Product Management Books – The Learning Curve: Interesting Readings for Product Leaders

Book Review: “Product-led SEO: The Why Behind Building Organic Growth Strategy” by Eli Schwartz

May 9, 2021May 9, 2021 Ram SevakLeave a comment

Did you know that the collective value of all organic traffic in the world is more than a trillion dollars!

First a little story. In 2011, when I started my product career with Naukri.com (India’s largest public Internet company by market cap as of Apr 2021 and leading classified site for over 20 years), I had ZERO idea about anything called SEO. Anyway I was tasked to work on the jobseeker acquisition and engagement funnel at the classifieds leader and happened to work with an inhouse SEO team. Frankly, I did not know anything about the term called “Product-Led SEO” or that term existed in wider usage until I happened to chance upon this book

As I progressed through this book “Product-led SEO: The Why Behind Building Organic Growth Strategy” by Eli Schwartz, I harked back to those times a decade back and could retrospectively see the work our team did fit well into the paradigm this book describes. Little surprising now that Naukri was able to fend off any impending threat from many job aggregators like Indeed, Mitula or Jooble as well LinkedIn to a certain extent during that time while successfully managing to navigate the web to mobile transition. The absolute traffic from SEO grew by 3x in those 4 years and in my assessment a sound SEO position remains a competitive moat for the company till today!

Book cover of "Product-led SEO" by Eli Schwartz — Cover Image of the Book: “Product-Led SEO…” by Eli Schwartz

Coming to this book, it is a good concise one arguing essentially that product-driven growth when combined with SEO’s strategic application can unlock growth for most companies. One should not expect hands-on SEO domain knowledge from the book, for which there are umpteen online resources one can refer to. However this book does neatly describe challenges any SEO leader and practitioner faces in a complex org and offers clear tips to navigate the org dynamics. The author, in my view, remains honest in recognising the limitations of SEO craft in driving low-cost growth which makes his advice throughout the book even more credible. So let’s dive in!

General Background about SEO

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization, and that it is a process of taking known rules of how search engines work and building it into a plan to improve upon the visibility

Product-Led SEO builds a great product for users first and optimizes for search second
Maximizing SEO visibility requires taking the known rules about search engine best practices and applying a level of creativity and logic to develop a strategic approach
Focusing efforts on technical SEO, on-page factors, or user-experience optimization together is essential to drive results through SEO

In general, these are the 5 stages of how Google or any search engine works

1. Discovery

Discovery is the algorithm that crawls the web to identify new pages and sites that Google has not previously indexed

2. Crawling

Once a URL is discovered, Google has to decide whether it wants to expend the resources required to crawl the URL. It’s typically constrained by crawl budget for every site that Google enforces

3. Indexing

The indexing algorithm determines how to cache a web page and what database tags should be used to categorize it
The indexing algorithm will decide whether to trust the content or not based on technical SEO signals on the page
The most important part in any SEO audit is to check whether links are getting indexed by Google

4. Ranking

Ranking uses the information from the first three algorithms to apply a ranking methodology to every page

5. Intent understanding (BERT)

This NLP algorithm launched in 2018 doesn’t directly impact the rankings of websites for queries, it rewrites the actual queries to what Google believes the user is searching

Latest trends in SEO

1. Complaints that SEO is only getting harder are a byproduct of all the AI already included in the algorithm

Google doesn’t just have a better understanding of what its users want, it has used AI to dramatically change how it values links
This is the change with the biggest impact on users

2. Frequent software updates from Google including the the two biggest updates to its algorithms

The first update was called Panda rolled out in 2010. The goal of Panda was to flush out sites that used keyword matching just to rank on highly searched terms without providing content of any value to those keywords on the page
The second algorithm update was called Penguin and was released in 2012. Penguin’s target was manipulative link-building practices. When Google discovered unnatural links, it levied a penalty on the site

3. Mobile SEO and Trends in Voice Search

Google ranks websites on mobile optimization the same way it does on a desktop. Google recommends having a mobile-responsive site that will look and function great on a mobile, tablet, or desktop environment. The nuances between SEO for desktop and mobile are in how users interact with search and websites after they click

However, on mobile there are fewer results, meaning a number-five slot on mobile is essentially like being on page two of results
A mobile-first index merely means Google is ranking the content of a website that is visible to a crawler that emulates a mobile browser

4. While mobile was last decade’s big paradigm shift in SEO, this decade is going to be all about voice and smart assistants

Also the number-one reason voice search is never going to replace multiple results is voice must be perfect, and perfect is never possible in our changing world
Also as voice assistants get increasingly more powerful, having a proper schema is important

What’s product-led SEO?

The key part of building a Product-Led SEO strategy is that it is a product (an offering of any sort) that is being built. An ideal Product-Led SEO strategy is programmatic and scalable, creates something new, and addresses untapped search demand i.e. build an experience that is useful for users first, and the search engines will follow

Product-Led SEO requires thinking of the reader and why they should spend their precious time enjoying the content

Create the content that you know there is untapped demand for. Google will reward you and will direct users to you with search-query suggestions
- Nevertheless unlike other marketing methods, content is inherently trackable and should justify its RoI
Bad content for paid marketing channels is less prevalent than that in SEO since marketers know that the costs are high in case the content is not engaging their users enough

Should SEO be the focus area for early stage companies?

The author recommends that early-stage companies first spend as much as they are comfortable allocating toward paid marketing before they shift to SEO. Also SEO investments should not be made by businesses that are close to the edge on survivability
- Paid marketing will help quickly determine product-market fit, identify customer journeys, and generate revenue. Knowledge gained from paid marketing will help SEO maximize its success
In later-stage companies where the new hire will only work on SEO projects, prioritizing skill sets is critical
The business category and type of customer are two of the biggest factors in how one should invest in SEO. Visibility only matters when you are visible to the right user. For many categories, especially long-sales-cycle B2B, SEO is absolutely the wrong investment
SEO is an optimization channel, not a demand-creation channel. SEO efforts improve the visibility of a website when the demand is already there

Competition and SEO

1. For SEO, the competitor is any site targeting the same search terms. Also one should assess whether she is targeting queries that real humans would actually write? Since search is all about queries written by users, the underpinning of any tactical effort is keywords

2. Pay attention to your competitor’s specific tactics, whether in the content type or technical setup. How, specifically, is that site driving growth?

