Enhance Your Product Management with Our Mobile Shop Bill Format for Product Management

Mobile shop bill format for Product Management

previous to that I was I was working with that large multinational firms primarily as a consultant as a product manager around in mobile apps and so that's why I'm here to kind of talk to you about that and my experiences with that just before we kind of dive in keep this as interactive as you can you know there's no point in me coming and just kind of sharing my thoughts so you know feel free to engage any comments anything on your mind just shout out your name and and put the question across and see where it goes and so that's my expectation for this session is to try and hopefully you guys will leave with a little more knowing a little more about mobile apps then you came in here with and III for sure and hoping to get more out of your experiences and and take that back with me tonight so so yeah so so any questions at this point anything that's there on anybody's mind before we get started okay go ahead I have a bunch of them I mean lots of folks are doing some great great work in that like I liked slack Trello those guys primarily for their UI because they're like lots of quite a few folks who raise their hands for design I think everything is in the in the design of the app if the design of the app is simple is easy to transact that kind of salts for many things so yeah I like Trello I like slack you know there's a there's an app come show you guys know it since many of you might stay in New York City there's an app called Street easy which is an excellent app in terms of again design and user interface and UX and so on so so let's just kind of this is the broad agenda the no hard and fast rules but so I'm going to talk to you a little bit about creating and implementing new mobile apps so starting an app from scratch and taking it out to market and then I'm going to talk about how do you scale an app it's a very complicated thing you've heard a lot of you know famous entrepreneurs and and some other folks talk about it but scaling an app is a very challenging and a cumbersome exercise but there are techniques and there are there there are areas that you can work on in order to kind of facilitate scaling and then I'm going to talk about pillars which are important and critical revenue retention and user engagement which are the most critical things in as far as mobile apps are concerned and then talk a little bit we won't go into too much of detail here in terms of an analysis and tracking which again is is paramount to you know any of this like if you want to scale a app you want to put out a new app you got to have a good fundamental layer and so we need to touch up on what analysis and tracking means and then we leave some time for Q&A I I just want to reiterate that don't wait for the last I think the last 15 minutes is going to be Q&A but feel free to shoot out any questions at any point of time so that we don't wait till the very end for for people's questions so so before we just get started I just want to get a anybody who work in the mobile app industry or through them okay three any so can anybody tell me what a mobile app is before we kind of get started does anybody have a take on it and in a simplified version of what a mobile app is anyone okay so so I think the the way the way mobile app is is thought of is it's a it's a it's a computer it's a program or it's a software that you can put and display on on a small computing device so it could be a smartphone a tablet and so on but the idea is to kind of create an application or software that can be placed on it so that's broadly the definition of a mobile app now these are my six kind of critical areas that you look at when you try and put out a new app so let's say that you guys after this event you want to go home and you know think of a idea you think that it's a it's a product or service that you can you can go after then these are some things that you want to strongly consider now before before we just kind of get to this the other important thing that you need to think of is when you think of a product or service you think of whether it would be useful to somebody meaning it solves for some you know aspect of their life that that is going to make it useful for them is it entertaining if it's not useful or entertaining then it's there's only a third bucket which is useless so you want to you want to make sure that you are in that either that useful bucket or you're on the entertaining bucket and then there are I'm not going into the details of you know you need to you need to do a hypothesis you need to test it out you need to know what your target audience is you know all that kind of stuff but in principle for any product or service you try and categorize it into this bucket that's where you begin now what is the bare minimum so bare minimum means sorry yeah bare minimum means you got to be on menu think of putting a mobile app first you've got to think of what platform you want to be on and you've got to be on Android and iOS and that everybody understands that but the reason why I say it is that it's the bulk of the universe 85% of folks are on Android 15 percent of the world world's market share is on iOS so you want to make sure that an iOS is a little more challenging operationally to kind of put out a mobile app versus Android so maybe the first platform you want to be on is Android and you got to think along those lines then you got to make sure that their device ubiquitous so which means that you got to make sure that they're honest on a smart phone you got to make sure that they're potentially on a tablet if you're if you're thinking of desktop apps do they fit in these things need to be studied and you know kind of evaluate it then it should be technology pervasive when I say technology pervasive it's no good if it works on one one technology and not on the other it should work on Wi-Fi if somebody comes out with a new technology tomorrow you should be able to expand to that you should obviously work on cellular you know all these things have become prerequisites today so if you don't if you're not on one platform and not on if you're not on one technology and not on the other technology then it's no good it's not going to help your cause you're going to have a lot of customer friction Desmond's is going to be very difficult to tackle so the conceptual or the inception stage you've got to think through these these ideas you can't over emphasize this