Finest-5 Product reads #38
Product marketing, microservices, cohort retention, etc.
Hi,
Let’s start with a collection of excellent tools that Kavir shared last week. Though, I do not use all of them as I believe in using limited tools to not shuffle a lot between them, but my list resembles this a lot. Do have a look and adapt 1-2 new tools to improve your productivity.
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What Product Managers need to know about Product Marketing
Product marketing and product managers a lot of time can come into conflict because of vague definitions and on decision-making front, where both teams believe what they suggest is the right thing to build.
Key Takeaways:
Simply, product management is about deciding what to build, for who and why. Product marketing is figuring out the most effective ways of telling potential customers about what’s been built.
Distribution and reach are one thing, but converting these users is quite another. You can go viral on TikTok and get 2 million views on a video, but if this results in zero conversions, what’s the point?
Product marketers will consistently think in terms of audience segments. This is an important mindset to adopt as a product manager, too.
Why should product managers understand Microservices?
Microservices - is an architectural style where the application is a collection of services that are loosely coupled and independently deployable.
Key Takeaways:
Benefits: Faster time to market, True omnichannel experience, Better and less complex code, Easy deployment, Independence to choose technology stack
The product leader should carefully decompose the large, complex application into a set of logical services, where the new and changed requirements only affect a single service.
One easy way to decompose an application into services is to define services according to the business capabilities and then into pods.
How to involve customers at every stage of the product development process
We all know talking to customers is important, but most of us remember them for beta testing or at the market research stage. However, it is important to be in touch at every stage.
Key Takeaways:
Sharing the customer’s articulation of the problem will help you build a solution that solves exactly that problem. Otherwise, you might end up beating around the bush.
While building the solution, the designer might try different approaches. If you have multiple approaches to choose from or want to identify usability issues, it’s better to do prototype testing.
Shift Left — The earlier in the development process you identify issues, the lesser is the time & cost associated with fixing them.
How to measure cohort retention
Retention is the most important thing that is needed for a product to scale. However, for measuring retention, our understanding is limited.
Key Takeaways:
Most companies use logins or app opens as main events for the “active users” definition. But to aim for the cleanest and most precise data reporting, recommendation is using the main user action as the activity event.
Often, a mistake SaaS companies make is reporting one “blended” retention, with a mix of free and paid users. This can be misleading, because users who pay for the product are likely to use it way more than free users.
The next step in calculating retention is setting your timeline. As a team, agree on what retention reporting type you should adopt: X-day retention or Unbounded (rolling) retention.
How to offboard users the right way
Offboarding the users is like saying goodbye. We do it in different ways. Some try to keep it professional, while some show emotions to extremes. In product, we can understand the reason for drop and adjust product behaviour.
Key Takeaways:
Using human emotions to make someone feel bad for leaving is an inadequate exaggeration.
Start introducing new ways of using your product when you detect a decline in usage.
That’s why smooth offboarding is key to keeping a good reputation. Even if people leave, they can still recommend your product for years if their last interaction was meaningful.
Product of the week: Weekrise
Task Management Made Easy
Weekrise is a good tool to organise all your todo, maybe day, week or long term. This looks like a tool I will pick up in the long term to manage all my non-meeting tasks.