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- Product Management In Automobile Industry: Roles & Responsibilities
Product Management In Automobile Industry: Roles & Responsibilities
Updated on 26 October, 2022
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Table of Contents
How Product Management works in Automobile Industry
Product Management revolves around the overall supervision of a product. It is a functionality to structure all the phases of a product life cycle. A product manager’s role is to manage the growth of a product from the initial stage until the time it reaches the customers. In the case of the automotive industry, there are conventional processes that are still prevalent.
This industry mainly consists of aging employees and faces several problems due to internal and external factors. The emergence of electric vehicles, constant rise in global warming, and globalization are some of the significant challenges faced in the automotive industry. Despite all the challenges faced, the automotive industry is continually evolving and embracing the latest innovations to make an impact in the market.
Product management is a very demanding field and is expected to reach $59.25 billion by 2027 (Source). There are many reasons behind product management’s growth and demand. The products that have been put into the market need to be successful, to measure that certain parameters have been attached to them. With the rising competition in the market, these product managers need to stay at the top of the game in order to create and deliver products that are targeted toward consumers.
There is a big requirement of the product managers in the automotive industry as they are the ones who keep a knowledge bank of the sales, product, and strategy with them so as to define the next step better. Along with that, they keep a close competitive analysis of the products in the market. The product managers in the automotive industry stay on the edge and are responsible for a better product in the market, they work closely with various teams.
Product Managers in the automotive industry have to monitor the technical progress of a product besides the traditional role. It is a bit cumbersome to adapt to new tools and frameworks as most of the people in this industry are aging.
However, this is an exciting time to be a part of the automotive industry with disruptive innovations in electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles, and other mobility solutions. In this article, we will read about the changing role of product managers with the disruptions being caused.
The automotive industry in today’s times is changing vastly with electrical vehicles also making an entry into the industry. The automotive industry is strongly driven by the forces of connectivity, mobility, design, and technology. And automotive product development makes sure to maintain a sync among all of these in order to keep the standards high.
Keep reading to know more about product management in the automotive industry.
Read: A complete guide on product manager career growth
Processes involved
In automobile companies, there is less freedom for innovation given to product managers. Usually, a top-down hierarchical approach is adopted for decision-making and other processes.
Regardless of the scenario, the automotive industry management is centric on making sure that the product pipeline is intact and the elements remain standardised across the products.
Check out our management programs to upskill yourself.
Competition Faced
The competition faced in the automobile industry is quite fierce. Product Managers here need to strengthen the relationship with customers to increase the customer satisfaction level, thus solidifying the market shares. With the latest technologies and disruptions in the automotive industry, product managers ensure that the entire team is ready to adopt smart product features as a result of innovation. This enables the company to thrive in the fast-growing and evolving automotive market.
There seems to be huge competition in the automotive industry, one of them is consumer behaviour, which keeps on fluctuating with the given options to choose from. The behaviour change could be either guided by the price, design, technology, or durability. The product managers stay on the edge to balance out this possibility by communicating internally within the teams and advising the right strategy.
There is a stern focus on maintaining the product quality which is competitive in the market. With the advent of technology, automobile products in the market need to have a defining feature that sets them apart. The product manager automotive industry understands the gap in the market and also suggests innovations that need to be done.
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Monitoring End-Users
There are various tiers involved in the automotive industry. OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) belong to the tier-1 supplier. OEMs are the big brands that sell a product directly to the end-user. Any product in the automotive industry needs to be of top-notch to sell in this competitive market.
The tier 1 manufacturers are responsible for supplying automobile parts to the OEMs. Similarly, tier 2 provides components to the tier 1 manufacturers. Gradually things are changing, more tier 1 supplier is carrying on business with the end-users.
There has not been much correlation between retention of users and engagement policies. However, this is changing now. Product Managers are working closely with data processing teams to derive maximum information. The essential insights extracted, help the organization move a step ahead in the product value chain. This is why monitoring the end-users is an essential step as a part of product management in the automotive industry.
Monitoring allows product managers to foresee upcoming trends and tackle the situation. Also, it allows the managers to stay informed and derive strategic information from the data gathered by the teams and devise innovative ways to improve the product that caters to consumer demand. As the automobile is a product that is useful for every industry from railways, to road, water, or air transport. It has importance in every industry.
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Disruptive Innovations in the Automotive Industry
There have been constant changes in the automotive industry. With emerging technologies, high-end research is going on in the field of electric vehicles, constructing autonomous vehicles, and there is the development of other innovative solutions. As people from the automotive industry like to stick to conventional ways, there has to be someone explaining the need for a transition to new innovative ways to survive in this immensely competitive world.
A product manager is fit for this role. PMs keep themselves updated with the latest trends in the market. They study about the new tools or frameworks that cause disruptions. Product managers need to ensure that all the teams are on the same page. This can be achieved only if there is good communication among the teams. A product manager has a close look at other companies.
A product manager keeps the track of the new innovations that come into the industry along with that they also make sure to stay within the government rules set for the automotive industry. That does not create any problem post launch of the product. Also, they maintain the standards that remain appropriate according to the brand.
He monitors the challenges faced by other companies and the ways they used to combat the difficulties. The day is not far when we see fully automatic vehicles used as a popular means of transport. A huge credit for this will go to the product managers who act as mini CEOs for making this possible.
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Integrating the latest Software and Hardware
With advancements in technology, there has been cutting edge technologies emerging in the market. The latest software needs advanced hardware to function smoothly. Thus, the integration of advanced software and hardware is an important part of product management in the automotive industry.
According to a recent survey, more than 80% of innovations of products in the automotive industry are a result of new software features. Numerous Original Equipment Manufacturers have transformed to be a part of the Agile Enterprise. Accenture’s AutoScrum is one such Agile enterprise gaining popularity these days.
Accenture’s AutoScrum provides a platform for the integration of software and hardware development. The only challenge is to synchronize the long development cycle of hardware with Agile’s fast development cycle.
There is a huge involvement of the IoT and AI in the automobile industry, the product managers make sure to inculcate the latest trends into the automotive industry so as to spread consumer satisfaction. The latest software and hardware are incorporated into the existing model increasing the quality of experience gained through the experience.
Softwares improve the car’s functionality in the system, some examples of software in the automotive industry are autopilot features, memory, navigation, etc. Similarly, hardware aims to improve the driving experience of the car. And with the rise of technology the brand needs to be aware of the latest technology and incorporate the same swiftly to stay up in the market and product managers in the automotive industry facilitate the same process.
Read: Average Product Manager Salary
Study Product Management Courses online from the World’s top Universities. Earn Masters, Executive PGP, or Advanced Certificate Programs to fast-track your career.
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Wrapping Up
With emerging new technology, there have been massive changes in the automotive industry. The role of a product manager is constantly updating to adopt the latest tools and technologies. This enables the best product to be designed and developed.
Thus, a product manager needs to be strategic and proactive to look for easier ways to eradicate existing problems continuously. New feature roll-outs to current products need to be ensured. The new features ensure that the products do not become obsolete in today’s world and remain in use.
The Product Management Role is thus considered one of the most crucial positions regarding the organization’s growth and development. High-paid PMs in the automotive industry lead the sophistication of day-to-day life by using technological tools.
If you are willing to learn more about Product Management, check out upGrad and Duke Corporate Education’s Post Graduate Certificate in Product Management. In this course, you will gain vast knowledge on how to build a product roadmap through user research, prototyping, and product analysis. This course offers 200+ hours of learning, certification from Duke CE, 15+ case studies and assignments, one-on-one mentorship from product experts.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Q1. Is product management a good career path?
A career in product management can be supremely rewarding and attractive for those who have a creative bent of mind and are interested in playing a vital part in the development of products. Products can be anything from regular consumer goods to business software, automobiles, or anything else that is used by people. Product management roles are highly dynamic and encompass an extensive range of tasks from handling clients, holding meetings with the executive leaders to testing products. They are the ones who set a vision about a specific product, manage a portfolio comprising different areas of expertise, ensure smooth development of products, and handle the entire product lifecycle.
