Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the introductory
video of this class. This is Shea Jen. I work in
the product team at Phonepay. Phonepay is India's one of the leading Fintech
brands that does over 350 million
transactions per day and has over 500 million
registered users. Prior to this, I have worked
across many BTB SAS firms as a platform product manager and has about ten plus years
of working experience. I started my career as a data scientist and have a computer science
degree from Bispin. So in this class, we will learn about the core levers of building
a solid GDM strategy, which is nothing but
a tactical plan, along with your
product release to ensure that you gain a
competitive advantage to ensure the successful release
of your product and that it reaches to
a widespread audience. Detailed key takeaways
from this class would be a understanding
what a GDM plan is. A GTM plan would include the
pricing of your product, how do you want to
promote the product, different sales enablement,
channels and tactics, the core marketing philosophy you would want to
follow, and so on. Second we also see how do you manage your
product life cycle? That means after the successful
release of your product, how do you plan
the growth stage? How do you make it a
sustainable product, and at what time you make it to a maintainable state so
that it can run on its own. In this class journey, along with discussing core
concepts and frameworks, we'll also do some case
studies so that you can take these learnings and apply in your day to day
life as a product manager. This class ends with a
really cool class project where you get to define
the product metrics, North Star metric,
which is nothing but the core key metric that measures the impact
of your business. We'll also define
primary metrics, which assesses the impact of changes on your
product and lastly, secondary metrics that
ensures that nothing is negatively impacted while you're releasing different
product features. So let's get started. Very excited to see you in
the first lesson. Thank you.
2. Product Release: Hi, eon. Welcome to the new
lecture of product release. That means once
you are done with the execution of the
features for your product, how do you release it
into the market for your end customers for
a successful launch? First item on the checklist is finalizing features
and conducting QA, which is firstly the features that you had intended to build. Doing a higher level QA or UAT from a product
manager's lens is the first step conducting
user acceptance testing, which is AT to validate the product and you do
that with real users. So first step is you
do it by yourself to ensure the high level
features are in place. Then you go a level deeper by conducting Quat with
your real set of users. Third item here
is conducting QA. So we have specialized
QA engineers, just quality assurance engineers
in the company that will do a deep type test to
cover all the edge cases with dummy data or
dummy user flows to ensure the technical
nitty gritties are working fine or no. So this would cover a high level quality assurance that the features that you are intended to build in the
right form is being built and is understandable
by the end users, as well as all the
edge cases are being covered with the
help of QA testing. Second, is technical readiness, once your QA is done, in order to actually push this into a realistic
environment, each company follows
a different strategy, but in some cases, you will push the
actual product into a sandbox environment in a semi production
environment and then to production environment
to ensure all the APIs, databases, integration, et
cetera, are working properly. Just to give you an example, if you are, let's say, adding a new cab ride option
on your ride hailing app. Okay. In that case, when you are pushing it into
the production environment, you need to ensure that A, all the users are seeing this, all the systems are
working in accordance. That means a user
goes and books a cab. This is actually getting
captured in your database. All the right APIs
are getting fired, and the end result of booking a ride showing
the exact pricing is also working in the
intended manner in the production or
the live environment. This is called
technical readiness. Third is internal alignment. When you are about to
push this feature, you need to align on the
timing and the readiness of all your parallel stakeholders
or parallel teams, which is including sales, marketing, so they can prepare their draft to release a note or campaign out in the public as alongside your
exact product launch. Fourth is documentation. So like we discussed
anything and everything that aids to sales and
marketing efforts, as well as user manuals, troubleshooting guides, SOP
needed for customer support. A documentation also need to
be ready in place in case you get customer complaints
or any customer concerns. Uh, last is soft launch
or Beta release. So we saw different types of release strategies that you can make as per your use case. So you need to choose
that strategy, have the right instrumentation, have a sense of what
the feedback is going to look like
and how you are going to incorporate
that feedback. In the worst case scenario, if it's the beta launch
is not successful, you should have a
rollback strategy even if it works fine, firstly, what is the threshold that you will know that
it's working fine or not? And once it does work fine, how to roll it up to
all the end users. So this is a rough checklist
or the category of items you can follow before you release your
product out in the market.