3. Predicting how the competition might react should be an essential part of how you develop your SEO strategies

What’s an SEO persona and how to identify it?

SEO persona is the one that pays you (or whatever the conversion element might be), and one should track those people back to the original acquisition source. Those people will be aggregated into the persona buckets that should be your focus

Persona research should answer questions, such as where in the buying funnel a user might be when they’re visiting a particular piece of content

Channel Strategy and SEO

1. Brand traffic is great, but it doesn’t indicate SEO success. Growth of branded traffic will plateau at the natural penetration level of the brand. The focus of SEO should always be on non-branded search since their potential is immense while branded search grows with brand awareness.

Consider also that good ranking on targeted keywords is often aspiration and may never be achieved
Paid could dominate brand placements at a very inexpensive cost in a way that organic never could. OTOH SEO is a hybrid between branding and performance traffic
Word of mouth is also not a sustainable strategy since that can dissipate quickly

2. SEO and paid marketing are very similar from a performance standpoint. Ultimately SEO is done by humans for humans and it takes a unique person to be able to combine customer empathy with creativity layered in SEO knowledge

Duplicate Content and SEO

How is duplicate content generated?

One area that is a common source of duplicate content is the lingering legacy of site moves and updates. So, when undertaking any big update or migration, it is vital to get it right
A full site migration should only be undertaken when absolutely necessary for legal purposes or branding needs. One major consideration to keep in mind with all redirects is the redirects likely have to be maintained in perpetuity
The primary takeaway on updates and migrations is that they should be done carefully, slowly, strategically, and with full consideration of the risks

How to identify duplicate content?

Google Search Console can be particularly helpful in identifying problems with duplicate content
It’s possible that so much of a website is duplicate, it could fall into the realm where the Panda algorithm might think the website is of too low quality to be included in Google’s index

Linking Strategy and SEO

1. Links are a critical part of Google’s ranking algorithms, as a link to a page is a vote of popularity and contextual relevance. Quality is not created by a website alone. The page giving the link will also have its own authority, which will be determined solely by the search engine

Every domain has to stand on its own within the web, based on its own backlinks. Google claims to view hundreds of factors in determining rankings, links have always been a very prominent part of the calculation

2. Attract links instead of acquiring them. Most social media links (Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.) do not count as quality SEO backlinks. To generate links, just do what a PR agency would. Build relationships with journalists, understand what they like to write, and pitch stories

Some of the best link builders use PR methods
In your link-building efforts, be creative and generate unique data

3. Externally, page rank is a two-way street, so a site that wants to hoard all of its page rank would nofollow all its external links. Many websites inundated with spam links, including Wikipedia, opted to make all their outgoing links nofollow by default

It’s very likely there’s no real difference between a follow and a nofollow link, so one should not place much stock in the classification of a link

4. A site directory does not have to be a visually well-designed page to be effective. It can truly be an alphabetized list of every category and page on a website

The ideal internal-link graph looks like the route map of a budget airline that thrives on point-to-point connections

5. Featured snippets: This is when Google takes a portion of a website’s content to answer a user’s question and puts it in a box in the first position. If you are just looking for awareness, this might be a feature; otherwise, else avoid ending up in these boxes

Stakeholder Management and Navigating Org Dynamics for SEO Leaders

1. Justifying RoI. SEO should be measured the same way any product is measured: by adoption and engagement

Much of effective SEO Product management, especially in a large company, is about diplomacy
For smaller companies, if you are competing on search with a large competitor, know that you have the advantage, as they can never adapt to change as fast as you. Negotiating the system in a larger company is part of the essential skill set
Most sites cannot do statistically significant A/B testing on SEO because of traffic significance. Large sites can, and a change might lead to lower average ranking positions on search, but if its net result is higher conversions, it is a winner

2. One has to consider that rankings alone, as a KPI for SEO, is a vanity metric and should never be used in budgeting, or financial modeling. Also since paid and organic searches are both going after the same user, the author recommends strategizing each channel’s core competencies and having each focus on its strengths

3. A good metric in growth in impressions on search pages. Use the data you have and not the data you think you should have. Then, find a way to test and trial until you build the data you need

4. Using keywords as a predictor of how much search traffic you can expect to generate is not a viable option for a few reasons since there is competition for high traffic words and some keywords may not even exist

Without the ability to rely on keyword search as a north star for your new product, you need to find a proxy instead. Use a tangential product that might have similar demand, and use the search volume for that site

5. For a growth-minded Product manager or marketer, the bureaucracy can be negated by embracing incremental wins as a method to succeed. SEO should be viewed as a Product in and of itself

Instead of asking the engineers to update a whole bunch of SEO requirements, ask for engineers (or content or money) to build X for SEO

All in all it’s a great book for product leaders and founders to understand and lay foundations around as to how SEO can potentially unlock growth for their product! For really low level details about the art and science of SEO, author refers to very authoritative sources which can be explored. Hope you enjoy reading this book!

Book Review: “Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products” by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones

April 4, 2021 Ram SevakLeave a comment

The book “Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products” by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones is a must read for all product and business leaders. Marty’s earlier book “Inspired”is probably the most-referred book for aspiring / noob product managers, authors need no introduction to the authentic insights they bring!