Q2. How is a product manager different from a brand manager?
A product is a service or commodity that people use for their benefit, while a brand is an abstract metric that decides how the public perceives an organization. A brand can influence whether people will choose its product or not. A product manager is responsible for the features, design, and delivery of the full product. Their work is often technical and logistical. On the other hand, a brand manager is responsible for maintaining a particular brand and its goodwill. Brand managers are engaged in more strategic functions with the intention of augmenting and generating more interest in the brand through effective marketing techniques.
Q3. Is it automobile or automotive?
Automobile and automotive are words that are associated with the vehicle manufacturing sector. Both of these words are often used interchangeably to refer to any motor vehicle, although automotive is a broader umbrella term that denotes anything linked to motor vehicles. Automotive is (an adjective) used to describe anything that is related to motor vehicles. At the same time, the automobile is a (noun) word that typically denotes a four-wheeled car or motor vehicle that is used for transportation. So automobiles, which are typically passenger vehicles, are essentially a subset or part of the automotive industry.
Did you find this article helpful?
Jitesh is an experienced Growth Product Manager with a demonstrated history of working in successful startups and expertise in the education-technology domain. His core skills are in analyzing, designing and architecting products to improve user experience and help scale businesses.
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How do I transition to being a Product Manager?
(Note: This article was first posted on LinkedIn Pulse by Dalan Mendonca, Product Manager at Instamojo.)
Answering a question that I get asked a lot.
Short answer
The Product Manager is the jack of all trades, coordinating with design, engineering, sales, et al. to make the product better and grow the business.
In general, if you’ve:
Taken a project from start to finish/operational state.
Worked with diverse stakeholders to get your project out.
Have a basic awareness of the multitude of things that shape a product like design, marketing, support, QA, analytics etc.
you should be able to move into a product manager role.
Long answer
Step 1. Understand who a Product Manager is
You may have heard about this job indirectly (as I did) or worked directly with a PM or two. In any case it might be useful to know the job before trying for it!
PM are to products what CEOs are to companies. A PM (or the PM team) is responsible for every aspect of the product from the bounce of the animations on the app to the speed of customer service. You own that shit & any product problem is your problem.
Sounds like a vague job description doesn’t it? You must be thinking so what does the PM actually do?
The answer, whatever it takes to make the product successful.
Yes, it’s a vague role because PMs by nature are generalists.
The product manager will:
Define goals for the product, decide actions to be taken, communicate that clearly to the team, get things built, see if it matches expectations, rinse repeat.
The work varies based on the stage of the company too. A PM at an early stage company will be responsible for defining the product, understanding the market, picking the best features to push out in version 1, and probably also hiring the team.
Slightly later, it’s about tuning the product to its users, testing out the assumptions underlying your product, and making something your users get with ease. As the product matures, the focus might shift to growing the number of users, putting the right metrics around it, optimizing the product to perform at a better scale, etc.
Check out our management programs to upskill yourself.
Step 2. Get/fake PM experience
Now you’re like “Yeah great I get what a PM does, how do I become one?”
Get product thinking — A product is the culmination of many things, the important thing is learn how to take a holistic viewpoint of products instead of sitting on one side of the iOS vs Android or insert you pet battle here> debate.
Go own a project — Take something from start to finish. Do things you couldn’t have done on your own.
Go cross-functional — Try to understand in depth what people in various departments in a company do on a daily basis.
Figure out business models — Take your random idea and then imagine how you’d make money from this. How does X company sell its stuff/make money?
Critique products — Love/hate some product? Explain what’s so awesome/sucky about it. What would add/remove from it? If you were to launch X today, what would be different about it? How did it get so popular?
Working on a hobby project/product of your own is by far the easiest way to gain the above.
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Step 3. Understand basic PM terminology
What to build — Requirements, wireframes, product specs, functional specs, technical specs, flowcharts.
When to build — Roadmaps, pipelines
Measuring things:
What are people up to — Funnels, AIDA, MAUs/WAUs/DAUs, retention, (likes, shares, tweets, pins), (likes, shares, tweets, pins)/ person, time spent, bounce rate, installs, searches, ..
Money — Total revenue, ARPU, LTV, avg. ticket size, GMV,
General management BS: Stakeholders, value proposition, .. just hangout with an MBA grad for a few hours and you’ll be sorted in this department.
upGrad’s Exclusive Product Management Webinar for you –
How to craft GTM Strategy for a Product?
document.createElement('video');
https://cdn.upgrad.com/blog/panel-discussion-on-crafting-gtm-strategy-for-a-product.mp4
Step 4. Know the different paths to get there
If you’ve got can crack beginner product roles like Associate/Junior PM good for you, else you might have to take a hit and get some “management education”. Also, a lot of folks move into the Product Management from related roles like Product Marketing, QA, etc.
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My own story
I kinda got lucky.
I had worked on product-ish projects since right since my college days. My first job was that of a data analyst on the Site Integrity/Anti-Spam team at Facebook — apart the regular data analysis/data modeling work that most analysts do, I got the opportunity to lead some really impactful projects where I worked with lawyers, engineers, policy writers, fellow analysts and security researchers.
This was my first taste of blood in terms of working cross-functionally. Hereby lead I mean being the person owning the project and responsible for its success, not in terms of having any title that implied the same.
Another experience that got me awesome exposure was an internal rotation I did within Facebook. Think of a rotation as an internal internship where you work with a different team for a while. I worked for the Global Sales Reporting team — this teams assists the top advertisers on Facebook in understanding what happened to their ad money; working here showed me a whole new world of online advertising — Clients, client partners, account managers, sales pitches, campaigns, demographic targeting, ad impressions, click through rates, ad inventory, various ad products/ad networks and a whole lot more.
It was really eye opening to work in a team operating in the same company but working very differently because they solved a whole different problem.
The above experiences amongst a litany of others, helped me make up mind about getting into the PM space. I decided to hunt for APM roles or Business analyst roles in companies where I could move into a PM role later. Did crack quite a few interviews where everything went fine but in most cases was rejected in the end for not having any prior PM experience. However all was not lost, I did crack an Associate PM role at Paytm, one of India’s fastest growing e-commerce companies. That gig however didn’t pan out for too long and I was out looking for another place — I ended taking up a Product Manager role (YAY! Promotion from APM :’D) at an early stage startup called Instamojo for the (possible) experience and challenge of seeing a company grow into something bigger and thats from where I write this today.
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So around 18 months into this, having not (yet) being fired as a PM, I can say my transition into being a product manager hasn’t gone that bad 😀
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A Day In The Life Of A Product Manager
Note: This article is originally written by Dinesh Vernekar, Head of Growth – Gaana, Product Manager | Analytics | Mobile
Technology moves very fast. As a product manager, you have to adapt and constantly evolve. Also you need to keep track of multiple threads and be productive at the same time.
In the past 2 years I’ve worked on a search stack for Gaana, a digital asset management system and built out an android app (go check Smartapp, the fastest way to recharge with smart recommendations!). Project management is a big part of product in the initial stages but success is defined by metrics and focus. I believe the job definition constantly evolves. Below is my experience so far.
I try to start out as early as possible so I’m off to work by 7.30 am. I grab some breakfast at work as soon as I come.
My day is broken down into 4 key parts.
1. Email and organisation — Follow-up, keeping track of things.
2. Discussion — Resolving issues, helping the team move forward.
3. Creative work — Defining a requirement
4. Planning — High-level purview
Things I do on a daily basis:
10:00–11.00 am, through the day.
Email and Slack:
I joke that my job is to write emails. But it might not be that far from the truth. Communication is a very important function of a PM.
I start by replying/marking the most important threads.
10.30 am
Daily scrum and JIRA board:
A daily scrum helps everyone chip in with their inputs and identify possible issues. A typical meeting lasts about 20 mins. We use JIRA for project planning. It’s a bit hard to get started with this tool but it’s quite powerful. A functional document is broken down into tasks and a sprint is planned. I do this as I come across ideas.