3. GTM Strategy : To the lecture of GDM strategy. GDM strategy is basically how you introduce your
product to the market and introduce it in a way
that maximizes your success, adoption, user engagement,
your customer success, all the important metrics. We'll look at a couple
of categories to ensure all the stakeholders to have a successful launch is covered, have the right GDM in place, and also some of
the metrics that you want to look
post the launch. Starting with market
research and positioning. Let's say when you are launching a new product or a new feature, whatever your nitty
gritties of the products or features that were
highlighted in the PRD. That means to translate
to a very crisp goal or a use case to the end consumer and how your feature
stands out in the market. For example, if you
have, let's say, introduced cashback or you have started introducing
discounts on your product, assuming you are let's
say a D to see brand, you sell various products in the market and you have
just introduced discounts. So what it means to
the end consumer is a very crisp USP that now products are available
at this discounted price, or you can avail cashback
for this and this. The narration has to be in such a way that it's
catchy and appealing, and users find a need and a
use case to use your product. Like I said, the narrative
and storytelling is really important here to not
overcomplicate your USP. Second is pricing and packaging. Take the case of a subscription app newsletter that the product that we talked about in earlier lectures. What is the best pricing to
your subscription model? So it depends on your assessment
of your user persona, their propensity to purchase
your competitor's pricing, the use cases that
you can offer. How to tear it into
different categories. What do you much
are you expecting the users to pick the basic category versus
a premium category? How do you plan to upsell your features within a basic
and a premium category? And ultimately, how do
you package this out? That means, how do you when
you launch a subscription, let's say, a newsletter, how do you bundle this pricing for your product and package it out
in the market? Third is sales enablement. Of course, when you
launch your product, your sales team will be
for a case of a B to B, let's say, product
or a platform. Your sales team becomes the most important
stakeholders because they are the one to get adoption from external clients
to your product. So it's important
to have, let's say, a pitch deck prepared
if they need that to talk with big clients. They need to have a
certain demo environment where they can showcase the
working of your product. You might need a few
strategies like pushing some dummy data into your
product because on day zero, if the end client is just spending time
in integration and uploading their
data for it to see the effectiveness or the
benefits of your product, it is that time has passed. Even if it's not
a B to B product, if you are a say convincing small merchants or clients
in a B to b2c environment, it's better to have
that strategy in place where you can showcase the most important features of your product by
bypassing some of the steps and by producing dummy data by
giving them a demo video. There can be multiple
strategies to it. Yeah, sales channel or sales
team need to be enabled with all the required set set of
creatives or set of demo. Fourth is marketing campaigns. Now, like we discussed, marketing team with
their storytelling and narrative needs
to be updated, as well as the campaigns that
they are going to run on different social
media channels on improving their search engine
optimizations and so on. And even the campaigns or again, the narration that you
want to put out on day zero on day ten have
to be thought through. So let's say if
you are releasing a credit based product that users can apply
loans to, Okay. You have to ensure
that the trust is also established because it is a product that people might not be trustworthy
about on day zero. It requires actual giving
in critical information, and in order for you, you have to understand
this product cannot be completely coming
out as a gimmick. So awareness and
campaigns around that, what needs to be sent
out on day zero? What needs to be
sent out on day ten? How do you establish trust? How do you lay out the process needs to be thought through. Customer success and
support strategy. So this is preparedness of
your customer success team and support folks with your SOP and aligning them what sort
of problems might come. How do you deal with it? What is the best way for them
to give you feedback? What is the right
channel to do that? So that A and customers have a smooth experience
from day zero, as well as your
customer support team is not feeling overwhelmed
with no information. Lastly, metrics for success. Once that product is launched, you need to start capturing the North Star metrics and
other granular metric. A, in order to see how
the product is launched, because based on these metrics, you will take a call whether
to roll this out completely, what to do in the
next iteration. A couple of strategies, marketing strategies also might change depending
on these metrics, other feedback that you get from the so this is roughly the set of areas that you want to cover
when aligning your sales, marketing customer support
team with a GDM plan, you.