What follows next is my recollection of broad themes, key takeaways and compelling arguments the authors put forth. Authors have relied on their learning from 500+ organisations of different scales, what they state is generally applicable. That the book was published during Covid times is testimony to the new realities we are all living in around resilience, adaptability to change and staying true to our core values amidst volatility. Unstated but these themes keep recurring throughout the book

Cover Image of the Book: “Empowered” by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones

The book is divided into 81 chapters, although most chapters can be independently read like a well-written blog. The authors differentiate strong product teams from what they call feature teams (one striving to serve the business) and most of the book is organised around helping leaders create strong product teams in their organisations. In the strong product team, the purpose of the product org is to serve customers by creating products customers love, yet work for the business. The book also argues that the key to building strong product companies is having strong product leaders

On coaching mindset

Coaches roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty, whereas mentors dole out words of wisdom
Developing people is job #1 for managers
To earn trust of the team, be interested in the team member as a person
While a team member’s self-assessment to develop a career plan is helpful, the manager should not hesitate from correcting the difference in perception between him and the team member. Not doing so is abdicating the responsibility!

On developing talent

The biggest difference between competent PMs and effective PMs is probably their people skills
It’s manager’s responsibility to bring a new product manager into the team and unless she is competent enough to ensure the person is NOT doing harm to the team and is making reasonable decisions
Constructive feedback is the main source of value you provide as a manager. There should never be surprises in annual reviews related to performance!
A written narrative for major decisions / products is helpful to be an exceptional product leader. It’s mostly a 6-pager doc with narrative in the first few pages followed by FAQs that might come from key stakeholders
An employee with an owner’s mindset takes responsibility for the outcomes rather than just the activities
Ability to think is the single most important behavior of a capable product person. How to assess this in interviews is by probing what the candidates do when they don’t know they answer
Three critical characteristics of strong product teams no matter what processes they use are
- tackling risks early
- solving problems collaboratively
- and being accountable to results
A product manager’s career will survive mistakes which inevitably happen if she is on the whole dependable in her commitments, always works toward the company’s best interests, and takes responsibility for her mistakes
Also coach your people around ethics of product management i.e. whether something should be built in addition to viability, feasibility, usability and valuable
As a leader, it probably helps to measure success by the growth of people one has managed or helped throughout the career
Also the leadership is not about you, it’s about the team member. More like an actor vs. director in a theatre aphorism “don’t fix a line”
Leaders need to set the expectations, establish the governance that acknowledges necessary boundaries—but removes barriers to progress—and support the teams with the necessary tools and resources

On stakeholders

In general the more senior an executive in the organization more likely they care about everything – customers, brand, revenue, compliance
Product managers need to invest in trust before they need it
On imposter syndrome: if I don’t do home and prepare thoroughly, the fear of looking clueless is what drives preparation. It’s not necessary something to fight against
Treating stakeholders like customers may dilute the role of true customer
On reducing number of meetings: if there is a way to make them happen asynchronously like status update is generally better

On decision making

The authors describe a colloquialism by Jim B, former CEO of Netscape
- If you see a snake (i.e. an important decision to be made), kill it
- Don’t play with dead snakes (past decisions)
- All opportunities start out looking like snakes

On hiring

Hiring is the responsibility of the hiring manager and not the HR!
The best product companies hire competent people of character, and then coach and develop them into members of extraordinary teams
There are two bases of hiring 1. Competence 2. Potential. Nothing wrong in hiring basis 2 as long as hiring manager is willing to invest time to develop the person
Product vision is one of the most effective tools for recruiting great product managers!
Every new hire should raise the average of the people
Reference checks should be taken seriously especially to weed out toxicity in behavior which can be hidden during the interview process

On product vision

Vision answers two critical questions 1. What’s the end game 2. What is my team’s contribution to it? It’s purpose is to inspire and it’s told from customer’s perspective
Evangelism is never finished. Just because a person is convinced one day doesn’t mean they will not be unconvinced the other day
Product vision should be accompanied by product principles or tenets in order to provide guidance to PMs in decision making

On team topology

Establishing an effective team topology is one of the key responsibilities of a product leader
The best team topology will balance the needs of product, design and engineering orgs
Topology choice should be guided by the team empowerment, real ownership, team autonomy and alignment with other facets of the company
- Optimise for the product team rather than executives, managers or access to customers!
Beware of Conway’s law i.e. shipping your org chart!
If you’re making changes to team topology more than once a year, something else is wrong
Platform teams reduce the cognitive load for experience teams in using the underlying technology whether customer facing or customer enabling

On product strategy

While product strategy starts with focus, it depends on insights. Product strategy requires choice, thinking and effort. For elements of the product strategy are 1. Focus 2. Insights 3. Actions 4. Management
Good strategy works by focusing energy and resources on few pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes

On OKR framework

If the leaders want the product team to feel ownership of the results, then the key results must come from the team
The team will also need guidance from leadership on how ambitious or conservative (roof shot or moon shot) they should be in pursuing solutions
Activities are not key results, outcomes are
All of the work need not be OKR. There could be some high integrity commitments which need to be tracked differently
- High‐integrity commitments are intended for situations where you have an important external commitment or a very important and substantial internal commitment. They are the exceptions
It’s normal and often wise for different teams to chase the same objectives simultaneously
Technology makes many things possible, but if it doesn’t deliver on the needs of the customer, it will not deliver on the needs of the business

On product leadership

There are 3 things a product leader will be judged on a. Business results b. Product strategy c. Product team
Evangelism is one of the critical roles of product leaders in mid- to large companies
Top methods of evangelization
- Use prototypes
- Share the customer pain
- Share the vision
- Share the learning i.e. information the audience needs to help come up with solution
- Share credit generously
- Learn how to do a great demo! It’s sales!
- Spend time with your developers, designers and product managers
- Show genuine enthusiasm!
The best source of innovation are your engineers!

In short, a must read book for all product and business leaders. The book contains decades of product leadership experience in a very concise and easily practicable manner and you can keep it like a ready reckoner for quite some time to come!

Book Review: ‘Decoding the Why’ by Nate Andorsky

December 28, 2020December 28, 2020 Ram SevakLeave a comment

This book “Decoding the Why: How Behavioral Science is Driving the Next Generation of Product Design” by Nate Andorsky can be summed as the one attempting to bridge the gap between what is loosely known as gamifying the product experience and a typical product development in non-games companies. As you would have observed, even before Covid – product companies were focusing on driving user engagement and retention through non-monetary interventions. In a horizontal product world – everyone trying to do almost everything else – user attention is literally a currency!