on on design enough like I mentioned somebody asked me what are the apps that you like I mean I meant some of the apps there are like n number of apps but I think the simplicity is the key lots of companies on in the pitfall of trying to put too much into an app so you actually lose out and what the cold core value prop is so nobody knows what the app is doing does it do does it solve for X does it solve for y does it solve for Z it does everything so now the question becomes you have to identify what is your core feature and try to deliver that to the user in a very simple easy and you know intuitive way and so that's that's the concept of design there's another big thing which is kind of which is a pattern in the industry today which is online and offline when I say online it means that you know like obviously all the apps are designed that when you are connected to a particular technology they are on Wi-Fi it allows you to transact do certain services you know you know the products is operational but when you are not on them that's the question so when you are in an offline mode can you interact with the user and some of the apps like or Trello or a Google Docs arguably because those those products and services are catered to you working with it when you are in an offline mode but you have to strive every application has opportunities and avenues to work offline the most important thing is when you work offline you're still engaging the user so it doesn't mean that he has to be connected in order to use your app but all this needs to be thought through when you conceptualize an app immediate gratification immediate gratification is is something which is so important right now in today's context everybody looks and nobody does this better than gaming gaming companies so I'm sure you you guys are a young crowd so you probably do a lot of Pokemon go or minecraft you know these guys nobody does it better than them you got to instantaneously reward customers meaning you got to give them a status you've got to give them coins you've got to give them rewards you've got to introduce a new feature to them all that can be done through immediate gratification lots of the apps they wait for it like only during a promotion season they give you something or you know there's a only when they are introducing a new feature they you know they expect you to do a try and buy but the gaming companies don't wait for anything and their services are designed for that but but lots of the applications can explore opportunities to you know based on what their core value prop is you can give them opportunities to you know unlock some some new feature or rewards or status and so on so I think that again is a is an area which gets missed out and I think is is key when you and all this is very once you put an app out there you have a question okay once you put an app out there it's very easy to you know after a certain period of time you know come back with certain feedback but all this needs to be thought through even before you put an app out that's when you can really design the app in such a way that you've covered many of the elements that you later on find out that are essential user feedback again back in the day the way we gave a user feedback was very clumsy you know you go into settings it's buried somewhere you can give use of you can give a comment or so about the app or something's not working nobody reads nobody responds and so on it's a painful journey now it's not like that you have a plethora of options so user feedback 3 a pre-application launch post application launched during an application launch you just have so many options you could you could run app or even before you do anything you could run a poll with with with a set of users as to what they think about this feature about this idea you can do user test you can launch an app or before you put an app into the Play stores you can set up a beta group and and test for it you can once you put an app out there you get you get constant feedback from the users in terms of their Google store and an Apple Store reviews you can look at them you know find out pattern answer to them create a two-way loop you can do hundreds of things in that area you can use third-party tools to engage users even before you put out an app so lots of these things need to be explored before you actually so it's one thing to think of an idea but it's a second thing to actually test it out you've got to figure out whether this is actually working what do people think in the market do people think that it resonates with them is it simple to use so all this needs to be looked at from from a user feedback perspective [Music] yeah again that's a very good question so iTunes so the iOS has come up with this earlier on feedback was you know it was not it was not current so what your what the example you gave is a is something which is absolutely so if somebody's you know transacting on an app application and that particular I can decide when I want him to actually review the app earlier that was not the case so you got to be very in your case you're absolutely right that actually disrupts the user experience you are doing something you send him at an awkward time and you expect him to respond which is horrible it irritates the user and and so on and has a bad taste it leaves a bad taste but there are ways to tackle that there are ways to you know like when somebody completes a purchase and you know that he's completed a purchase and then they are like you know probably going to end up going to be in the app do another transaction that might be a good time to sender because they've completed the purchase they won't buy something from you if they are not satisfied with the service so that might be a good time to say hey how was your experience you know would you like to rate us so and iTunes has made it so so current that you can actually send these reviews when it really matters not when earlier on when back in the day in two years back I used to send like messages and notifications to our users when it really does matter he might be sleeping at like whatever 12 o'clock and I send a message it's like it's crazy it's not only dumb it's also going to irritate the user it's not going to get you any results so to your question I mean I think that's those are very very good moves bye-bye iOS the the the product owners the managers the companies who run all these applications need to use it wisely so the other important piece is pricing um now they're just so much of