Be The Voice Of The User

We talked to Anirudh Agrawal of Momspresso about product management challenges and how the field could evolve in the future. Here are the highlights.

How do you currently measure and optimize the user experience of your product?

The process varies from product to product. Product metrics are different for an e-commerce product compared to a content-based platform.

I am currently working on a content focussed product, hence the most important metrics for our product team to track are user engagement based on time spent, the number of pages viewed etc. Creating sticky users via our app is also a goal because usually whatever content readers consume, typically comes from searching on Google. Very few content platforms are able to create sticky users.

So before optimizing product metrics, we need to understand the business and see what impacts business.

Once you have those metrics in place, then it comes down to first looking at where you are in the product or user flow and if something seems broken. If something seems broken, then we typically consider setting a comprehensive pipeline for A/B testing. The next step is to carry out these experiments one by one with some product metrics in mind to see what corrections can be done.

At this point, you can also do user research of your super engaged users or a ground study of your users. No matter what hypothesis you create, when you are speaking to a user face to face, the experience is totally different.

Nobody likes errors and slowness in a product, do you have a process to find such problems and set a bar for quality ?

We usually create a lot of funnels in the product, for all our important events. Say, your product has a QnA section, then we can create a funnel for say "Creating a Question". Then we measure each step and the drop off associated with it. We then find steps with a lot of drop and dig deeper into each of them.

Once we have identified the potential problem areas, we track the issues by -

• Funnel drop analysis and heatmaps - Finding the problem area if there is a significant drop using heat maps and funnel drops.
• User session recording tools - See the session recordings of 50-60 users to identify if they are dealing with any website issues.

How do you think the role of Product Management will evolve in the near future?

I think that the role of AI may become significant for product management if it could solve some of the problems like:

• Building ultimate UX for products - Currently a lot of time for product management is spent on what kind of user experience flow would work for a product for each user type. If a system where we can feed in user segment data and it can come up with multiple options of information flow, that would make a lot of difference.
• Insights on product metrics - Currently there are a lot of tools to measure product metrics but if AI in addition to just reading out the metric could help in generating what insight to draw from those metrics that will be helpful.
• Voice search - The one thing I believe as a product owner of a content website is to make the most useful content easily accessible to the user and I think voice search can play a major role over there.

Any words of advice for peopl starting in product management roles?

It is interesting how the landscape for product managers are changing. The important thing to keep in mind is that you will ultimately be judged by the success of your product. It is foolish to think that you will only be involved in developing new features or you do not need to take care of any marketing activity. Ultimately, these factors will decide your product's success.

• Have a good understanding of how data works - Knowing databases and queries is a must and a differentiator. Understanding how the technology works is also key.
• Always be user-centric - It's very easy to get swayed by a lot of constraints of business and technology feasibility. However, it's very important to be the voice of the customer because no one else in the organization owns that responsibility.

  You should always think about your users because they will eventually determine the success of your product. It is easy to slip towards developing new features and internal tools but your ultimate success will be always be judged by your product.

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