Image 1: Book Cover of “Decoding the Why” by Nate Andorsky

In author’s own words, the book is intended to give readers a baseline understanding of how behavioral science integrates into the product design. What now follows is summary of the book in Q&A format

What are the limitations of an archetypal user research oriented product development process?

Basic flaw with user research could be that most of the time, one is asking users to provide explanations of behaviors they don’t truly understand themselves! OTOH, mimicking competitors’ products creates an echo-chamber of product design

Our innovations will only live up to their full potential if they are built on an understanding of the human experience. While context plays a significant role in how our behavior manifests, the underlying mechanisms remain constant and this is where behavior oriented process gives an advantage

How does the human brain function?

Tversky and Kahneman’s seminal paper, “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” proposed that we attack complex problems using a limited number of heuristic principles—basically shortcuts. The brain typically operates in one of two modes: automatic and reflective, often referred to as System 1 and System 2 thinking. System 1 runs on autopilot and it’s possible for these systematic errors to be understood and “predicted”. System 2 is slower, more methodical, and dedicated to solving complex problems

How does one get started on this new approach?

The author introduces three kinds of data points one should be cognizant of

SAY data: subjective information collected from users
DO data are the analytics—what users are doing on the website or product
The WHY data. If you understand the WHY data behind the DO and SAY data, it unlocks a world of possibilities

How do we fight inertia wrt current user behavior?

We have a bias toward the present, giving stronger weight to present payoffs than those that will happen in the future. Present Bias ties into another theory, Hyperbolic Discounting, which states that we have time-inconsistent preferences

The way we perceive our future selves is similar to the way that we perceive a stranger. The further out into the future the loss or gain happens, the more heavily we discount it. To offset Present Bias, we must close the gap between our current selves and our future selves

In general users who perceive more personal stability over time tend to behave in a more future-oriented fashion—one that aligns better with their future self. However when the reward is too far off in the distant future, one needs a substitution to fill the void

OTOH users need guidance when they make decisions. Without guidance, they can fall into Barry Schwartz’s paradox of choice i.e. when presented with too many options, we have a hard time making a decision. This is why good on-boarding and product tutorials may be sometimes critical to product adoption!

How do we design for a reward cycle?

It is important to first consider the desired action before one integrates the reward

The fundamental building blocks of a reward cycle are: trigger, action, investment and reward. Nir Eyal notes that the reward should be variable, and there should be an investment component where the user puts something into the product such as time, data, effort, social capital, or money

Dopamine is the high you get from experiencing something new and exciting. The nervous system produces dopamine during the experience of reward, but even more interesting is that the production of dopamine also happens in anticipation of a reward. The closer we get to receiving a reward and missing it, the more likely we are to engage in said behavior again. Overall, rewards and incentives don’t necessarily have to be financial as anyone who has watched Tik Tok’s growth can vouch for!

How to choose between intrinsic and extrinsic motivators?

Daniel Pink, NY Times Best Selling author opines that the three elements he believes make up true motivation are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Intrinsic motivation drives creative tasks that are open to interpretation.

A good rule of thumb is to leverage external rewards to promote interest in an activity that is easy but may not initially interest a user. If it is a specific, relatively easy task with a concrete outcome, easy to do, and with an endpoint, extrinsic motivators would be a good place to start

Then, if possible, trigger intrinsic motivations to reinforce the action over the long term

How do we get people to keep acting on their intentions?

Commitment devices help us follow through on our intentions. A common form of a commitment device involves a person voluntarily giving up something of value that they can only regain access to by following through on their commitment. It’s more effective to structure a commitment contract where the reward money is theirs to lose rather than gain. Think of an example, of incentivising student participation in class by tying higher participation to a picnic the school will organise later in the year

Commitment contracts don’t always have to come in the form of money. These commitments can be to another person or a group of people. Goals should not be so big or far in the distant future that they feel unattainable

One should not underestimate the power of cues in precipitating an action. Others give us cues regarding what we should do. Even a small subset of a larger group making a confident move can influence the rest of the group. Social norms and the pull of the crowd can help your users follow through on their intentions. The way to drive behavioral change predicatively is by changing norms and changing the rules, effectively changing someone’s environment. Important part is to understand how to change the behavior, and the outcome will follow

Why are goals so powerful?

Regulatory Mode Theory studies the development of goal-pursuit as well as motivation. The theory lays out two main approaches from a social cognition perspective regarding the pursuit of goals: one is assessment, and the other is locomotion. Scoring high on assessment means you evaluate your options before making a decision and while scoring high on locomotion means you need to always be doing something

Streaks are a powerful way to incentivize action. They provide a sense of progress that plays into the natural way we see the world, our desire to avoid loss, and our need for growth and accomplishment

For example, the primary focus of Duolingo is to make the long-term benefits of learning a new language more immediately salient. Winning streak that increases its attractiveness as it lengthens, becoming a self-reinforcing system. On Duolingo, the grouping of these streaks is completely arbitrary. However, streak loss can be demotivating for some participants. Duolingo has countered this by allowing learners the ability to restore a broken streak

In short, people who set goals make more progress!

How do we signal trust?

We have a natural inclination to trust people who look and act like us, a bias called similarity bias. Aribnb used this to build trust between two people who have never met before in the absence of multiple reviews by creating similarity between the renter and rentee. However, if users share too little or too much about themselves, acceptance rates go down

So how did they design for this? Airbnb nudged users to write an introduction of the correct length and to include the right details about themselves. Airbnb also discovered that at a certain point, reviews trumped similarity bias. When a listing accumulated more than ten reviews, everything changed, people started trusting ratings more!

How to retain motivation?

Leaderboards spur competition, but they have weaknesses. Leaderboards can backfire. If a user gets too far ahead or too far behind, they disengage. In games, there are techniques employed like Dynamic game difficulty balancing (DGDB), also known as dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) or dynamic game balancing (DGB), which is the process of automatically changing parameters, scenarios, and behaviors in a video game in real-time based on the player’s ability, to avoid making the player bored (easy game!) or frustrated (hard game). Overall, a competition between users is a powerful technique to motivate action

How to leverage loss aversion to our advantage?