in the marketplace people there's always pressure as an entrepreneur or if you're putting out a new mobile app even before you put on an app people say how are you going to monetize what are you going to do out of it are you going to make the money and so on but my philosophy is that the most important thing and and I'm done this a lot of you know kind of pain I've got this experience out of a lot of pain you don't actually look for money what you try to do is to try in try and see whether you really have stumbled upon something that is useful to somebody or is entertaining like I said and you really don't think so there's there's revenue per download there's subscription there's third-party revenue there's advertising revenue there's so many forms of revenue and people will say you know which bucket you want to latch on to but you don't want to do any of that until you gain a critical mass you the first the most important number you want is you want to have a good strong user base so you want to grow the number of users where you can construct ly find out what's going on understand the pain points improve your app and so on and build a good base because all the other things flow from there and so when it comes to pricing if it's a mobile app I would say that no matter what it is unless you are a Netflix or a Hulu or somebody who's offering rich content that you know otherwise you can't find on the Internet without being without it being pirated or something it's better to kind of take the route of make not charging anything for the user and then and then seeing how the user responds to you or your product or service so so this was kind of the the six things that you want to keep in mind before you actually put something out there okay [Music] yeah yeah now again that's a good question I would say that you know you don't even worry about like whether what you want to do like six months down the road because it has to see whether you're able to gain a user base if if your user base is growing substantially then you kind of start thinking along the lines as to how do you want to monetize that whether you want to go the freemium route or whether you want to do a subscription-based route which means you don't have to put a new app out there you can create different pricing tiers you can do all kinds of gimmicks you can you can maybe like keep this all aside and look at an advertising model which may or may not work for your app or you can look at like putting new features in your app and adding premium features to your app so you can do plenty of things and they give you that that leverage but but the thing is that you need to gain you need to gain users first like a company like whatsapp to give you a real-life example right like the reason why they got valued at twenty million dollars is is because of the user base so they didn't care much for you know you know how much money I'm going to make them are only concentrating on how to make their product better and everything else followed and I think that's the best approach because then you're focused on the user and not on unnecessarily on how to make money out of the app because once you start getting the the layer of monetization into the app then your priorities change then you are no longer concerned only with user base then you're starting to think how to you know how to make sure that the the guy pays you money every month how to introduce a new feature how to make sure that you have people who to to suck up to all these features every month so you have different priorities so you don't want to do all that when you put out a new app any any questions okay good so this is again this is a you know kind of again scaling an app is is something which is not not very easy to accomplish but these are some techniques that have helped me and I think overall it can be applied to any vertical so for example app optimization I think app optimization is something that can easily be done and let me kind of talk to you a little bit about app app optimization so if you go to if you go to if you go to the Play stores you can obviously the predominant play stores are Google and Apple for for folks who don't know so you can go to you can you know tweak the description the keywords in there you can tweak you can tweak the screenshots on there you can you can adjust the search words all that to improve discoverability to to kind of organically help it grow um also there's something called a search engine optimization you can use code like Google has a code called firebase some of you would have kind of used it so you can kind of index data and make sure that your app pops up more often then then say another app in the same category or you can use search words within Play Store to make sure that your app comes up first before any other app you know that kind of stuff which is all which will all kind of help you organically grow the other thing is you have to think broadly you want to put this app out there this is a domestic is it global if its global do you want to have translation services the app needs to be translated to all different languages now that organically now a guy in France may not be interested in a I don't know of a us-based app but if it's if it's given in France and the benefits are in French then there's a chance of him you know there's an appeal there might be discoverability they might might lead to a download so-so app optimization is obviously kind of critical the other piece is better in your database long as is as you kind of once you put the app out there you getting some traction people are starting to download it your increase in your user base and so on you want to start thinking about how to how to mine data now it depends upon how you grow like some of the apps have been involved the companies I've worked with they've been very rapid and they've grown tremendously so you needed to think big so you needed to start figuring out how do you want to index that data so when you know you have to look look at a database technology or something where you can index the data assimilate the data collate the day analyze that data and so on do you want to integrate third-party SDKs into the app to collect the data for you there's so many players out there there's fabric there's you know there are multiple what sets are eager yep that's five baseless fabric you there are lots of players out there who who basically collect data for you and then you can you can use that for analysis decision-making and so on similarly do you