Product managers are often seen as the CEO of their product who are navigating their way between the business, technology and user experience to deliver, as described by Marty Cagan a product that is “valuable, usable and feasible”.
That’s a big job!
Surprisingly, there arn’t really any tools that “nail” that level of responsibility – and we think that’s weird. The most important role in the product organization has to beg, borrow, steal dashboards from other organizational units.
There are many software tools used by Product Managers to:
- roadmap planning and communication. (e.g Trello, google spreadsheet???!!!, Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas)
- design of an app and user interface (e.g Invision)
- execution allow to help them manage and monitor a product teams activities and ensure jobs are done (e.g Jira)
- measurement (Mixpanel, Google Analytics, Omniture/Adobe)
- growth hack experiment roadmap (trello again or maybe Sean Ellis’ tools).
However, there are no tools available to empower a mobile product manager to experiment, measure, iterate the user experience without negotiating priorities on the product roadmap,, scheduling developer tasks and going through a development and release cycle.
We interviewed over 90 Mobile Product Managers to understand the pain points they are experiencing with mobile user onboarding and here are the common themes:
Business
- We are investing in developing new features in our App, but we have no time for user education and our activation rates are low
- We spend so much money acquiring users only to lose users after download. Our Day Zero churn is huge!
- We need to drive users to higher-value features to monetize the App.
- We want to know what features drive high value users.
- Whats the next-best-step to move a user to higher value segment?
Technology
- Any onboarding change I want to make requires me to log a ticket with my busy developers (who are sometimes at an external agency)
- When I suggest changes I have to use a team of developers and designers
- I then have to wait for the new version to be released before I can see results and if I want to make changes I have to start all over again!
User Experience
- I want to get my user’s to perform key first actions on download of the App
- I want to drive actions that create power users
- I want to segment and target my users with different onboarding flows
- I want to educate users in real time for the exact user that need it. And not SPAM users who don’t
So we took this feedback and built:
- ability to run experiments INDEPENDENT of product roadmap
- zero drain of developer resources
- allow connection to backend systems to leverage existing user data in corporate systems
- easily measure the effectiveness of experiments with A/B testing.
- Build a library of best practice “champions” that match to specific target audiences.
- User-level App Analytics that captures the data before you realise you need it – no more event tags!!!
- Reports to present to management on uplift and success metrics.
We think we’ve made a good start on this. Mapping the above Contextual product needs onto the Venn Diagram it looks like:
Its time that product managers had tools that gave them the control and agility that the business demands from them! If you’ve got ideas for our product roadmap, tweet, click the chat widget or email us!
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