Losses psychologically feel twice as great as an equal gain. Only prospective (future) costs are relevant to a rational decision, but we fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy. IKEA effect which describes the increase in the valuation of self-made products. While the participants weren’t experts, they saw their creation as ones created by experts. The more of a hand we have in creating something, the less likely we are to part with it. Fitness app Noom uses this to its advantage in their onboarding flows

Peanut effect as a way to counter big loss aversion!

The peanuts effect is when we fail to consider the consequences of small losses. In this case, it is a good thing. The peanuts effect is part of the reason slot machines steal all of our money. The decision to save is easier when framed in a way that spreads the potential losses into smaller increments. Momentum leverages the default bias and the peanuts effect to help everyday people close their intention-action gap

How to use emotions?

We process information about one identifiable person differently than information about a group of people. Identifiable Victim Effect, which seeks to understand what moves us to offer help. Think back to a powerful marketing campaign, and it would have revolved around stories. To move people emotionally, tap into layer two and convey the emotional experience to your audience. We are visual machines. The brain can identify images seen for as little as thirteen milliseconds. All types of companies can help users achieve their goals by making them the hero of their own journey – the way Pain Squad does for its users

How to integrate behavioral-first approach while building products?

The process is quite simple and can be summed as a series of steps below

What is the problem you are trying to solve?
Collect the SAY and DO data
Compare SAY and DO data
Identify potential behavioral drivers
Identify potential behavioral solutions
Create interventions
Test interventions
Iterate

As one can see, steps 4 and 5 are the most crucial ones and this is where learning and having an opinion about behavioral theories may help

Overall, we are just getting started in this interesting domain of marrying behavioral insights with product design. Academic understanding of what drives behavior precedes the implementation by about ten to fifteen years. Product managers and designers learn by taking theories and putting them into practice. Hopefully one should be able to discern where assumptions break down and where they start to work and then hypothesize why and fine-tune it!

Book Review: “Strategy Excellence for Product Managers: A Guide to Winning Markets…” by Greg Cohen

October 31, 2020October 31, 2020 Ram SevakLeave a comment

This book “Strategy Excellence for Product Managers: A Guide to Winning Markets through Product Strategy” combines practical wisdom with theoretical frameworks we are already familiar with. In that sense, it’s a valuable read. The author Greg Cohen has 2 decades’ experience in the industry and the resultant scars are visible in his writing!

The book is divided into 11 chapters, however one can start reading from any chapter. In the beginning, the author tackles the question most business books tend to understate. The distinction between vision and strategy is that although vision creates a shared picture of the future, it does not take into account the fact that markets are dynamic. The author also opines why relative growth in a competitive scenario is validation of a good strategy

Rest of this post summarises key learning from each chapter

Chapter 1

The vision inspires the team towards a better future. The roadmap shows how the vision will be achieved over time while the strategy is about positioning ourselves where the most value will be in the long-term. There are five inputs to a product strategy exercise namely customer, market, competition, technology and business strategy

For developing customer understanding, voice of customer research helps while when doing market analysis, the objective is to understand which segments are most important for the product vision. OTOH when analysing how technology impacts product strategy, it’s important to understand capabilities, adoption rates and its cost structure

As a product manager where often the gaps are noticed is: not realising that the choice of strategy has to be evaluated in relation to the company’s capabilities and culture. So if the company is not investing in cutting-edge tech work, product strategy has to reflect that limitation

In short, the product strategy must incorporate the business outcome a product needs to fulfil for the company and the time horizon to meet that objective

Chapter 2

The product vision is any product’s raison d’etre. It is a high-level articulation that communicates the product’s value, often by painting a picture of the future

Unlike the product strategy, which can be complex and involved, the vision is an easy-to-understand articulation of the most important parts of the plan. The vision keeps three crucial factors

the target customer
the in-scope problems that the product solves; and
the most important dimensions of the product

Chapter 3

A strategic roadmap distills the product strategy into sets of capabilities that one wants to release in a given sequence over a defined time frame. Strategic roadmaps ultimately answers the questions – why and why now

A strategic roadmap helps focus all stakeholders on the pieces of the product that must be developed to achieve the strategy and the roadmap has to be vetted against the team’s capacity to produce a credible plan

The three steps to developing a strategic roadmap are

Laying out the external environment i.e. tech, regulation, market trend, competitors
Adding product plans and strategic objectives
Vetting the plan with dependencies and resource constraints

Chapter 4

In this chapter, the author introduces a few frameworks for prioritising product backlogs. These are summarised as below

Return on Investment: quickly understood metric for company-wide projects and also easily “sold” to management. However it can sometimes prioritise short-term over long-term sustenance and that not all decisions are ROI led. Sometimes people also forget that ROI calculations are as good as assumptions gone into them
Voice of Customer (VOC): This provides a good picture into customer pain points and of course VOC is essential component of every other prioritisation method. However sometimes market shifts can be missed if one over-indexes on VoC. Customer cannot quite often tell about new segments or markets to go after
Must, Should, Could, Won’t (MoSoCoW): this is often hard to apply correctly and is not quite suited for innovation-led products. However it can be useful for first-level prioritisation in a release
Kano Model: It looks at how the inclusion or exclusion of a feature contributes to customer satisfaction and how that satisfaction changes based on the level of the implementation. However it does not include product strategy or cost view. Typically any feature in this framework can be modelled along three curves: Must Haves, Delighters and PerformanceHowever one has to consider that customer expectations change over time and today’s delighters could be Must Have very soon. Besides, customers are not often a monolith – so not all features are equally important in these buckets for all