want to build a kind of an API based model with respect it all depends upon how you scale your app so if you're scaling rapidly then you really have to apply or you know you got to get to get to your technology teams and and and see what is the best approach here the other piece is new technologies and hardware now the way you look at it is there are like there are so many new technologies there are new patterns emerging you've got to be very hands-on and it's not like if it comes in one vertical it's not applicable to to another vertical I'll give you an example like deep linking have you guys heard of deep linking right now deep linking is is a is a very relevant and a very very very poignant technology so what you can do is earlier on if I sent a message to somebody and say hey you know go and go and get your whatever don't get your 500 coins from here it's a very painful process for the user because they have to it doesn't take you to the place where they can redeem those coins so they have to figure out within the app where it is go and go and redeem it and so on itself it's a tedious process what deep linking does it immediately takes you it drops you in that location where you can redeem coins so that's a big that's a sea change the user gets to the place where he wants to very quickly he he transact and he's out of it so it's a technology you've got it in but go ahead yeah I mean they have dabbled with it in many ways before I mean now they are calling it be rebranded and calling it an instant apps earlier on it was called by a different name so what they would do is so basically one of the things that they came out with in order to reduce bloatware in order to make sure that you know the device is not heavy you know all that kind of stuff they came up with this thing like an instant app where in its a try and by the user can actually you know not download or the app but can get the benefits off it even without doing that so if they like it then they go ahead and and then download it like stop I'll give you an example what Starbucks said was that you know you could you don't have to download the Starbucks app but if you use like an instant app then you can get out you can get a fob whatever dollar discount or something at a for a cappuccino and then we'll give you a another dollar if you if you feel that that service was been beneficial then we'll give you another dollar off on your next cappuccino if you if you the Starbucks so it was like not not pushing it on your head but at the same time kind of coaxing you to get it so you know they're dabbling with all this kind of things they've changed and rebrand rebranded the names and you know that kind of stuff so yeah so so you've got to be very cognizant so cognizant of what the new technologies are what's first on a platform like let's say Samsung is coming out tomorrow with a with an Android tablet then you want to make sure that that you're there you know that's the best time to negotiate that's the best time to you know say that you know what kind of partnership can you do with them and so on because the moment something comes out and it's already there and they're 150 people in that it's very difficult to make an inroad so you want to see what are the new hardware is coming out how do you this is all help you to scale acquisition it's a dicey subject but but it's but it's obviously a way to to scale so you can use lot of the dollars like the company I am I'm currently associated with and I've just finished up with you know we've spent marketing dollars in select geographies because we know that those guys are going to there are more propensity to come to our app than any other geographies so spend money in certain Eastern European markets Southeast Asia markets in Vietnam in the Middle East and so on so now you can spend your acquisition dollars very carefully in order to get people to your app so you don't have to randomly say you go to an advertising agency or if you have it in now say okay this is 40,000 bucks go and spend the money and doing me users it's not like that you could be very selective very targeted in order to get users there are other ways of doing it let's say that you were already there on the web now you advertise and you want to go towards mobile you can advertise on a web platform so that you know you can when you open a webpage or you and you open that specific webpage you would see ads and an M promotions that will you know kind of move you towards mobile so you can do this cross cross advertising you know kind of engagement so that's that's another option so yeah I mean I mean you could do that but there's also what I was talking about more is like let's say that I was setting up an app on the mobile side but it's already aware that or it's already or it's used as a as a web service so I work with a you know like a social messaging app which was even before the mobile app came out they were already present on the web and it was I had a big presence on the web so what we did is that we said hey we want to grow our mobile user base so we don't and there's no cut or you know a revenue angle with that we already have a web presence all we needed to do is to try and get the the mobile content the mobile advertising on there so that people on the web could actually say that hey this is available or moved on mobile too and we facilitated that you know there are quick ways to try and get to the you know like you say you let you you you say that you want to download this application on mobile you there's a button on the web you click that button then it automatically you know you have that ready to download on your on your mobile phone so things like that in order to cross-pollinate so there are there are various ways to do it but like you said if you go to the mainstream guys like you go to Apple and so on then they're there they're models are are pretty tight and they they dictate what the the revenue split should be which is for a small or a start-up or a medium-sized company is not not necessarily great because they don't have that kind of volumes so you got to be you got to be mindful of those things the other thing which which which is very critical and mundane is app maintenance now you want to and these are help to scale the app so one thing that we had a problem that we had in in in real life with with my app was that the fact that it used to the crash percentages were very high like if you just crash fifteen percent of the time for various reasons you know when you move from different