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The actual work:
11.00 am — 2:00 pm
Product specification:
I prefer the Joel Spolsky way of writing a detailed functional specification. It helps us get clarity on the requirement and speeds up dev. Entire days are spent defining and refining a spec. Once a spec is created, it’s broken down into individual JIRA tasks and prioritised in the backlog.
As a PM, the focus is on the outcome.
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Setting goals and meeting them matters more than the process. You take a number of small decisions everyday like postponing a feature, trimming something down etc. I’ve screwed up a number of tasks by not defining a task properly, building the wrong thing, being under-prepared. As a PM it’s your job to take responsibility for it all.
Reading documentation:
Understanding the third-party SDK, testing the APIs, raising questions.
Writing documentation:
Documentation of APIs, updating them on a timely basis. I think this is very important. If you’ve done the hard work and designed an easy to use extendable API, you should definitely go the extra mile and detail it out.
First level of debug: I’m also the first level of debug for the APIs.
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3:00 pm
Discussion and meetings: A discussion can range from an optimal UX flow to design of a new payment api. For a typical meeting, you prepare the points to be discussed, figure out possible problem points and communicate before hand if possible. Now with slack, we just post ideas to a channel and team members contribute through the day. Typically we hold a meeting after lunch.
A lot of this is tedious and it’s easy to be caught in the process loop.
4:00 pm
Google analytics and metrics: When I worked on the search stack, we spent a good amount of time debating the right metrics to be tracked.
The fun stuff:
I spend a decent amount of my day tweeting random stuff, reading news on hacker news and keeping up with tech news.
Keeping up:
A PM has to constantly evolve to keep up with the latest trends in design, play-store eco-system etc. I’ve completed a couple of tracks online. I’m currently learning Android dev.
6.30 pm
Goofing around:
When I’m not all serious and updating JIRA tasks, I’m goofing around making inappropriate comments and drinking coffee. Hanging out with friends etc.
Final comments:
I’m constantly evaluating what it means to be a good PM. Keeping up with different threads, getting better at strategy, looking at the larger picture, building empathy. I’ll love to hear your thoughts.
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Decode your way into Product Management
Learn how you can acquire the technical skills of a product manager
A product manager’s job is not easy – neither to define nor to execute. When there are so many definitions of what the role is, it gets tougher to define what the role exactly entails. There are a 100 things a product manager is responsible for along the product journey; right from conceptualization to design to building the product to taking it to market. For a role that has touch points across the business, it is important for an aspiring PM to understand the skills that a product manager must have.
Through a series of articles, UpGrad will help you figure what it takes to be a PM. We will also tell you what you can do, every day, in order to develop these skills and smoothen your transition to a product manager. There are basically three key areas that the work of a PM is focused on. For the sake of not repeating the clichéd Venn diagram, the skills are listed as follows: –
Technical skills
Design Skills
Business and managerial skills
In this first article of the series, we are going to talk about what the first bucket – the technical skills required to be a PM and how you can develop them.
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Technical skills:
A PM is typically not required to write code to develop a product. However as someone whose core role is to solve problems using technology, a PM still needs strong technical knowledge to:
Define how the product should function to solve the problem at hand
Accurately define and prioritize product requirements based on the effort required to build them
Efficiently communicate with the engineering team to brainstorm solutions, validating timelines and checking progress
Also Read: A day in the life of a Product Manager – Making it all work
There are a number of things an aspiring PM can do to build their technical expertise:
Learn how to code – In all probability, you will not be required to code as a PM. However, knowing how to code will get you well versed with the terminology, help you understand the tech constraints and feasibility much more accurately, and help you communicate your requirements and collaborate far better with the engineering team. You can either pick up a book (like Beginning programming – for dummies, Coding – for dummies), or get on codecademy.com (or other online tutorials), or simply start googling (What is backend development? What are stacks?) to give you a start. You don’t need to be an expert, but it helps to know the basics.
Talk to the tech team at your current employment – Another great way of learning to speak the tech language, is to try and engage with the tech team at your current job. Talk to the engineering guys; try to understand what they do, how the team functions, what is the typical software development process, what would they expect for a product manager to know. This can be a good point from where you can then start googling and reading about tech terminologies, as suggested in the previous point. You could also take their assistance in teaching you how to code – you could probably ask them to send you debugging assignments once a while, to get you accustomed to coding.
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Learn SQL – SQL is a programming language designed for managing and querying data in a database. As a product manager, you will often need to play around a lot of data. Learning the basics of SQL will help you go a long way in your PM journey. It isn’t complicated and won’t be an investment heavy on time.
Develop a technical viewpoint – Technology will be at the core of whatever product you develop as a PM. Starting to think about products with a technical lens will prove to be extremely rewarding in helping you develop a product vision. Every time you use an app, think about
The technology that the app is using
How is the app different from its peers on the technology front?
What can you do to improve the app?
You could run by your suggestion with the technical team at your office, over a casual chat, to know if have been thinking in the right direction – from a feasibility point of view, and getting their opinion on how they think about the app. Doing this exercise on an ongoing basis will definitely help you develop a technical viewpoint of looking at products.
Stay updated on the tech ecosystem – Start reading about what is happening in the technology space. Start following Quora, Mashable,TechCrunch, Verge, Tech Insider, Gizmodo, and others. Read digital news. Have discussions about what is new, what is defunct and what is upcoming. It will help you in ideation, conceptualization and execution alike.
Hack up a side project – And for the final and most effective hack, pick up a fun side project and try and build it from scratch. Could be anything from a simple photo app or a chat bot. Try and get others to use it. Building something from scratch for actual users to use will make you appreciate the intricacy involved at every step and go a long way in improving your technical knowledge.
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As a PM, you will be interacting with the tech team day in and day out. You will be the sole point of contact between tech, design, business and users. It, therefore, becomes extremely important for you to understand the tech language so as to be able to play the role of a translator well. Practicing the hacks mentioned above while tweaking your daily schedule just a little bit is going to help you in enormous amounts in your journey of being a PM.
Stay tuned for two more articles of the edition to learn about design and business skills. Till then, sharpen your tech skills and get closer to becoming a PM!
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UpGrad’s PM Program attracts IITs/IIMs/ISB students
We are thrilled to announce that our first batch of UpGrad Product Management Program launched on 30th July and is running houseful with students from top schools like IITs, IIMs, ISB, working at companies such as Practo, HP, Coca-Cola, Adobe, Intel, and others.
The sheer diversity of the batch stands as a testament to the exponentially growing interest in the field of product management. 70% of the batch consists of students with over seven years of work experience. There is a healthy balance of professionals from technical and non-technical background, current and aspiring product managers and budding entrepreneurs. Our students hail from varied geographies such as Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata, Dubai and Germany. While the cohort has a mix of students with diverse backgrounds in terms of experience levels, geographies and work backgrounds, what binds them together is the common goal to start and successfully grow their career in product management.
“Structured approach, live projects and mentorship from industry leaders are all which attract me to this program,” says Pulkit Jain, an IIM graduate currently working at Adobe. Kushagra Jaiswal, an IIT Delhi alumnus who is working on his own startup, feels this is a “chance to learn something which is not frequently taught and the chance to network with the stalwarts of this line of job.”
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Read: Scope for Product management career and jobs
Product management as a role has come to be one of the most critical ones in current times. There’s no better time to be a product manager in India than today given the booming Indian startup ecosystem. With the growing number of startups and tech companies in India fighting neck-to-neck to have a competitive edge by launching a new product every year or by constantly improvising on the existing product, there is an increasing demand for PMs who understand the consumer behavior of Indian users. Product managers are the backbone of any product team who play an all-encompassing role of seeing the team through till the product launches in the most responsible and efficient way possible, no matter what they have to do. Neena Budhiraja, Director – Product Management at Ola, says that a product manager is the ‘CEO of his/her product’.