Image 1: Kano Model

Prioritisation Matrix: This s a lightweight, fast, and effective tool to help stakeholders make their beliefs explicit. It is also likely the best way to link product roadmap to company’s strategy, however it is subjective and doesn’t include costs
WSJF Method: Weighted Shortest Job First method prioritises those items which deliver the most value soonest. The key factors when applying WSJF are: value; time sensitivity; risk reduction and opportunity enablement; and duration/effort. However it does not take product strategy or customer perspective into account
Feature Life Cycle Based Prioritisation: essentially this method buckets features into proof of concept, validated learning, minimum marketable feature and polish features. This method however considers cost and risk. And based on the company’s strategy, some risky (POC!) features can be front-loaded
Value, Risk, Cost Matrix: It can help us visualize investment allocation across a “portfolio” of new features. This lens is also useful for evaluating investments across projects. However value is not necessarily connected to product strategy and value and risks assessments are highly subjective

VRC Matrix for Product Backlog Prioritisation

Image 2: Value, Risk, Cost Matrix: Prioritisation Priorities are indicated

One has to frame prioritization in the context of product goals and corporate strategy. Overall objective with prioritization is to develop a winning plan and get stakeholders to understand the prioritization

Chapter 5

As a product manager, one needs to focus on product growth and how the product is doing relative to the market. The Ansoff Growth matrix highlights broad phases per product lifecycle

Image 3: Ansoff Market Growth Matrix. Product development is a depth strategy

Chapter 6

This chapter focuses on product-market fit. PMF typically requires focusing on 3 areas: problem, product and business model. If one takes business model as constant, we have 4 scenarios which product managers find themselves in

Image 4: Problem-product Solution Mix by Greg Cohen

When the business model itself is uncertain the hardest business models to test are those involving channel distribution. It takes time to grow channel relationships, and further time and effort to get those partners active

A nifty trick author proposes when doing customer research is to probe customers around 5Ws. Probe means asking ‘why’ without sounding like a 5-year old – Whys uttered 5 times! One can use phrases like “Tell me more”, “would you describe the last time that happened”, “what is the implication of that”, “how do you deal with that”, “what do you do next”

Chapter 7

This chapter focuses on purposeful learning. The sooner companies, product teams, and product managers are willing to acknowledge that they don’t always have all the answers, nor will they have the complete set of answers upfront, the better they will do at managing the uncertainties and risks of new product development

The most we can ask of any team is to deliver validated learning at all stages of the development process. To do this, you have to do two things: become a purposeful learner and create a learning plan

Few techniques to become a purposeful learner are

PDCA: Plan, Do, Check, Act. Also known as the Deming cycle.55 This model assumes the scientific method can be applied, and that a statistically significant data set can be acquired. It works very well for web analytics and quantitative studies
OODA LOOP — Observe, Orient, Decide, Act: OODA explicitly incorporates cultural context. With the continuous application of the OODA loop, you can navigate an ever changing landscape
Build, Measure, Learn. Within all these processes, the core is to describe how one believes the world works and test it frequently

OTOH learning plans have a question and a test. The team should first formulate a question and then generate a hypothesis or prediction for each test

Chapter 8

This chapter focuses on basic strategy frameworks. There are two components to strategy – where to compete and how to compete. There are 3 ways in deciding where to compete: scale, depth and innovation. Whereas in choosing how to compete – there are 3 positions: leadership, value and low cost. Leadership companies (Apple) focus on delivering superior capability or performance at a premium price. Value companies (Amazon, Flipkart) focus on delivering a high value to price ratio, and low-cost companies (Dell) look to compete almost purely on price

Niching is when a company selects to serve a narrow segment of the market with a product that matches that segment’s unique needs and preferences. Author opines that the companies choose niching when they will struggle to succeed in the mainstream market. This can be contested, niching is sometimes quite a viable strategy to outcompete a behemoth. Think classifieds as a business model are still thriving – surviving 2 decades of technology disruption!

Chapter 9

This chapter provides introduction to familiar frameworks for doing industry analysis. Porter’s five forces framework is touched viz. threat of rivals, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes, bargaining power of suppliers, and bargaining power of customers

When threat of new entrants is high, profit potential becomes limited
Non-consumption, or doing without, is also a substitute
Suppliers also have power if they offer highly differentiated offering or where there are no substitutes. Scale strategies and standardizing inputs allow you to improve your bargaining position with suppliers
Depth strategies are a way to gain power with customers
Innovation strategies, along with leadership or value differentiation strategies, are a way to avoid pure price competition with rivals. Relative market share is calculated by dividing your market share by your largest competitor’s market share

Porter’s Five Forces analysis allows us to understand the pressures on the different players in the industry

Chapter 10

This chapter can be avoided without much loss of information. This focuses on market Maps – powerful visualization tools to compare companies’ strategies for deciding where to compete

Chapter 11

This chapter focuses on pricing. There are three factors that influence the price one can command for the product: value to customer, competitive intensity, and costs. As an example, airlines successfully charge travelers different prices for the exact same product, a technique known as yield management

There are three basic pricing strategies from which to start: Penetration, Skimming, and Maximization

Penetration pricing is when a company prices a product low relative to its value. Jio’s earlier plan in Indian telecom industry is one such example. Freemium pricing strategies are a version of this pricing strategy
Skim pricing is when a company targets a segment of the market with a high willingness to pay, favoring high margins over volume. Apple’s pricing strategy in India is one such example
Maximization is when a company focuses on optimizing total profit or revenue. Amazon as company seems to follow this
- Contribution margin is the money left over after all incremental costs have been subtracted from each additional unit sold. Thus, contribution margin is the money that is available to cover the fixed and sunk costs of the organisationAfter subtracting all these costs, any additional money left over is true profit. To maximize profitability, you maximize contribution margin. This decision is independent of fixed and sunk costs

How you charge for your product is a key pricing strategy decision that is as important, if not more important, than what you charge because it is easier to adjust your price than to change your pricing model

You should not miss reading the appendix of this book where the author explains different kinds of product-business fit challenges through the case study format. Overall this book is a good read for a mid-senior level product professional!