Network environments from let's say Wi-Fi to airplane mode or airplane mode to cellular you had different problems the app would not be able to handle in a low bandwidth environment now you've got to be very cognizant as an owner to to control and nip that all in the bud so if you are offering or promising something that the user you better well make sure that the app doesn't you know it doesn't misbehave it's stable and so on so you've got to be very focused on it and all that leads to an increase in scale similarly onboarding on you can't emphasize enough about like whatsapp again is an example where if you want a what's a bond let's say the the computer on a desktop it's so easy and so seamless all you need to do is you need to go and there's a code in the settings of the whatsapp and you just show the code to to the computer it automatically scans it for you and boom you have the whatsapp on your computer so even a person who doesn't have intricate knowledge of technology or doesn't understand it so much they have simplified that process so much so that's the so you've got to make sure that all these areas like onboarding is is so easy flawless simple and idiot-proof people who you know you don't have any information or don't know much about it can easily get in so this is some some some kind of pointers to how to scale an app Oh like Android iOS yeah I mean now so that game is now totally different like Facebook and and Google pretty much controlled every advertisement like all the other smaller guys are all bought by these guys so it's like you either go with Google or Facebook that's it you don't have any other third option yeah yeah so anybody and everybody is all the smaller players in that space are consolidated and and so if you really want to generate anything positive in that space you want to be with these guys yeah so my focus was trying to spend as much as time as in the first two slides but I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the about the three pillars so these are three revenue retention and user engagement are are key for a for a mobile app once you come on board once you once you got a little bit of scale once you put the app out there so people like I said people are going to ask you okay so you got this here what are you going to do about it you know how are you going to monetize how can you justify all the folks who work on this project you have a ton of engineers ton of designers you know ton of resources that you've used in order to put this product out there so that's when revenue comes in and primarily broadly you have these three areas of revenue you have advertising you have subscription you have new-age revenue you can you know you can have revenue through gifting through premium features through all this kind of stuff through social connection like you know if you have a special feature then you can charge money for that but primarily if you look at any kind of revenue they are all divided into these three buckets now you got to think through whether you want to have one kind of revenue whether your service that can that that users might be willing to pay for as a subscription is something so valuable you're providing or do you think that you know that's you know you can't go there and maybe rent and there are ways of ascertaining that you can do you can do the dipstick research you can kind of do hypothesis test you can get an understanding of what might resonate and try and do some people go for a combination and some people like test with one thing but but definitely at some point you know it would come a stage where you need to think through these parameters then there's retention retention again is super critical I mean it's it's it's the same with any other business the cost everybody knows that the cost of acquisition is is four times the cost of retention so it's like you want to retain somebody because otherwise you're going to spend four times to acquire them so the and there are just so many avenues today like you can partner with so many third-party tools there's a I'm sure you guys would have used as an intercom dot IO which is a which is a tool where you can run several shown campaigns in you know retention campaigns user engagement campaigns you know you can do lot of in-app push messaging in order to retain and bring back subscribers again you can use third-party companies tune Tapjoy apps alar just there's just so many guys out there you can also do the old-school methodology of out calling and reach so what I used to do is that every Friday at 4:00 p.m. I used to call some cut subscriber of ours I mean you know we we had some random selection process and then I would just out call him and you know just talk to them try and understand whether you know they're you know they're pissed off for the service and 90% of the time they were so it was like you know just get a feeler of what they think you know they also feel like you know there's a there's a real connection and you know we used to do it methodically used to understand their problems and we used to report on the progress we've made based on the feedback they gave so if somebody complained heavily that you know network sucks this is not good the app broke down here we would tell them that hey you know we are looking at this we are looking at this this is the progress we made and we've created like a communication loop for them so that that's that's an old methodology but it still works it's it might be slightly expensive like you can't if you outsource that operation to a to an agency or something then it's going to cost you money even now our call center call an outgoing call from the US is $14 a minute so which is ridiculous but that's the rate so it's like so you got to think through what what the scenarios are social media is a big boon and an urbane but it's a boon in the sense you really know the pulse of the users users comment on it and so on so you can really establish a relation maintain a relationship have the ability to do retention through that similarly all the reviews the customer feedback which you get on all the Play stores you gotta really monitor them carefully have a turnaround time reply to them and it's not that they complain and you just let it go many of the companies what happens you will see so many negative reviews on all the apps but people will not do anything about it which is not good because then it's going to irritate the user they're going to be it's going to create dissonance user engagement again is super critical