4. Product Lifecycle: Hi, Ron. Welcome to the new lecture of
Product Life Cycle. In this section, we'll
discuss the various stages of getting a product to release stage and
what to do afterwards. How do you ensure that the product reaches
its right momentum? What needs to be monitored over time until what time the
important aspects of growth need to be taken care of before you start
removing resources from your team till it reaches
to its own natural pace. Starting with development stage, the goal here is to
build a product that has MVP defined and
feasibility testing done, which aligns with your
market needs as well. Now, in order to achieve
this goal, first, like we discussed, you do the market research to
validate the customer needs, come up with a
vision and a plan, build the prototype by building
the key set of features, by building out the
MVP and plan your GTM. Once the development or execution
of the product is done, you introduce that
into the market. The stage two is introducing it into the market,
gain traction. Validate whether the PMF
has been achieved or not, gain feedback, it rate, and define your user persona
or your customer base. That means what we discussed in the previous last two lectures, which is, how do you
plan a GTM what needs to be taken care of just
after the release. All those details
will come in here, which is introduction
to the market, which is a launching campaigns, awareness to your sales team, market research,
or customer team. Tracking important
metrics to gauge whether any feedback needs to
be incorporated or any strategy that
you had thought of earlier needs to be updated. Lastly, educating the users and the end customers and gauging their end
customers feedback also. Third is the growth stage. Once you have achieved the PMF, you feel that the
product is working, you have identified the
right user persona, it's time for you to scale. The goal here is a
increase the market share. That means increase
the number of users who are using
your product. Drive rapid adoption. So the growth stage involves
getting customers at a much faster rate that was not there in the
introduction stage. So in the introduction stage, you would ensure that everything
is working fine or not. Do I need to improve
certain features before I can go full
scale with the product. And hence, a more rapid adoption in terms of user
growth is needed. As well as to maximize
revenue growth, user growth coming at the expense of low
revenue or basically giving your product in
free is something that's not going to cut from
a PLL point of view. And hence, you need
to ensure that the growth is coming with a good talance of
getting revenue as well. So the key focus areas in this would be a
scaling marketing to reach a border audience. In the introduction phase, you analyze what channels
are the most important ones. Once you have identified that, once you have done basic
budgeting exercise for that, then you would scale
your marketing efforts. Adding new features to
differentiate the product, uh in the previous stage, you had released the MVP. Now here, you would continuously
introduce new features, remove features, and this
is an ongoing exercise. So that depends on how your market is changing
alongside you, if you want to introduce a new language or you want to introduce a new
payment method. This is a contiguous exercise, which will continue to be dictated by
external environment, as well as your company vision. Third, is exploring new
distribution channels. Now this is again to maximize
your revenue growth. If you feel that this channel is as you have scoped out or maximized from this
particular channel, you want to focus on new
distribution strategies as well, as well as new user
retention strategies. So this is a more
mature understanding of your external
market as well as your end consumers that
you would gain over time. So if you feel that the users
are churning after x month, you would need to develop new features for that or develop
new strategies for that, which can come only if you
have a good user base, and you get to know the
patterns on this scale. So after your growth phase, where you have a increased your market share to
the right amount, you have followed avenue
basic revenue model that works on this scale, you reach to the maturity stage. So maturity stage is
you fine tune the Nitegrits in order to make
this a viable business. That means the goal here is, A, you want to sustain
your market position since you have gained
your market share. You want to optimize
for your profitability. Now, this would mean
that if you were selling a subscription model
for $20 earlier, will $22 make cents or not on
the same set of user base. So this is where you can increase the revenue
for your company. And finally extend the
product's lifespan. So you would want this
product to work to eternity for a good
number of years. You have to ensure
a lot of things are working in an
automated manner. A lot of processes
are in place for maintenance and for support in order for it to
continue over time. In order to achieve the goals, some of the line items would be optimizing pricing
strategy as we discussed, enhancing the product
to retain users. So the features, any additional features
that you want to add, any personalized features that is specific to the users
who are churning out, For example, for a haling app, you see that people
above, let's say, the age of 50 or let's say 50 to 70 are also using
your haling app. Now for them, it might the user interface
might not be as easy to understand because
they're not used to exploring digital apps. So for them, you might want to make the experience more
lighter because you see value in the number of users above the age of 50
who are using your product. You don't want to let go
of that customer base. So you have to adjust
some of your feature, be more personalized to them. And this is basically getting a grander understanding
of your user needs. Um, second is
maintaining relevance. Or, like I said, external conditions
will keep on changing, so you have to
stay relevant with a new security protocol
that is introduced a new payment method that
is being introduced, or any trend that is
going outside, right? So if you feel there
is a Christmas Eve, you want to fluctuate
your prices because there is a
high demand and so on. So you have to keep your product relevant to
your external environment. Exploring ages in markets
and secondary use cases. So again, taking
example of Ride hailing apps only where as Uber has
introduced ETS category, which is food delivery as well. So the same set of
development or product can be utilized for broader use
cases in order to again, improve your PNL
getting more revenue by covering many other use cases on the same fundamentals
of the product. So these were the key goals
that you need to take care of with different stages of your product
life cycle. Okay.