Book Review: Practical User Research: Everything You Need to Know to…” by Dr.Emmanuelle Savarit

September 6, 2020September 6, 2020 Ram SevakLeave a comment

“The issue with startups is not that they do not understand what UX is. I think they are just not ready for it”

“Stakeholders may not realize that face-to-face interviews with 12 people are more reliable than a survey with 100 to 200 respondents”

Have you ever wondered when you should involve user research into your product development? Or think that quantitative research is more reliable than qualitative research? Or wonder how user research can influence business strategy? Or confused about the difference between a user profile and user persona?

This book “Practical User Research: Everything You Need to Know to Integrate User Research to Your Product Development” authored by industry veteran Dr.Emmanuelle Savarit offers a systematic approach to incorporate user research into products. This book is a great read, and can be quite easily used in real life product management situations. Let’s dive in

Structure of the Book

The book is divided into 10 chapters. First 2 chapters concentrate on explaining to readers how user research as an expertise has come about and also how traditionally product development happens across industries. In Chapter 3, the author explains how product managers can introduce or evolve user research function into their organisation depending on their maturity. The author argues that the main obstacle to introducing user research into product development is maturity phase of the business. Chapter 4 and 5 explain how to prepare for user research

Chapter 6 explains main methods for quantitative research namely analytics, surveys and card sorting. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on collecting data and analysing findings for a few qualitative methods. Chapter 9 goes into aspects like ethics, compliance and consent in user research – areas which are generally considered as an afterthought. In the last chapter 10, author briefly touches on how user research projects unfold in real life through 10 case studies she has conducted across multiple industries and cultures

A. Introduction to User Research

User research consists of putting an end user’s needs at the center of the researcher’s investigation. Role of the user researcher is to provide evidence-based findings using quantitative and qualitative research methods. In user research, we are not interested in the demographics, job role, etc. We are interested in participant’s motivation or their behavior while using the product

Like many other disciplines, it traces its origins to the military. After WW2, there was a need felt for optimising weapons in order to minimise injuries to soldiers. Many disciplines like ergonomics, design, human-computer interaction, usability and user research emerged consequently

While doing research, we have the choice of taking a quantitative approach or a qualitative one. Often, stakeholders prefer numbers to case studies. However, when the research is properly done, both approaches are reliable and robust

Quantitative Research

Takes a top-down approach, starting with the big picture and using deductive reasoning
Validates a hypothesis, theory, or preconceived idea
Answers the questions how many, how often, and when
Doesn’t answer why or how people are using the website

Qualitative Research

Takes a bottom-up approach and starts from a specific observation and goes to a generalization and informs theory. It for the same reason leaves room for unexpected avenues
Identifies phenomenon, common patterns, and systematic occurrence
Useful to answer the questions how and why

Often, businesses have difficulties understanding that user research is not going to provide them with what they want to hear but rather help them identify what the user needs to perform a transaction, to complete a task, or to carry out their daily job

A typical digital product development goes through 5 phases

Discovery
1. Get a full understanding of the current situation. It helps to decide at the end of this phase whether the project should be moving to alpha
2. If made correctly, this will limit the risk of failure and create a clear account of what should be done in alpha
Alpha
1. It is the moment when the team can try different options
2. At the end of the alpha phase, the team should have a prototype representing the future service
3. Sometime after completing an alpha phase, the team may realize that it needs to revisit original objectives and needs
Beta
1. Building stage of product development for the backend and the front end to provide a minimum viable product/service (MVP/MVS)
2. At the end of the beta phase, the end-to-end minimum viable product should be ready to move to the private beta phase
Private Beta
1. Way to put live the new service with a small number of users
Live

B. How research can fit into this framework?

Discovery: this phase is an excellent time to do competitive research

Alpha: In this phase, one can conduct pop-up research, also called guerrilla research which is a quick user testing session in which you test screens and prototypes with real users in their natural environment

Beta: One can test prototypes and solutions

Image 1: Integrating User research during PDLC. Credit Dr.Emmanuelle Savarit

The following diagram summaries research methods typically used in developing digital products

Image 2: Methods used in User Research. Credit Dr.Emmanuelle Savarit

How can one arrive at the Research maturity stage for the organisation since it’s so critical for continued success of the function?

Author derives a version from the famed Nileson Norman corporate maturity model for UX

Image 3: Nileson Norman corporate maturity model for UX. Credit Dr.Emmanuelle Savarit

While rest of the stages are self-explanatory, in Skunkworks user experience the organization realizes that relying on design team intuition is risky, and the organization starts requesting some data

Image 4: Savarit User Research Maturity Model. Credit Dr.Emmanuelle Savarit

The author opines about a new trend in user research org: research ops team! It needs to be put in place once the organization already has a certain degree of UX maturity and a good understanding of the differences and advantages of conducting research in the product development life cycle. Typically sometimes user research leadership dons this role depending on size of the company, number of user researchers and project complexity!

C. How to prepare for User Research?

Identify if you need user research for your product
1. The first question to ask is “Does my product/service involve users?” f it does not include end users, you will probably not require any user research.

Review the research that was done in the past and identify the gaps
1. Identifying the gaps is the starting point of conducting user research and finding out what you don’t know
Identify your users
Build a case to get budget for your project
1. While building the case to stakeholders, one has to make sure that they are not reinventing the wheel. One needs to have a clear account of what they are trying to do and why, what the benefits are of doing it, and what the risks are of not doing it
Get your stakeholders on board to support the project
Put in place the relevant capability to conduct the research

D. Research Preparation

This is the most important part of user research

Image 5: Steps in a Research Plan Document. Credit Dr.Emmanuelle Savarit

Few points to remember here

The methods to collect data are different from the research method that one may be using. The approach to collecting your data is not the way you are going to analyze the data. Following diagram provides a good heuristic

Image 6: Methods to Collect Data, depending on the development phase of the Project. Credit Dr.Emmanuelle Savarit

Every participant has the right to withdraw at any time during the research. This should be respected
Use a screener / questionnaire to recruit people for research. However be wary of panels since sometimes although using a panel is cheaper, but it may provide only those people who spend a lot of time taking part in studies, user research, and marketing just for the incentive
It is easier to get participants if you are giving an incentive
Organizing all documents in a clear format may save the team a lot of time

