didn't go up so yeah overall it was overall it's a huge success but there was some counterintuitive things that we saw that is something we are still pulling data for getting getting that data is a little bit more complicated and we're still pulling that our hypothesis is it has impacted that but we haven't confirmed that yet I would say a mature product I don't want to say a good product manager but if you're working for a technology company right if you are a software product manager you want to have enough of an understanding to make trade-offs limit Li the product manager is the one who's making trade-offs if you think about you know I'm gonna draw something and there's a common thing you guys have probably already seen this customer experience technology and business and PM is right here right you're making trade-offs between customer experience technology and business and building things for the long-term which again make you want to make sure you know thinking about technology you know tech debt versus really building stuff for the long term same thing with the business are you thinking transactional versus building building a long-term business and relationships with customers and you're making trade-offs daily and you want to be able to have enough understanding of the business and the business priorities and kind of the long-term vision for you to be able to make good decisions same thing with technology you need to be able to have enough of an understanding when these conversations are happening because what will happen is and this has happened for us as well is you go down a path and you've spent a year and a half investing in something and the ROI is in there and you could have spent all of that time and money building so many other things so you are you're delegating that thinking to somebody else would end up costing you that doesn't mean that you have to make all the decisions and you have to know everything in to end you should definitely rely on your engineering partners to have that context but you want to challenge some of the assumptions you want to challenge the thinking you want a key part off the product manager is critical thinking right that's the key skill it's not about us building experience UX comes up does some hypothesis testing there's some usability studies and say this is a problem customers have here as a design we'll build that and you go build it which is really product managing it project managing it it's really asking those critical questions it's like is this really the right thing what are the trade-offs what are the risks are you know they're trade-offs worth the risk are we really thinking long term or is is gonna be good for now it's it's that critical thinking and often you'll find that people don't go as deep as you know you ideally would want them to and as a product manager you're pushing the thinking a little bit so you want to be there asking those questions and for you to ask the right questions you want to have enough of a context that's that's the first point the second is to the extent that you're working with engineers to build your products for you to be able to build credibility and trust with them you need to be able to speak their language you know and do it in a way that you know earns their you know yarn their respect and trust and credibility and all of those and you're making decisions beyond this technology you're making decisions on whether or not to pay down tech debt or you know whether or not to do things certain way and everything has a trade-off you're either taking risks or deferring tech debt and you want to be able to make those decisions and if you don't have the context you'll either make bad decisions or you delegate those decisions both of those are not a good thing for that was a long answer yes the trends yeah I would I would caution so yes look at customer I mean one quick caution before I kind of dive into it it's important to look at competitors for sure and you should look at them I would caution about paying too much attention to competitors you might end up building the wrong thing you want to spend most of your time looking at customers and in an example as I owned Alexa assistant experience in Mobile I had a feature gap of about three hundred and eighty-seven features between what my assistant could do versus what my competitors were able to do and I could say you know what my assistant needs to be the best or my experience and mobile needs to be better as good as competitors and I need to here's my feature list for my product team here are the 387 we need to close that feature parity gap we need to be better than Google and you need to be better than and you can define it that way but the reality is if you kind of look below the surface nobody's really using those 387 features maybe not the 387 but a large number of those features nobody's really using that in yeah you don't want to be building features that are not really adding value to customer instead think about what are the things you could build that good add value so yes I would say definitely look at competitors in terms of resources and I'll answer that question in two ways one is from the competitor context right which is really there our industry you know reports available be marred whatever and I forget their name BMR group just look up BMR they have some research for e-commerce and they do benchmarking studies they'll do an audit for your product for writing the charts some amount I think maybe 10 or a few thousand dollars they'll come in and do an audit and do a benchmark of your product so there are there are companies who do that the second is I'd say just use the competitors product become a customer of the competitor's product what you really want to think about is excuse me not just what competitors have built but are they solving real problems and are they working so an example of that would be let's say if you were looking at Best Buy and say oh I'm gonna copy what Best Buy has done in benchmarking against them and say oh they have this cool AR feature but you may not know that that feature is maybe not working in our case it is but you may say it's not working if you build something that kind of is working or maybe our motives for doing that were different from what you're trying to do and that's the other thing your success metrics for building something might be different from your competitor success metrics and by copying them you might be getting a different outcome your goals might be engagement or customer lifetime value and competitors success metric might be revenue or something else so be careful about but industry reports start using the product you know I would say do a benchmarking exercise of your own where you go deep into each of the pick your competitors and use their product and naturally in a structured way pick different experiences and then go benchmark them place orders cancel auditors whatever you need to do it can get pretty involved you know in benchmarking is the easy part which tells you what the differences are but then deciding which ones you care about and which ones you're gonna ignore is the harder part which is ideally like I said you want to focus on the customer and their problems and what the competitors are have done you should look at that as ideas for how they're solving a problem versus a cool tech but that being said sometimes things might surprise you you know you might do experiment with something that might just surprise you and work in different ways than you expected you you want to have a really good perspective of who your customer is and within that which is the customer