Manish Jethani, Head Consumer Products at Grofers, who was the founder of food delivery startup Spoonjoy says “India is going online; even the older generation is rapidly adopting technologies like Facebook, Whatsapp, etc. Now that a lot of products are being made in India for Indian population, there is a gap in availability of people who understand the user behaviour and what needs to be built.”
While the demand for this role is at an all time high, the skill-set required is scarce. This is largely because the product management is a nascent career option in India due to which a mentor ecosystem has not developed. Moreover, it is a role that needs one to have a deep understanding across diverse areas such as technology, design and business.
To fill this huge demand and skill gap, UpGrad introduced an extensive five-month online Post Graduate Certificate in Product Management — a program that allows you to learn, develop and implement the necessary skills to be an ace product manager. It gives you a sneak peek into the experiences and anecdotes of leading product managers at Microsoft, Paytm, Practo, Myntra, Bookmyshow and other leading companies, inspiring you to hone your soft skills and understand the fundamentals of product management like user research, product design, product analytics and much more.
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The UpGrad Product Management Program is a fantastic tool to have at your disposal to learn product management. – Mangesh Dalvi, AVP – Products, Myntra
This course gives you an opportunity to be mentored one-on-one by the product heads of leading technology companies such as Practo, Paytm, Microsoft, Goibibo, and Freshdesk, and learn through live Q&A with industry experts. It lets you get a hands-on experience by making you solve real product problems faced by the industry and thereby building your own product portfolio by the end of the program. Its special placement assistance program helps you showcase your product development knowledge to potential recruiters, thus helping you step into the shoes of a good product manager seamlessly.
Here is what Punit Soni, ex-Chief Product Officer at Flipkart, has to say about product management in India:
To know more about this program, take a look at the detailed syllabus here. And if you are floored by it, don’t be discouraged by the ‘bookings closed’ sign. The admissions for the next batch which starts on 15th October is already open. You can sign up for it at any time right here.
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Do you know different Types of Product Managers?
Product managers come in all forms and flavors. Product management, as a subject, is too vast and generic to fit a single description. Not only this; different types of product managers can also be divided into different groups based on their skills and specializations – the type of product they work on (B2B vs B2C, early, mature), or even at a higher level (whether they are builders, tuners, and innovators).
If you are an aspiring Product Manager or have just started your career as one, you must be extremely confused about what is expected of you, which areas you should dive into and what are the things you should hone or work on. So, let me make it simple for you. A product manager is generally expected to work at the intersection of business, UX, and technology.
Based on such a generic description, every Product Manager seems to have the same set of skillsets. So how do we classify them?
In this post, I am going to classify some Product Managers (going by some of the greatest Product Managers of our times – as inspiration), based on what they bring to the table, a.k.a. their unique strengths. Depending on what your current skill-sets are, you can choose who you want to be like, or aspire to be, and build some really awesome things as a product manager.
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Check out the video and Infographic below explaining different types of product managers!
These are the Different Types of Product Managers:
1) The Tech Product Manager
I know my rocket inside out and backward. I can tell you the heat treating temper of the skin material, where it changes, why we chose that material, the welding technique… down to the gnat’s ass.
– Elon Musk is a product guy who has been a ‘techie’ throughout his life. He is the chief technology officer at SpaceX, a company that he founded to take on the multi-planetary existence of the human species.
Marissa Mayer falls into this category as well.
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Pitfalls/Traps: These Product Managers try to solve engineering problems, which they are pretty good with. However, this means they can end up working as an engineering manager on the team, rather than a product manager. If this is the type of PM role you see best fit for you, you should focus on defining WHY you are building something, and WHAT you are building. You should leave the ‘HOW to build it’ for engineers.
Advantage 1: These PMs work pretty well with engineers and it takes them no time to gain their trust and respect.
Advantage 2: They can think through technical products (AWS, recommendation engines) pretty easily. Google/Amazon hires a lot of engineer-turned-product managers.
What you should focus on next?: Building a good business sense and user empathy to see the big picture, and defining what products to build. Also, though not true for most, some may struggle with communication skills to get along with cross-functional teams.
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2) The Designer Product Manager
Steve Jobs made this category very appealing, didn’t he? Most people remember Steve as the guy who revolutionized six industries. Few people focus on the common thread that runs between those six industries – animated movies, digital publishing, music, personal computers, phones, computing tablets.
Steve was the guy who could strongly sense the future needs of consumers and focused (with almost a crazy precision) on design and aesthetics in all these products. Brian Chesky, co-founder, and CEO at Airbnb, and Joe Gebbia (CPO, Airbnb) are other examples of designer Product Managers.
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Challenge: Many coders idolize Steve Wozniak over Steve Jobs because Jobs didn’t write a single line of code. And this would be a problem when you are starting as a Product Manager because you haven’t been anywhere near the engineering as a designer. Their method of working is quite different from yours. So it becomes harder for both to work together. Same goes for this Product Manager working with other teams, like sales and operations.
Advantage: You understand what a good product looks like. You empathize fairly well with the users of the product and understand the difference between stated preference and revealed preference. All these qualities help you make and design much needed, beautiful products.
What you should focus on: Building a business sense is pretty important as this will help you prioritize things. As a designer, you get pretty good at recognizing flaws in a product. Prioritization will help you define what to focus on.
Where you should go: Instagram/Facebook/Apple/Tesla would love you.
3) The Business Product Manager
Ever saw that fast-talking MBA kid who seems pretty well versed in terminologies of business, operations, and finance? Probably starting off with liberal arts, engineering or economics major and going on to learn elements of business by either doing an MBA or some such.
Some people in this category actually learn about business fundamentals by working with/for a fast-growing startup, as well. They are pretty good at communicating with, and understanding, people around them. Ken Norton falls in this category.
Pitfalls: Not understanding technology/design very well can lead to conflicts, and it takes hard work to build credibility with designers and coders.
Advantage: These are good thinkers and are able to paint and see the big picture to lead teams.
What you should focus on: You have a lot of things to do. Start by understanding how tech works and evolves over time. Develop an eye for detail and rigor. You don’t see many of these in product manager roles unless they get an MBA.
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4) The Data Product Manager
A future role, I must say. With the advent of gaming apps, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the role of a Data Product Manager is also emerging. These Product Managers work on data products such as recommendation products, personalization, etc.
They are pretty good at reading and finding patterns in data and since data is the key to decision-making in most meetings these days, they gain influence within many teams, over time.
You don’t see many Product Managers right now in this category. Sebastian Thrun, who led the integration of big data into robotics, falls in this category. He is the founder of the leading ed-tech startup Udacity. Netflix, Amazon, and Google are companies driven by data algorithms and personalization, and they would love this kind of a Product Manager.
Pitfalls: Focusing on data too much leads to losing sight of the big picture sometimes.
Advantage: Being equipped with good analytical abilities can help you understand business, sales, and product equally well.
What you should focus on: A good idea of user research will help you understand the ‘why’. Clubbing research and quantitative data can work wonders. You should also focus on understanding design elements well so that you can tell a good design from a bad one.
5) The Growth Product Manager
Every organization has its own set of growth problems. Some find it hard to generate demand (e-commerce, content) at low cost, others find it difficult to meet supply once they have generated demand (Uber). Growth Product Managers work to solve these problems.
This is a rather undefined role and varies a great deal from one organization to another. These Product Managers are generally very strong with data and communication. Further, business acumen helps them prioritize and solve the most important problems first. Chamath Palihapitiya, Head of Growth at Facebook, helped Facebook become the first social network to cross the 500 million user mark and reach more than a billion users.
Pitfalls: Focusing too much on metrics leads to losing sight of the big picture here too. There are a lot of ideas you come up with while solving the growing problem for any organization, and the lack of quick experimentation and the right prioritization framework can lead to low impact work.
Advantage: A well-defined growth problem gives you the kick to hustle and make a difference. Clear metrics can help you move in the right direction.
What you should focus on – User research and psychology. This can help you most while taking the decision of what to build and why.