E. Research Methods // Quantitative Research Methods

Point to note here is that quantitative approaches used in isolation will provide only validation of preconceived ideas

Analytics: few points to note

Business context is important while analysing data. For example, in grocery shopping, it takes more than two minutes to fill up a shopping basket. So time spent metric has to be interpreted carefully vis-a-vis other categories
It’s important to realise that analytics alone is not enough, and does not answer the questions of why, how, and who

Surveys: Generally used to describe a population. A survey is a methodology that uses questionnaires to collect data

The advantage of conducting a survey is that one can get a large sample size that will validate some of the assumptions
Surveys are useful to validate findings from qualitative research or for data validation
One can also pay for a panel; useful if looking for a specific audience that is difficult to reach

Card Sorting: It’s asking intended readers to sort items into groups or categories that make sense to them. Few online tools such as Optimal Workshop’s Optimal Sort or UserZoom’s Card Sorting can be used here. Types of card sorting can be of three types: open, closed, hybrid. Some of the use cases for using card sorting quantitative research techniques are

Designing a new information product or improving one already existing: Open card sorting
Whether different groups of readers use the same approach to finding items: Open
Where new topics fit into an existing website or intranet: Closed
Whether you can reduce the number of categories, by testing whether a smaller set still works well: Closed
Set the tone of the organizational pattern while encouraging participants to generate and name their own categories: Hybrid
Further explore groupings that were unclear in an earlier sort while providing categories for groupings that were clear: Hybrid

Having ~40 cards ensures that one will generate the data needed to make decisions about Information Architecture. Beyond 60 cards, participants will be less likely to complete the card sort

Also one must randomize the order in which participants see the cards and the categories unless there’s a specific order to test. This removes list-primacy bias from the overall result

Two of the techniques to interpret data from card sorting are: dendrogram and similarity matrix

F. Research Methods // Qualitative Research Methods

A qualitative approach requires a small sample however analyzing qualitative data takes more time than the data collection itself. Some of the methods used to collect qualitative data are contextual inquiries/ethnography, interviews, focus groups, user testing, and diary studies

To have reliable results with qualitative research, it’s recommended to have a minimum of eight people if you are conducting user testing every two weeks
When product is live or in private beta and if one wants to test the end-to-end journey before release, it’s recommended to have between 12 to 24 participants

Contextual inquiries/ethnography

Here the researcher conducts a face-to-face semi-structured/conversational interview within a user’s natural environment. It’s an observational approach. It’s recommended to be used at the start of every project

Understanding their day and which tasks they have to complete at different times helps us understand which information they will require at time t
It enables us to capture not only how they are using the current product but also to identify the other tools/products that they are using
It however can be time-consuming and is more challenging to record

Interviews

User interviews are frequently used to capture general information about users. There are three types of interviews: structured (pre-defined response), semistructured, and unstructured (natural conversation)

Focus Group

It’s a session that lasts between one and two hours and takes place with six to ten participants who discuss a specific topic. It could be useful when you want your stakeholders involved in the project

Usability Testing

Usability testing/user testing is a face-to-face session with real users who are interacting with the product not only to evaluate the functionalities and the efficiency but also to capture the user’s behavior. However Usability is associated with quantifying success rate, task on time or error rates or satisfaction. User testing can be done as soon as there are some screens available. This is also useful for launching new websites and for evaluating end-to-end user journeys

Some techniques are A/B testing, eye tracking (when there is lot of information – tool Tobii Pro), guerilla testing or pop up research and System Usability Scale (SUS)

System Usability Scale

It is a quick usability test that is now a UX standard. It provides a high-level satisfaction score of the usability of a site, application, or any technological item. SUS is a simple, ten-item scale giving a global view of subjective assessments of usability

SUS scores have a range of 0 to 100. It is not a percentage. A score above 68 is above average, and a score below 68 is below average

Image 7: Interpreting SUS: gold standard for usability testing. Created by John Brooke (1986). Credit Dr.Emmanuelle Savarit

Diary Study

This approach permits us to get insights from users while they are experiencing a situation. The study is longitudinal and captures temporal information

Diary studies are used a lot in the field of education to understand the learning process or seeing how streaming services are being watched
It helps us uncover if participants develop any habits over time
It also allows a peak into user impressions as well as their frustrations
This technique is becoming more democratic now with proliferation of smartphones however making sure that participants remain proactive is a challenge for user researchers

How do we analyse Qualitative Data?

Affinity Diagram

A fast way to analyze data is to create an affinity diagram. Jiro Kawakita created this method that simplifies a large amount of data by grouping it by the themes that emerge from the data

However this analysis should be done with as much objectivity as possible
This method is suitable for brainstorming or early-stage analysis to identify the different steps of a user journey

Thematic Analysis vs. Content Analysis

If we identify that the user makes the same comments while booking a flight or conveys the same issues or frustration, that means we have identified a systematic pattern

Difference between User Profile and User Persona

A user profile is a set of characteristics based on demographics, job role, age, the industry the user is working in. A persona is a typical user who has specific characteristics such are interests, goals, behavior, attitude, habits. A persona is not a real user, it is not a case study, and it is not an imaginative character

G. Few ethical questions in User Research

How do we make a website or a digital product accessible so that people with a disability can use it in terms of perception, comprehension, navigation, and interaction?
Making respondents comfortable, taking their consent for data use, signing up NDAs for protecting company’s information and also understanding that their participation in the research is voluntary, and one cannot force them to respond to our questions

To sum it up, a general process for conducting user research can be summed up as below

Get a brief
Refine the scope of the research in order to set up stakeholder expectations
Work with your stakeholders to draw up the research questions
Choose the relevant method to answer the research questions
Identify the right participants
Collect and analyze the data
Extract meaningful and actionable findings
Share your findings with your team and stakeholders

And this process mostly remains the same across industries, org maturity levels, engagement model of the user researcher or geographies!