segment you're prioritizing that for you could be building everything for all customers in which case you'll kind of go down a rat hole but in terms of structuring that and prioritizing of the universe of cosmetics for Best Buy my universal customers is I want everyone who's shopping online for consumer electronics right but I can structure that and say okay I could do everything for everyone but where do I prioritize where do I start is it who is that customer so knowing who that customer group is understanding their problems understanding their needs understanding their behaviors and then building experiences to solve for those problems which is where the ideation phase comes from where you should look for how others have done it and how others are solving the same problems and then how would you measure success and then you want to definitely think about how you would invent on behalf of the customer when you're talking to the customer be careful about trying to you're trying to uncover their problem they'll they will give you suggestions like why can't you just do there's like give me this like if you do this I will you know use this will become more valuable but you want to get to the kernel of the problem like why are you asking for that feature what is the problem you're trying to solve because you might come up with a better way to solve it and you can say hey this is a fix for the underlying problem how about I didn't so in example Delta right somebody might say hey reduce that friction in me having to check in verses Delta I would say okay why do you why do you want why are you asking for that feature like I have to make five clicks and go here enter the flight number then it pulls it up and then I have to scroll down and do the check-in and said make it simple and quick and easy remember me whatever it instead also say okay you want to reduce friction how about you don't even have to do that you might find better ways so you want to invent on behalf of the customer make sure when you ask customers you're focusing on the problem not what they're asking you for I think when it comes to prioritize ation you want to make sure you're solving the biggest problems for the most number of your customers right there could be instances where you have small number of customers who are very vocal and have a really big problem and there might be you know 0.1% of your customer versus there's a bigger problem that affects 10% of your customer and you want to you know prioritize around that but really trying to understand trying to look at so definitely look at the caller tative data look at quantitative data if you can to the extent that these are existing customers and you have data about how they're engaging with your app and to a certain extent they're voting with their wallets if you can look at some of that data and uncover more information about that that's the second data source third is of course you can do additional usability studies and essentially get the multiple inputs that create that understanding of customer problem and then solve for that being one dimension solve for the biggest problems for the most number of your customers ultimately you want to look at you know customer problems how many customer does does this affect how big a problem is this is there something that is preventing is it just it slightly extra friction which is annoying versus something that is really you know taking away value from what they could have been doing what is the second thing is cost what is the cost of fixing that and you want a so for example you want to divide the impact by the cost because per unit of cost and by cos it could be dev time or whatever you choose right per unit of cost you want to maximize the value you create for your customer so you know what is the value you're creating but you know by solving that problem divided by cost you want to there's multiple dimensions there's not two or three there probably a dozen different things you could look at how many of them there are some problems that you saw or features you build and maybe them a problem but that could have a flywheel effect on your whole product or your ecosystem right so what are some of those things that create that that make your product significantly better because it has some kind of network effect or a flywheel effect so there's multiple dimensions simple answer is yeah I mean you would consider that but that wouldn't be the sole criteria saying okay these guys are the loudest and most vocal customers I'm just gonna you know and that goes towards senior executives coming to you as well like CEO saying hey I saw something in the like can you fix that right you want to prioritize that as well and you can say yeah maybe I have other problems and here's what I'm working on and we'll come to that when we come to that in some cases you'll have to do that there is could be an impact to reputation there is an impact to so those two types of impact right and you want to be careful when you say the word impact one is what is the impact of the customer and their experience and how much value they're getting out of your product the second is what is the impact to you as a business and you don't want to conflate the two sometimes they are the same but you want to be very careful about conflating the two and you want to bias towards the impact to a customer because you solve customers problem that over the long term will lead to the right things to your business often they can be the same thing customer not being able to complete do a checkout because of some friction in your thing or you don't accept a payment method let's say you don't accept then you applecart or whatever or don't have Apple wallet and that's a pain point so you're solving for a customer problem but that'll have an impact to the business as well but again you do want to be careful and not conflate the two but yeah and and you're right yeah in some cases it could have an impact to your reputation in some cases it could have an impact to the stickiness off your customer or loyalty and lifetime value and when you are thinking about impact you want to think about it broadly and make sure you account for that yep does legal risk as legal in ple all kinds of stuff right this reputation brand hey I would say amateur product I don't want to say a good product manager but if you're working for a technology company right if you are a software product manager you want to have enough of an understanding to make trade-offs ultimately the product manager is the one who's making trade-offs if you think about you're making trade-offs between customer experience technology and business and building things for the long term which again make you want to make sure you know thinking about technology you know tech debt versus really building stuff for the long term same thing with the business are you thinking transactional versus building building a long-term business and relationships with customers and you're making trade-offs daily and you want to be able to have enough understanding of the business and the business priorities and kind of the long term vision for you to be able to make good decisions same thing with technology you need to be able to have enough of an understanding when these conversations are happening because what will happen is and this has happened for us as well is you go down a path and you spend a year and half investing in something in the ROI isn't there and you could have spent all of that time and money building so many other things so you are you're delegating that thinking to somebody else would end up costing you that doesn't mean that you