Summing up, let’s list down some of the key and desirable traits of a Product Manager. It looks like you will need the following traits to become a great Product Manager:
Good understanding of how the technology works
Project Management
Business Understanding
UI / UX
User Empathy & Research
People Skills
Data / Analytics
The best PMs out there understand and work where the interaction of business, design, data, and tech happens. Project management and people skills are the most important aspects of being a good Product Manager since you are working with a lot of people, at any given point in time. That said, you don’t need to be well versed in everything when you are just starting off.
So, if you were confused at the beginning of this post, hopefully, I have managed to diminish some of that confusion and some of you may even have figured out which role to aim for, depending on what your current strengths are.
If you are an analyst/data scientist, you can learn elements of design and user research to move to a Data Product Manager role. If you are a ‘techie’, a tech Product Manager role would be easiest to mold yourself into. The same follows for a designer and a business person. Marketers tend to like the growth Product Manager role a lot, given the hustle it involves.
I hope this post helps you gain some clarity in where you want to go as a product manager.
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So, what type of Product Manager are you?
Read Moreby Deepak Singh
24 Nov'166.85K+
Shaping User Experience at Zivame: A Product Management Case Study
This is a Guest Blog by Udit Khandelwal.
“The website is amazing and the session was awesome! I would love to come back for another round!” – Deepika called out while leaving for home after going through a usability testing session at Zivame. From that moment, Zivame was always going be the first choice for Deepika – a proud homemaker and entrepreneur.
What did we do to invoke such surreal emotions in people who shop with us?
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Well, we involved users at each and every step of product design. In my article How I Changed The Way Women Buy Bras Online I covered how we leveraged user research to discover a new way of shopping for bras. Here, I am going http://notuser.com/how-i-changed-the-way-women-buy-bras-onlineto walk you through the journey wherein we managed to test the design with real users, obtained real insights and implemented course correction.
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The Game Plan
Challenge
The resources were limited, the scope was huge and we had to keep churning incrementally enhanced designs.
Endeavour
The entire website was supposed to be designed and developed from scratch within 5 months. The last month was already reserved for all the testing, deployment and stability-related activities. So we had no more than 120 days to design and develop the new Zivame experience. I had heard this saying somewhere:
No shortcuts today; I’m in a hurry – Swiss saying
… and I thought, it was just the right time to follow it. We needed a game plan that involved no shortcuts because we couldn’t afford to go down the wrong lane. Hence, we decided to do the following after our early research was over:
Lo-Fi Prototypes: Refine the sketches until we were done discovering the loopholes and until we had fixed all the broken flows.
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Formative Tests: Use paper prototypes to test with whoever you could,whenever you could, even if it was on the lunch table.
Hi-Fi Prototypes: Develop a high fidelity interactive prototype, as close to the final product as possible.
Summative Tests: Test it with real users and obtain real insights.
Beta Tests: One final round of testing, on the actual product, before we handed it over to the world.
Iterations: Every test delivered some good news and some bad news (which was good news). We had to prioritize fixing bugs and making enhancements for every iteration.
Lesson
Usability testing is an ongoing activity that needs proper planning, time and resources.
Formative Tests
Challenge
The initial design was completely untested and development teams were waiting on us. We had to give them something solid, real quick.
Endeavor
Low fidelity prototypes work beautifully when you want to fail faster. They help you discover flaws in design at an early stage and designers themselves are very open to making changes in the raw design. We did the same at Zivame. Once we were done with white-boarding, we quickly moved on to our tools to create different screens on the computer and took prints to create screen flows.
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And then, we simply asked some folks from within the office (who closely matched our target persona Mahi Agarwal) to perform certain scenarios. Whenever they were stuck even for a bit, we knew there was a problem. More than often, they would even give us suggestions, which we took note of. We would then come back and discuss why the users were suggesting what they were, go to the root cause of the problem, and figure our own solution.
Sometimes tests not only tell you what’s wrong with design, but they also reveal new opportunities. For example, it was during the formative tests we discovered that users were able to comprehend and interact with notifications. We took that as a green signal and design for a stronger, deeper integration of notifications.
Lesson
For testing, don’t wait for the final product; go ahead with whatever prototype you can afford and test with whoever you can find. Fail faster.
High Fidelity Prototypes
Challenge
The website had more than 300 unique screens and screen-states. Putting together a click-through was a mammoth task.
Endeavor
We first set our goals and non-goals before building the prototype. This helped us reduce the scope of prototyping. eg. We wanted to test the new shop-by-experience feature, but were pretty sure we had followed best practices for the checkout, so we decided not to focus on that flow.
Next, we evaluated 3 options for building the prototype:
Flash – my personal favorite, I know I sound old-school!
Marvel App – because everyone is going this way.
Invision App – Marvel’s competitor.
Now Flash was quickly ruled out because of the overheads involved. Marvel kind of worked, but had limited support for overlays, and my entire design was based on surfaces and overlays. Invision offered me better flexibility, so I went ahead with Invision.
Lesson
Scoping is critical; even for a prototype.
Summative Tests
Challenge
The test had to be optimized to FAIL the design.
Endeavour
We decided to write down the script that we were going to use during the usability testing sessions. The critical piece here was to figure out exactly what to test and how. So I listed down my goals and non-goals, based on which I broadly figured out what was I going to test.
Initial Mental Model – Expectancy Test
Actual Usage – Free Exploration Test
Navigation – Performance Test
Affordance – Visual Affordance Test
Task Flow – Performance Test
Sentiment – Semantic Differential Process
Once that was done, I quickly mapped a technique against each line item and then moved on to the modules that I wanted to focus on. After this I moved on to defining the task flow of individual scenarios. I didn’t write down the language of the scenarios as I didn’t want to sound stiff. I have shared the script below on Slideshare.
View this on SlideShare
Lesson
Use a hammer for the nails, but a screw-driver for the screws.
Recruitment
Challenge
Finding women (in India) who’d agree to participate in the testing of a Lingerie website.
Endeavour
We wanted women who closely resembled Zivame’s target persona Mahi Agarwal. We took to social media and made an announcement. We asked women to help Zivame in building a great shopping experience for women! A lot of women came forward and we received a good number of responses. Not only this, they also invited their friends to participate. And kudos to forward-thinking women like Deepika, Subha and Aastha, who went a step further and agreed to put a face to our participants.
Deepika, Entrepreneur & Homemaker
Subha, Blogger at dolphindives.in
Aastha Chaudhary, Homemaker
We were in a good position to screen and recruit our participants. Women who expressed interest, had to fill the participant recruitment form. After a quick screening, we shortlisted the participants and gave them a call to schedule the session with them.
Lesson
Finding real users isn’t that difficult. You just have to do it the right way!
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Usability Test Sessions
Challenge
Talking to women about a website that sells bras.
Endeavour
On the D-day, we were well prepared with systems set up, printed copies of the script, the team was ready to perform their roles and the participants were to be greeted warmly.
We started the sessions by making the participants feel comfortable. We began with some chit-chat and brief introductions. We emphasized how important their contribution was and asked them to not worry about hurting our feelings and give honest feedback. In order to avoid them sharing their bra size details with us, we made sure we told them to assume their size was 34C. I think they liked the idea. We made sure they believed:
You are not being tested, we are!
Invariably, every user would smile at this moment, and we knew, we had managed to make them comfortable. Throughout the session, we made sure, the focus was on the tasks (and hence on design) and not on the products. That’s when we would begin the flow (as mentioned in the PPT).
We discovered some pretty interesting things during these tests. To our surprise, none of the users had trouble figuring the ‘shop’ menu, which was a big change from our previous design. However, users were confused when they reached the sub-menu and we knew it needed to be simplified (which we did later).
We also discovered a basic issue with title bars of our surfaces. Users were facing difficulty going back and closing the surfaces. Again, we resolved this issue in our next iteration.
One of the key findings was about the sticky buttons at the bottom of the surfaces. We realized that sometimes the button used to break the user flow as users were clicking on it without reading the labels or they were misinterpreting the labels. We found alternates to such situations.
All in all, the users proved to be very helpful!