if you want to have any sort of impact with with your with your existing base so it's no good and acquiring somebody keeping them on but you've got to constantly engage them so that they think that ok this app is cool it's worth being on there's something valuable all the time people are working on it and so on so you got to have relevant information in promotions rewards something you reward loyal customers you can create campaigns for people who have done good things in your app so all that kind of stuff you can you can have relevant conversations with people or you can you can you can have referral programs for users who be there on your app so that if they refer somebody they get a reward like anyone any one of you use betterment the Robo guy for investments yeah so he's I mean it's a good service and and so on but you know they have a very strong referral program the moment you get on it you'll say you know any day they'll send you notifications even after three months after you join saying hey you want to refer somebody then we give you a thousand or four will be able a your commission for the year you know things like that to keep them engaged alright any I'll just any any questions at this point no all right so I like I mentioned at the top analytics I think again is is fundamental to anything what I spoke right now so so you know usually product managers owners look at you know the traditional stuff activations downloads installs revenue you know all that kind of stuff visits NPS ratings but but but besides that there are these three things that are very critical with retention we spoke about in the last slide there Joan and this quality quality means network quality making sure that all the promises that you make it's a little bit like a political agenda you can't just say and not deliver so you know you got to make sure that the quality of the app is really good Shaun again you have to monitor it very carefully usually mobile apps if any of you have worked in in that area is like in the churn areas like one seven and twenty eight days people look at churn one seven and twenty eight days so usually what happens is that 80% of the people who downloaded app on day zero come back to the app on day one on day seven that number is twenty percent on day 28 that number is two percent that's the the industry standard now that means you're saying that everybody who you acquire on day zero you practically lost them by day twenty eight which is like one month so if somebody asks you to do a product lifecycle analysis what lifecycle analysis will you do because it's like bide by the end of the month everybody's gone they're looking at some other app so it's a constant struggle to figure out you know how do you keep somebody there why should somebody come back to your app on day 28 how do you increase that number so these are some other the challenges that you have to grapple with and besides all this this data points are super important internally so if any of you have been in positions where where you have to drive a team you have to like I noticed that there were several engineers like the engineering team the quality team the design team and so on you need all this data you need all this data to tell them where you're going what you're doing you know what do you see you're six months from now yeah so so you need that that kind of data to let the team to motivate the team and so on you also need you need to understand like how to collect that data so like I said I think we touched upon it already but you need to figure out like this like I mentioned this flurry this fabric this tune these are all SDKs that you can feed into the app when you feed these SDKs into the app then then you can collect data assimilate data it will it will automatically spit information to you that you can analyze make decisions and so on so you got to decide whether you want to go that route do you want to do a database like you want to set up a database like a Splunk officer database you want to set that up and roll with that and if you're having a web platform you have an app mobile app platform you have a desktop app platform you want all the platforms to use that database v1 homegrown solutions in the company I am use all the three so they have their own homegrown solutions they have a database they have all these SDKs in the app now you need to understand you know what's the best methodology how could you use that effectively and so on so the focus should be on on data on trying to collect data on a trying to analyze data and trying to kind of make meaning out of that data and it's also super important not just from your peer group but also senior leadership everybody wants to know the progress of the app you know how its performing what are the expectations what are the key KPIs that are getting impacted so you need to be very very succinct cogent about all these things to collect information yeah you can do lots of things you know the like lot of these ad guys they give you so they come with a platform so so whether it's a where it's a Google or a Facebook they have they have they already built their analytics platform so once you partner with them you have access to it's just not cost per or download per or cost per click or any of those parameters it's like you can go much deeper you can figure out you know how many of the people who you are quite actually retained how many of them came back how many of them churned you get you get data points to a micro level now the question is that how do you you know what do you make of that data how do you put the data together how do you let how do you articulate the data to somebody else what decisions can you take out of that because that those data points come to you when you partner with these companies they have already built these engines so they have an analytical engine Facebook has its own analytic engine it has its own the cost per spend it will tell you exactly you know where you're spending a what you are doing you can get analysis from those portals so you have plenty of things to play with it's how you how you look at it what you do with it like I said how do you put it out to other people that that makes a difference yes I mean it seems I mean it depends I mean like I said the other primary right now the other I mean all the other smaller fragmented companies are all been acquired by these companies so you are practically left with no choice but then then people are exploring opportunities like not going with them and which I don't