have to make all the decisions and you have to know everything in to end you should definitely rely on your engineering partners to have that context but you want to challenge some of the assumptions you want to challenge the thinking you want a key part off the product manager is critical thinking right that's the key skill it's not about let's build an experienced UX comes up does some hypothesis testing does some usability studies and say this is a problem customers have here as a design we'll build that and you go build it which is really product managing it project managing it it's really asking those critical questions it's like is this really the right thing what are the trade-offs what other risks are you know they're trade-offs worth the risk are we really thinking long-term or is this gonna be good for now it's it's that critical thinking and often you'll find that people don't go as deep as you know you ideally would want them to and as a product manager you're pushing the thinking a little bit so you want to be they're asking those questions and for you to ask the right questions you want to have enough of a context that's that's the first point the second is to the extent that you're working with engineers to build your products for you to be able to build credibility and trust with them you need to be able to speak their language you know and do it in a way that you know earns their you know your in their respect and trust and credibility and all those and you're making decisions beyond this technology you're making decisions on whether or not to pay down tech debt or you know whether or not to do things certain way and everything has a trade-off you're either taking risk or deferring tech debt and you want to be able to make those decisions and if you don't have the context you'll either make bad decisions or you delegate those decisions and both of those are not a good thing for a p.m. it's important to look at competitors for sure and you should look at them I would caution about paying too much attention to competitors you might end up building the wrong thing you want to spend most of your time looking at customers and in an example as I owned Alexa assistant experience in Mobile I had a feature gap of about 387 features between what my assistant could do versus what my competitors were able to do and I could say you know what my assistant needs to be the best for my experience and mobile needs to be better and as good as competitors and I need to here's my feature list for my product team here are the 387 we need to close that feature parity gap we need to be better than Google and you need to be better than and you can define it that way but the reality is if you kind of look below the surface nobody's really using those 387 features maybe not the 387 but a large number of those features nobody's really using that and yeah you don't want to be building features that are not really adding value to customer instead think about what are the things you could build that could add value so yes I would say definitely look at competitors in terms of resources and I'll answer that question in two ways one is from the competitor context right which is really there our industry you know reports available be marred whatever and I forget their name BMR group just look up BMR they have some research for e-commerce and they do benchmarking studies they'll do an audit for your product for I think the charge some amount I think maybe 10 or a few thousand dollars they'll come in and do an audit and do a benchmark of your product so there are there are companies who do that the second is I say just use the competitor's product become a customer of the competitor's product what you really want to think about is excuse me not just what competitors have built but are they solving real problems and are they working so an example of that would be let's say if you were looking at Best Buy and say oh I'm gonna copy what Best Buy has done in benchmarking against them and say oh they have this cool AR feature but you may not know that that feature is maybe not working in our case it is but you may say it's not working if you build something that kind of is working or maybe our motives for doing that were different from what you're trying to do and that's the other thing your success metrics for building something might be different from your competitors success metrics and by copying them you might be getting a different outcome your goals might be engagement or customer lifetime value and the competitors success metric might be revenue or something else so we careful about copying but industry reports start using the product you know I would say do a benchmarking exercise of your own where you go deep into each of the pick your competitors and use their product and actually in a structured way pick different experiences and then go benchmark them place orders cancel otters whatever you need to do it can get pretty involved you know in benchmarking is the easy part which tells you what the differences are but then deciding which ones you care about and which ones you're gonna ignore is the harder part which is ideally like I said you want to focus on the customer and their problems and what the competitors are have done you should look at that as ideas for how they're solving a problem versus a cool tech but that being said sometimes things might surprise you you know you might do experiment with something that might just surprise you and work in different ways than you expected you you want to have a really good perspective of who your customer is and within that which is the customer segment you're prioritizing that for you could be building everything for all customers in which case you'll kind of go down a rat hole but in terms of structuring that and prioritizing of the universe of cosmetics for Best Buy my universe of customers is I want everyone who's shopping online for consumer electronics right but I can structure that and say okay I could do everything for everyone but where do I prioritize where do I start is it who is that customer so knowing who that customer group is understanding their problems and then building experiences to solve for those problems which is where the ideation phase comes from where you should look for how others have done it and how others are solving the same problems and then how would you measure success and then you want to definitely think about how you would invent on behalf of the customer when you're talking to the customer be careful about trying to you're trying to uncover their problem they'll they will give you suggestions like why can't you just do this like give me this if you do this I will you know use this will become more valuable but you want to get to the kernel of the problem like why are you asking for that feature what is the problem you're trying to solve because you might come up with a better way to solve it and you can say hey this is a fix for the underlying problem how about I didn't so in example Delta right somebody might say hey reduce that friction in me having to check in verses Delta would say okay why do you why do you want why are you asking for that feature like I have to make five clicks and go here enter the flight number then it pulls it up and then I have to scroll down and do the check-in and said make it simple and quick and easy remember me whatever a instead also say okay you want to reduce friction how about you don't even have to do that you might find better ways so you want to invent on behalf of the customer make sure when you ask customers you're focusing on the problem not what they're asking you for