Lesson
Users are humans, if you treat them well, they will be very helpful.
The Bug Bash
Challenge
We needed to make sure if the final product was behaving as designed and intended, and we were running out of time!
Endeavour
There is always a fair degree of difference between the actual product and the implementation.
When the Zivame beta product website was ready, we wanted to make sure that the product was behaving as expected. We wanted to see if users were comfortable interacting with the UI controls we had implemented and wanted to see it working in the real world.
So, we opened it up for all the Zivame employees, and conducted a 3 hour bug-logging Marathon, which we called Bug Bash. We issued a coupon that would work only on the beta website for 3 hours and asked all the employees to make use of the coupon and log whatever bug that they faced in the Bug Bash Form.
We divided them into different teams and announced prizes for the top 3 teams. The plan worked and we received 223 responses from different teams. It took us 2 days to go through the entire list and figure which ones were genuine. Most of the bugs filed were duplicate or known issues, but we discovered 12 new bugs (of which 3 were related to UI).
This gave us a high degree of confidence to release the beta externally!
Zivame Bug Bash Responses
Lesson
Testing never hurts and it can be done at any stage.
Kudos to the women, who helped us all along the way in building such a fantastic shopping experience at Zivame!
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Read More12 Dec'16
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The Truth About Product Management : In talks with Hotstar PM Gaurav Shahlot
Ever since I enrolled myself in UpGrad’s Product Management Program, I have been robbed of my weekends, developed bags under my eyes and have had cold fear struck in my heart with just two words – “Submission Day!”
Then a day like the one earlier this month, makes it all seem worthwhile. We were privy to an engaging session on transitioning into a product role by Ravijot Chugh (Head of Products, UpGrad) and Gaurav Shahlot (Director, Products at Hotstar) at the UpGrad Mumbai office. The two of them took what seemed like a torrential downpour of questions and answered them all patiently and like experts that they are.
Because of the sheer value that I derived from this talk, I wanted to share an excerpt of the interaction, so that some of the aspiring product managers out there can be inspired too.
Read: Product management jobs and their career prospects.
Q: What are some of the traits you look for while hiring a product manager?
1. A love for technology: You need a deep appreciation for the power of technology to solve real-life problems.
2. Passion for a delightful user experience: You need a burning passion for products that delight the user with their depth of understanding of user needs and insights. You also need to be the kind of person who is very excited about feature launches of your favorite products.
For example, if you use, admire or follow Uber regularly, did you wait with bated breath for the latest upgrade of the Uber App?
3. Analytical and data-driven approach to problem-solving: As a product manager, you’ll be taking some very important decisions that will affect the direction the product takes in the future. So, it’s imperative for you to understand a problem, break it down into smaller pieces, and arrive at a solution quickly and accurately based on the available data.
Q: What are some of the common mistakes newbie product managers make?
1. Not launching a product until it’s too late: As a product manager, it’s easy to get very attached to a product since you’ve probably spent all your time and energy building it from the ground up. This might prevent you from launching the product until you consider it perfect.
However, it’s critical that you narrow down a set of features that go into your MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and launch the MVP. After the launch, you’ll be able to gather feedback from users and decide on the future course of action, based on that feedback.
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2. Taking decisions based only on your gut and not on data: Some product managers tend to make decisions based on their gut feeling rather than data. The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that it’s not always easy to come by secondary data in India.
While some decisions based on your gut might work at times, it’s difficult to analyze the reason why it worked or didn’t work.
If decision-making is done based on a healthy combination of intuition and data, it’s possible to form a hypothesis of user behavior and have this hypothesis validated or invalidated. It also helps to course correct in a more structured manner.
3. Not having a concrete post-launch plan: Some product managers believe their job ends once they launch the product. But it’s just the beginning!
It is imperative to have a post-launch plan in terms of getting the first 100 users on board, sieving through user feedback and analytics, strategizing the feature sets in version 2 and version 3, etc.
4. Not being able to prioritize: As a product manager, you’ll receive inputs from multiple stakeholders and there’s a tendency for some product managers to say “yes” to everyone. The time available is always constrained and you end up in a situation where you have several half-built features and nothing to ship.
The only way to mitigate this problem is by prioritizing features and setting clear schedules against each feature.
Q: What are some frameworks that you’ve personally used for feature prioritization?
There are several theoretical models available for prioritization, but a practical approach that has worked for us is a metric which is a combination of value of the feature to the user and the complexity of its implementation.
Once you’ve scored all features based on this metric, pick up the feature that has maximum value to the user and minimum complexity in implementation, first.
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Q: How do you approach the idea of ‘value of the feature to the user’ quantitatively?
There is some subjectivity involved in arriving at what is the actual ‘value of a feature to the user.’
One approach that we have used is to first set broad product goals based on the product vision, such as increasing content retention for a learner. A feature is then rated on a scale of 1 to 5 based on its contribution towards the goal.
Image source: Pinterest
Q: Are there some pitfalls to getting into product management for a person with an engineering background?
The role of a product manager should be to answer the “Whats” and the “Whys” of a problem. Being an engineer naturally sets you to offer answers for the “Hows” as well, which might not go down very well with the engineering team. A safe strategy could be to recommend an approach but leave it to the team to take autonomous decisions.
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It’s a Wrap
After this, we had an extremely insightful session by Gaurav on how to bag an interview call for a PM role, what to expect in a PM interview and how to crack the interview.
This was followed by a short case study assigned by Gaurav where we had to solve a real-life problem with a strictly MVP approach i.e. what would be the minimum set of features you would launch your solution with?
The problem statement was:
“I’ve recently shifted to Mumbai and I work in an office building with 37 floors. I need to wait for 10 minutes for the lift every morning and evening. I want to reduce my waiting time in front of the lift.”
We organized ourselves into groups, made presentations and got feedback from Gaurav. The solutions ranged from apps providing status of lifts in the building with a wait time for each lift to adding an optimization algorithm to the lift’s functioning. We also heard from Gaurav on how he’d have approached the problem.
His recommendation was an app which allowed you to ask for the lift and get an ETA for the next available lift on your floor. You’d also get a notification when there was 30 seconds to go for the lift to arrive on your floor. It was a brilliant sneak peek into a day in the life of a Product Manager and we all came out of it feeling so much wiser!
Bourbon biscuits, great people, engaging conversation – it was a well spent Saturday afternoon, indeed!
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How Zivame’s UX Design Team Enabled Multiway Product Discovery
This is the first in a five-part Guest Blog series by Udit Khandelwal, UX Director at Zivame.
If the users can’t find it, the feature does not exist! – Human Factors International (HFI)
I first heard this quote in a training session at HFI back in 2012, and you will always find it resonating with my way of approaching UX.
Product discovery is one of the most important aspects of any retail business, and if users can’t find the products you offer, they don’t exist. To enable seamless product exploration at Zivame, we developed a multi-way discovery strategy across our platforms. In this series of 5 articles, I will be covering levers used for featuring collections, product discovery and, offer communication at Zivame.
This is the first article in this series, and here I will be mainly covering items under Ice Breakers from the list of levers given below:
In This Series:
Ice Breakers *
Homepage Landing Cards
Homepage Hero Carousel
Featured Collections
Category Masthead
App Onboarding
FitCode™
On Demand
Heterogeneous Shop-Nav
Shop-Nav Featured Image
Offer Banner
Explore
Sticky Buttons in Shop-Nav
Shop By Experience
Recommendations
Contextual More Like This
Our Bestsellers
You Might Also Like
Perfect Fit Recommendation
LookBook
Hand-holding
Landing Page Offer T&C
Rule Based Offers on:
Category Page
Product Page
Cart
Checkout
Notifications
Mobile App Push
Web Push
Universal Notifications
Marketing Email
Transaction Emails Footer
Marketing SMS
Content Hooks
Content Infusion Cards for Landing Pages
Content Pages and Collections On Blog
Product Infusion on Content Pages
Intrusive & Desperate
Conditional Pop-ups
In-App Messaging
* Covered in this article
Each one of these serve a very specific purpose in the user journey and are used accordingly. Let’s take a look at them, one by one – while talking about the challenges in each case, and what we did to overcome the same. I will also talk about business metrics, wherever applicable.