5. Release Strategy: Hi, Ron. Welcome to the new lesson of release strategies or
roll out strategies. As as we discussed different products depending
on their use case, market conditions,
business goals, end user personas, follow
different release strategies. So in this lesson, we
are going to discuss some of them with a
few examples as well. Starting with full scale launch, when you follow this strategy, this is basically
releasing your product to the entire
market all at once. This is primarily followed by well established physical brands where consistency is really important for all
the users at once. So for example, if
you have, let's say, change the composition of your product or
let's say if you're building a burger or you have
a beverage as your product, then the composition needs to be changed for every geography
all at once because inconsistency in
customer experience that my kola tastes
differently from here versus there can lead to significant questions or
repercussions for that brand. Second is phased rollouts. In this sort of strategy, follow we select
customer segments and introduce or release
product in stages. So this is done to
gather feedback and allow for it to be a testing environment as well before you
do a wider range. So for example, if your
product is a digital app, you might want to, let's say, uh release it only to power
users or 5% of the users. So you can actually test, whether this release is
technically working fine or is working as expected and
also to gather feedback, imaged feedback or
high impact feedback, do iterations, and then
do a wider launch. Third is pirate launch. This is basically not
a full product launch. It is to conduct a trial
in a very limited area to check for sometimes for ideation or sometimes
for performance or, in general, gather
more user insights. So one such example could be like how Bumble or
dating apps were launched. So those trials were
conducted in colleges or universities where it was a good testing ground
for power users, where the product was not
released in its whole capacity, but primarily to see whether it was peak interest of
the users and if yes, what is the insight or the direct most impactful areas that the product manager needs to look into when they're thinking
of such an audit. Four is soft launch. Now, soft launch is not very different from a
full scale launch, but it helps to gather insights again and test out before you do a
complete PR of the launch. For example, if you are already a well
established company, you're introducing a new
product line at scale. You expect, again,
the scale of users using your product to be very big because you
have a brand name. Hence, a phased out release might not be the best strategy because you would
expect the growth of users on your product
to be really high. You might not get enough
time to do iterations. Hence, a soft launch
where you are not doing a general release
of the product, but just people who are aware of this release are using
this product intensively, so you can maximize
on your improvements. If this Beta testing. Again, it's similar
to pirate launch, but in this case, you are intending to release the product
that you have built, already built, but after a few tests or round
of testing is done. This differs from
pirate launch in a way, pirate launch is primarily in the ideation stage versus a beta testing is where you have already built
out the product, but you are testing
it out slowly. Beta release also
differs in a way that it has not taken care of all the thinness
of the product, but has covered most of the important
functionalities that you want to test out, right? So for example, the UI layout
might not be the best. There might be some sparkles
missing in your product, but functionally,
you want to test it. Geographical rollout, it's basically when you
are a global company, your product might require different tweaks
in each geography. It could be language, it could be a little bit of
change in user flows as well. It could be how different the regulations
and compliances are. So depending on
all these reasons, you want to do a phased
out geographical rollout because even the products
are slightly different. Segmented rollout. Again, it is a variation
of phased rollout, but it is more granular or more nuanced than
that because now you are focusing on different bells and frills around a
certain demographics or certain user categories. So if you see more
if you identify a user persona or target audience with higher
propensity to pay, you would have to tailor some of your features
according to that. So segmented rollout would mean that some of your features
are slightly different, as well as it's released in different stages to
different user personas. Channel based release can be
thought of in a way where let's say you have DDC brand
and you market on Instagram, Facebook, and a couple
of other social media, and you have introduced a new feature and
you want to do PR. So you want to start with
one of the channels first, get feedback and
then distribute to other channels or even the
physical or offline channels. Last is seasonal rollout. Again, it's seasonal rollout is basically when you are
releasing some features or some campaigns or launches that are applicable
only to that season. It could be like a Christmas
season end of year sales, big billion day. So this is to maximize
your visibility. This is for business
point of view, it is done for
different reasons. So if you have a lot
of stock building, you want to remove the stock, you would want to then conduct one seasonal release or
one seasonal campaign. There might be other
reasons to do so. But here, seasonal rollout
is important because it's not going to stay permanent
in your product launch. So if a season like
Christmas, comes. You want to introduce
a new sort of layout. You want to fluctuate
pricing a little bit more. You want to put a deadline
of purchase for some items. And these items or
these features have to be controlled by a feature
flag because like I said, it's temporary in nature. Hence, a different Rise strategy technically also needs to be
built before you can follow, you know, execution
of this strategy. So these were a couple
of release strategies depending on the nature of your product and
your business goals. You have to choose this
wisely and make time to instrument the
release as well, okay?
Shreya Jain