know like very detailed about but it's like they they are they're looking at it like a third party database like somebody else who's doing the you know kind of the dirty work they partner with them they could be they you know they it will be a separate it would be a lighter SDK or you know that kind of stuff but but again the the veracity of that and you know whether it can really do well I'm not sure but people are part because they think that this is becoming a monopoly and you know that you know Google is and Facebook is controlling everything because you you have to use them in some way shape or form otherwise you can't get through any sort of advertising which they did and many companies don't want to be in that shoe because then they control and dictate terms all the business terms are dictated by that revenue share is dictated by them and so on so did that answer your question alright so I think we have a few more minutes left no weather oh yeah just about eight minutes left so the other thing was so I think I touched upon this but about user feedback and suggestions so again how does somebody get 70% are coming feedback comes through user tests this market research mobile surveys feedback form focus groups to it like you'll notice that some things which were there earlier on which were given a lot of weight is now slowly going down you know people like obviously like chat and phone have gone down tremendously because it's expensive and there are more easy ways of doing it now so so this is kind of the you know the current date trend um but but what I wanted to kind of spend some time here on was this potion so one of the things that in my experience I dragged you got to meet the customers where they are like some for example if somebody is using a mobile app you want to communicate with him on that platform not like sometimes what happens is that you know somebody voiced a a complaint or something then you push him to a mobile web page or you take you tell him that you know you got a log into a computer to give feedback you know that kind of stuff which is a complete dissonant so wherever the user is so if he's on if he goes on a web site and communicates which you want that you got to be there so that's that's very important to kind of you know this comes to the point where I think this gentleman asked me about be proactive right about iTunes actually pushing out reviews you know when somebody was kind of transacting in the app actually that's a good example of being proactive so which means that if somebody did something relevant in the app you actually send them a message in order to get a positive review so that's an example of being proactive a two-way loop again it's very important all your days people used to give a complaint send an irritated response and that was it and you know people knew that you know nothing is going to come out of it they were irritated and that was it but now you can create these two-way loops so it's not like you know somebody just sent you some message and you didn't do anything about it you can create a meaningful conversation you can follow up on the Scala's ation you can respond to the customer complaint you can act on the feedback you can show progress all that kind of stuff and again there are these I've just given these names you prop you some of you guys probably know already but there are these wonderful kind of tools like a you know like a Localytics or a kochava or a mix panel they give you all these tools in order to drive a lot of these campaigns it also has a lot of ability if you have those SDK in the app in order to receive feet feedback and so on like an intercom IO I don't know how many of you used that anybody here used an intercom I oh yeah for example if you have if you've set it set up with intercom IO then I can automatically like in our app what we did is that we've put a button called which will be a constant in your settings it won't be called well we call it you know it's a co-branded name but it will automatically be in your settings so if somebody went over there it's like they can actually ask questions real-time or past comments or it could be anything so sometimes it's ridiculous stuff likes people will just say hi so you know I mean I am sorry bottom ated it and I say hey there you know whether you if you have any problem you know please come back to us and we'll be more than happy to help you or something like that so that I don't have to go and write at a time to millions of users but but I'm just saying that that's an example of you know like these tools are just tremendous in order to keep connected to the user oh so I think um so this actually this chart I just picked it up from one of the apptentive source but basically tells you that you know if you don't have you know whether you have a feedback loop or not if you don't have a feedback loop then the customer will you know will leave a negative review and definitely chon if you have a feedback loop then you know you have a chance of you know improving your product you can correspond with the customer tell them that how what are the improvements that have happened create a positive you know relationship with them and improve customer experience and definitely loyalty which means all the things what I mentioned in terms of user engagement building loyalty trying to get back users one way of maintaining that is this feedback mechanism by just showing that you are your present you understand their pain points and you're working towards it you win them back you force force force users to come back they they may give you a second chance so that's that's pretty much that's pretty much the the kind of presentation so I mean just in terms of reflection so what what I wanted to cover was primarily you getting you know like a what do you need to do bare minimum if you want to whether you're working as a product manager in a in a company and you're tasked with putting a new mobile app out there or building a new mobile app what kind of things that you need to look at I mean they're just there are many hundred more different things but these are the big big items that you want to focus on the how do you scale an app if you put out an app and it does well what are the other things that you look need to look at when you want to scale them some of the key drivers in mobile apps retention drive new user engagement how do you drill down on the analytics piece and then obviously listen to your users so that's that's pretty much it yeah yeah it's yeah III quite