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Homepage Landing Cards
Challenge
45% of the web traffic on Zivame comprises of first time users
40% of direct and organic traffic lands on Zivame’s homepage
Most of the above users have very little clue about the breadth of the products we offer
Solution
Not having an open horizontal menu and going with a mobile-first hamburger navigation was a very well thought-through and user-tested approach we started following with our new stack.
It came at a cost of not being upfront about our offerings.
Hence, it became critical for us to communicate the same, right in the first fold. The cards shown below serve exactly this purpose.
What’s interesting is that this approach was first conceptualised for the desktop, and later adapted for mobile, as shown below. In the desktop version,
cards occupy the top real estate on the first fold, whereas in mobile, they are right below the hero banner due to vertical space constraint.
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Homepage Entry Cards and Hero Carousel
Homepage Hero – Mobile
When we were conceptualizing this, our executives envisioned it as follows:
Nobody who spends 8 seconds on my homepage should go away without knowing that Zivame sells lingerie, apparel and activewear. – Shaleen, COO Zivame
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…and I think we’ve done a good job at achieving the same via design. The positioning of the cards make them unmissable and the titles along with links set clear expectations about the individual categories i.e., Lingerie, Activewear and Apparel. Moreover, the fourth card allows for enough flexibility to put meta items which deserve a seat on the first fold.
P.S. This component is under development as I am writing this post, and will be released soon!
(Also Read: Shaping User Experience at Zivame: A Product Management Case Study)
Endeavour
It is difficult to figure which 4 things will go in each card, because every stakeholder in the company is looking for prime real estate for his/her property!
While data seems to be an easy escape route, where you could simply keep the most in-demand stuff on top, the business might have a conflicting direction. For example, Apparel itself contributes to merely 8% of Zivame’s revenue as of today, yet it occupies 25% of the top real estate.
A cross-functional collaboration with a fair amount of moderation from the executives of the company should give you the right answer. As my product manager puts it:
You have to be disproportionately kind to certain entities in order to ensure their disproportionate growth. – Vishrut Shukla, Sr. PM – Zivame
Homepage Hero Carousel
Challenge
This is the next prime real estate and the property is visual. It needs to represent the brand and a strict visual design language needs to be followed.
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Solution
Frankly, this was an easy one to design, but a tough one to execute. We knew we were following big-bold-beautiful design language, and hence it was an easy decision that the banner must occupy 100% of the screen width and 100% of the remaining screen height. But that left us with 2 problems to be solved:
On certain screen sizes, the banner would get cropped as we were going to use ‘cover’ algorithm.
When the banner stretches all the way to the bottom edge of the screen, users might get an illusion that the page ends there and there is nothing beyond that.
In order to solve the cropping issue, we defined the safe areas and tested it across multiple resolutions. After a few hits and trials, we were able to nail it.
We placed a chevron at the bottom of the banner to give a visual cue to the users that there is more beyond the banner. To keep it clean we decided to make the navigation arrow unidirectional, but also gave slideshow cues by putting dot-based navigation.
A heavy amount of cross functional collaboration went into getting up the right banner, with the right message up and stitch it together with the category page banners, keeping the user journey in mind. The above section displays an example screenshot, and below is how we defined safe area:
Safe Area for Homepage Hero Banner
Featured Collections
Challenge
Banners are good for grabbing attention, but in order to generate user interest and make users click with the right expectation, we need to tell them a bit more about the collection. However, real estate is limited and there is a lot of competition among different collections.
The earlier design of Zivame’s Homepage for Mobile used to sport an accordion of collections where each collection had an array of 10 products followed by a “See More” button after scrolling all the way to the last thumbnail. Data analysis revealed that more than 40% users who interacted with the accordion clicked on see more. This reinforces the point mentioned above. However, we didn’t want to use accordion because it was non-visual and text heavy.
Old Homepage – Mobile
Loading too many product images upfront negatively impacts the page performance. For every extra second of page load time, conversion goes down by a whopping 7%.
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Solution
At the cost of an extra click, show the USPs as well as sneak peek of every collection. Apart from a product collage, we simply surfaced 3 critical pieces of information:
Collection Name
Description
Signature Attributes
This not only invoked interest in the collection, but also guides the user into a journey of product discovery with a set expectation. The product collage can be technically optimised to be returned as a single collage image rather than multiple product images. Again, this version has been partially deployed on the current site, and the remaining is being implemented as I am writing this article.
Homepage Collection Banners (*in-progress)
Visit Zivame
Category Masthead
Challenge
Category pages are primary landing pages for paid traffic. Also, anyone who clicks on any of the collections/offer banners within the site, lands on a category page. Hence, it becomes crucial to stitch the user journey here and maintain the context.
Broader the category, more difficult it is for the users to make a choice. Hence, for certain cases, we might want to narrow down the user journey to a more specific subcategory and subsequently to specific products.
Certain categories are very special or new and the users need to be made aware of the USPs at the very moment that they land on the page.
Solution
The masthead consists of 4 main components. We came up with an approach where configurable components would take care of the use cases mentioned above: simply putting a banner in the masthead and relying upon the creative banners, shop by, filter/sort toolbar and offer communication to do the rest.
I’ll talk about banners here, and will be covering ‘shop by’ and offers later. We designed 3 variations or templates for the category banners:
Single Banner
Carousel
Split Banners
Single banners work perfectly for narrow categories and talking about their USPs. Carousels and Split banners, on the other hand, are a great way to provide multiple banners within a limited real estate and are used to lead to subcategories.
When promoting any of these pages, digital marketing & creative teams make sure that the marketing creatives speak the same language and use similar images to stitch the user journey together.
Category Banner – Single
Category Banner – Split
Category Banner – Carousel
Now just like the homepage hero banner, these banners occupy 100% of the width available, however, height is constant. Hence, in some cases (or resolutions) we end up cropping the banner from the right. So just like the homepage, we defined safe areas and the creative team was asked to follow the same while designing these banners.
Below is an example of how we defined the same for a split banner:
Safe Area Definition for Category Split Banner
Caveat
This is not a mobile-first design and, following graceful degradation, on mobiles we fall back to a simple banner, or a swipe-enabled carousel. There is no split banner for mobiles.
App Onboarding
Challenge
You want to tell the users so much, but going beyond 4 cards during onboarding is an overkill. The space is limited, features are enormous, users don’t have time to read and despite all this, you need to make the app stick.
You don’t know who is browsing: a novice or an expert, an explorer or a navigator; and you have to design a fit-for-all onboarding experience
Solution
Rather than thinking about what we want to tell the user, we started to think the other way around → What would users want to learn? With a quick dipstick research, we were able to figure users were mainly looking for answers to the following questions:
What is this about?
What can I do here?
How to get started?
What’s in it for me? How does it help me?
So the problem was simply reduced to 4 screens that could answer these questions. Hence we zeroed down on the following 4 screens:
What is it about?
How does it help me?
What can I do here?
How to get started?
The last screen is cleverly designed to promote the FitCode™ but the users are free to skip it and continue to shop.
Caveats
There are a couple of glitches, which we’re now correcting and I’d like to warn you about:
The notification permission pop-up shows right on the onboarding screen. This is very irritating for the user and we are likely to get a minimal conversion here. What should be done instead – the notification permission should be sought after the occurrence of a certain event (say login, or order success, or accessing content etc).
Web-engage messages (marketing popups) sometimes show during onboarding. Again, it’s a very bad experience and users are most likely to be non-receptive to any marketing messages during onboarding. We must take care that no pop-ups are shown on onboarding screens.
FitCode™
Challenge
Many women prefer buying from a physical store to buying online. One of the most common reasons for this is that they are not sure whether a particular product will fit them. They can’t try it online.