like fabric and I also like flurry so those are guys but again they're there's an implementation angle to this like you go to their SDKs need to be fed into your app and so on so all these things cause it depends upon like how light you want to keep your app it increases bloatware the engineering guys will push back you know that kind of stuff but but I quite like flurry but they've they've changed their entire structure their management is different now they give you very very good dashboards they divide the so it's a two-way street once you once the SDK is in you got to get your data to flow to them and so on but then you have you can get your you can get like retention dashboards revenue dashboards usage dashboards any features that you any feature that you want to track you can track and you can like dissect them by by day month time yeah you can do all kinds of gimmicks so it's like um yeah these and that these are not the only guys I mean there's just so many guys it depends upon so the reason why I like them is they they kind of give us data points for all our platforms so you know we've got a good rate we've negotiated with them and so on so it's worked out but you know there are less like many guys I'm sorry like I think concentrating on a lot of features is a no-no I think III think it was like I said you have to spend time conceptually you know like rushing into a conclusion I don't think like you should take like a good you once you have an idea you should like you know take that you know try and do different tests to figure out whether that makes sense or not and sometimes you might get you know like seven out of ten or six out of ten and it's it might still work so so I mean that's sometimes people are very very quick to you know pursue something and it you know so you've got to take your time once you have an idea you got to see whether it really adds any value to you like first to yourself you you should be convinced you know you should be convinced before you actually go out to the you know to different people and engage with that then I think that you you should definitely think about some of the things which I mentioned up top people really don't do which is like think about like offline online think about think about how do you how do you pursue analytics think about you know you what what are the main methodologies in which you're going to interact with the users they don't think through all that they just want to put our use you know mobile app out there and that's again a no-no in my mind because you got it these are all it will hit you in some way or shape or form and then you're like you know you're not in any position to you know kind of you know attend to the problem I think that that's those are pretty much yeah those are pretty much high level yeah yeah yeah don't know that yeah it definitely does happen it's a very good question it definitely does happen I would say that no you I mean if you are in that position then you really can't stop because if you stop then who's you send them you know not a good message to the market the users say that this company you know it's on its way out you know nobody's working on it and so on and so forth so you got to buckle up it's like think of it as a movie like if you cast an actor and for some reason the actor turns out to be an idiot or like you're not able to work with them or you know it's a problem or so on and so forth then you are like oh god what do I do now right like and there's a director you have more pressure because of somebody else's money you know all that kind of stuff so but then you have to tweak you've got to figure out okay the baby not this actor I get somebody else you know so you gotta figure that's why you know there are it's it's it's more important to take your time and figure out and try to do as much as you can the right way and there's nothing like you can get everything right you will have problems you will make mistakes but but you know just take that little more time try and figure out everybody's in a rush to do lots of things which is not bad but but just kind of you know think that you know these are the most important things that I want to solve for and right now I'm telling you all these things but like a month down the road some of these may not even apply you know because it just changes so far technology but there would be something else which is more cool somebody else would have come out with something so you got to be very you know you got to know the pulse of the market [Music] correct exactly right yeah yeah and then like I think I mentioned one of the things which is a no-no is people never think about like the gratification piece right that's again very it's ignored in the in the industry like people don't you know you want you want your users if somebody comes on board and you want them to be delighted quickly like if they did something that that you think was good for your app you want to tell them that and so people really don't think through all those scenarios and that's again a thing that that that needs to be done more okay sure oh sorry yeah yeah yeah yeah no ratings is I'm saying that you know this is again picked up from our data source but people like you know they the most important thing that they look at is active users so it's like product owners and managers look in this order like ratings is the Play Store ratings so Google Play Store ratings or Apple Play Store ratings people value that somehow more than NPS because NPS is more because these are our digital products NPS is more like let's say Verizon is is selling a you know like us you know like like connection then then that that traditional metrics of measuring it there's no ratings and stuff right then NPS would be valued very high so but in digital for some reason and again those things might change you know it's not a hard and fast rule like I was implementing NPS in our in our current digital mobile apps because it's a very good way of knowing how much your current users value your app what do they think so too it's a very intrinsic way of knowing but it's very time-consuming and it's not it's not the way you can do it quickly and so on and whereas the ratings are much more simpler right you just tap on a star and boom you're done right so it's like there are like you know there are things that did not need to you know that folks need to think through in that in those areas but this was primarily because of in a digital environment NPS is not valued as much as place place no ratings