Different women have different body forms and there is no one-product-fits-all when it comes to lingerie. Hence presenting them with the product that suits their body form and preferences is crucial.
If you give them a form to fill their measurement and preferences, the drop-offs are high. Hence, whatever solution we come up with, needs to be effective.
Solution
Zivame’s Fashion Design team, along with the Product Managers, conducted extensive research, and deduced that women’s body types can be accurately described by bucketing them into 11 kinds of profiles.
Club these profiles, together with the measurements and preferences, and you should be able to provide the right product recommendations to the users. We call this FitCode™, which is derived by asking the users a set of questions (FitCode™ Quiz).
A version of this was designed, user tested, implemented and released on apps. While the users were getting the concept and responding to the quiz, there were 2 glaring issues:
High number of drop-offs
Some people thought the images that we had used to represent the profiles were creepy.
We figured that the quiz was designed in a way where we were asking users the difficult questions first, and this approach needed to change. We needed to get the users invested by asking them the easier questions first, and then the tougher ones. We also got our creatives changed and made them more abstract. They weren’t creepy anymore. Take a look at the screens below:
FitCode™ Quick Start
FitCode™ Step 3 – Measure Yourself
FitCode™ Step 4 – Describe Specifics
FitCode™ Results and Recommendations
Find Your Perfect Fit
I hope you found this article informative and insightful.
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How Product Managers Visualize Data
I still remember how excited I was when I had my first tryst with PowerPoint in 2010, while working on a market research proposal at KPMG. While the thrill didn’t extend to the fact that I had to present to a Senior Partner team; I was finally getting a chance to experiment and play around with the various graphs, charts, Smart Art and what not. The multiple fonts and color options that PowerPoint has to offer was enough to make me giddy with anticipation!
Back then I didn’t quite have an accurate understanding of the sheer might of using these tools and what transforming the information I had in front of me could produce and answer – a field that is now being credited with changing the world of business today – often referred to as ‘Data Visualization.’
It took me many years to fully understand the power of design sensibilities and analytics if used effectively and in parallel. With the help of these, data can be transformed into something that can convey a message not only in a visually engaging manner, but in a far more persuasive and powerful form. Be it to your manager in a board meeting, or a user who’s trying out your technology product for the first time.
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“At the intersection of art and algorithm, data visualization schematically abstracts information to bring about a deeper understanding of the data, wrapping it in an element of awe.”
– Maria Popova, founder of Brainpickings.org
The Life-Boat to a Data Pool
Our lives are overloaded with statistics and information. Whether it’s the number of times we visit the gym in a month, or the price of tickets from Mumbai to Bangalore in December or the number of glasses of water we’ve had to drink in a day. The ubiquity of visual representations through illustrations, animations, photographs and various other forms is apparent in our day to day lives too.
A combination of data and design is now increasingly being used in various forms such as what can be seen with the rise of infographics in social media and newspapers; to fascinating ways of displaying cricket statistics; and even children’s report cards at school!
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Visualizing cricket team performances through graphs
Visual content is processed 60,000 times faster than text.
Data Visualization methods and tools have been around for a while with veterans like Edward Tufte evangelizing it’s benefits way back in the 1960s.
Although, traditionally used in evaluating and making business and product decisions via a plethora of methods and softwares like…
Tableau
Microsoft BI
Google Charts
…data viz is increasingly being leveraged for use within actual technology products as well – for showcasing basic information to the user and as a means of storytelling as part of the product narrative.
Industry experts such as Alberto Cairo, Andy Kirk, Jon Schwabish and Mona Chalabi offer advice on creation and examples of data viz in their blogs, which can be very useful for product professionals and newbies alike.
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Designing the Data in Your Product
To start thinking visually through your product, consider the nature and purpose of your visualization (why do you need to visually represent data in the first place), and all about your user. What is he/she trying to achieve by using the product? And how can you use the information you have about him/her to improve the product journey experience and get him/her to keep coming back? Data Visualization can be a crucial part of your User Experience as well.
For example, Uber demonstrates this with use of GIS by using the information they have about their user’s pick-up point and driver’s car locations. They show nearby vehicles on a map which makes it a lot more meaningful for a user to understand distances, along with a route map to the final destination and real-time updating of the user’s location. This is so simple that even a 5-year-old could understand what’s being represented – which is precisely how easy reading data visualizations should be.
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The Various Elements of Data Viz
“Creating a data visualization is a lot like cooking. You decide what data you need, you collect it, you prepare and clean it for use, and then you make the visualization and present your finished result”
– Data + Design Handbook
Using the above analogy, the final presentation of the dish, with all its ingredients, is something that can delight the customer or seem bland and boring. Careful thought needs to go into that extra bit of garnish or the colors you use to make it seem more delicious and inviting. And the methods used to cook can vary as well – from grilling to baking to roasting. Think Ratatouille or Julia Child!
Likewise, careful thought and preparation should go into deciding which presentations should be used for your target user and the narrative it supports. Post this, with the help of the following, you should have the final data viz ‘recipe’!
Ingredients or Elements
Fonts & Text
Icons
Hierarchy
Color
Simple sans serif fonts are usually preferred
2. Colors can be used to express value
3. Icons used to showcase various temperature preferences
Methods or Presentations
Area Charts
Bar Charts
Choropleth Maps
Column Charts
Concept Maps
Doughnut Charts
Flowcharts
Heat Maps
Infographics
Line Charts
Pie Charts
Pin Maps
Scatter Plots
Time Series Visualizations
Timelines
Tree Maps
Word Clouds
Understanding how best to represent data to your user requires a certain design and data literacy, which will only come with practice, patience and keen observation.
Venngage.com and CreativeBloq have some useful tips on choosing good charts for your infographic, including lessons for how-to-use them in your product as well.
Although one should keep in mind the major challenges in producing compelling data visualizations, namely, keeping it simple, selecting the appropriate method given the information available to you and selecting the right mix of ingredients to avoid drawing away attention from the main message of the visualization.
Products that Use Visuals Compellingly – No One Can See Just One
While there are many products that use data visualization, from sectors of healthcare, money management, sports and fitness (like Google Fit, NBA, Uber etc.), primarily to showcase user information while the product is being used – one specific example that comes to mind, which has become a recent phenomenon, is the FitBit interface.
FitBit makes sure that it complements its device capabilities by not only capturing the relevant information but displaying it to provide insights and ‘aha’s to users about their fitness levels.
From the user’s activity levels to calories burned as well as the leadership board; visual language is used in a very appealing manner through the FitBit dashboard, with an equally appealing color palette, to showcase your progress while using the app. What more you need to do to reach your ultimate fitness goal!
What about India?
We’re not far behind with home-grown products leveraging strong data visualization methods for their users – from the recent products I’ve used, fitness apps like HealthifyMe to money management app MoneyView, and my all-time favorite women’s health app called ‘Maya’ (formerly known as Lovecycles) – all seem to have strong visual compasses.
Taking Maya as an example – they have over 6 million users and let you track monthly (menstrual) cycles along with analyzing and predicting health patterns, moods, along with symptoms.
Not only have they designed a cute looking girl as their mascot directed at their target female audience – but represented delicate information in a very simple manner, with an element of fun too! The use of iconography prompts me to go back to the app and input my user data – which they will ultimately represent in their format and use to track my progress.
Enhancing Product Experience Through Data Viz
“The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.”
― John Tukey, Inventor of the box plot and FFT algorithm
Data visualization need not always be about complex dashboards or charts – and something even as simple as the effective use of icons and text, while understanding a user’s behavior and showcasing that in your product, could be successful too. It is also important to understand that this is not just presenting information but essentially designing an experience of information for your customer.
Be it through illustrations, real or interactive imagery or animation; data visualization could be used to give context, reveal trends, explain a process, tell a story, save time and eventually empower a user.
As a product manager or UX professional, it is thus imperative to showcase data effectively in your product’s interface. This can not only ‘WOW’ a potential customer, but also retain and engage them longer by showing them the benefits of adopting your product and driving home the intended value-add better than your competitors!
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