When I started this blog and decided to try to blog daily I wanted to have some professional benefit along the way. This is supposed to be driven by sharing the lessons I am learning through work or talking with others. And by voicing my opinions on different product topics.
This is one area where I am not succeeding. I have many content ideas but they are mostly lengthy posts that require half a day to finish each. They are more like essays than short posts.
Here are some titles and topics I am thinking
Product Domain Knowledge: How to deal as a product manager with products where you domain knowledge without creating unnecessary tension with the team.
Professional Readme: There is the relatively known idea of “Manager Readme”. I wanted to write a professional readme about myself and my style of working to make it easier for others who work with me, or want to hire me to have a good introduction about my strengths and weaknesses.
Writing a newsletter: Few months ago I started sending our department newsletter. I did some interesting experiments and wanted to share the lessons from this experience.
Demystifying Stakeholder Management
Mentoring new product managers: What I think constitutes a good mentor-mentee relationship.
Writing Product/Feature Announcements
And I am sure there will be more. But I need to commit.
In the Arabic podcast I appeared on with Mohamed Sherif, he asked me an interesting question about the difference between doing conversion optimization features at Booking.com and building infrastructure products at Zalando.
I think there are different modes of operation when one is doing product management.
One dimension is the nature of the product. A consumer facing product involves lots of data analysis, user research, testing, release and iterations. An internal product requires lots of stakeholder management, understanding of business constraints, and lots of communication. It also has a personal feedback cycle, as whenever you screw up in an internal product the users come straight to your desk.
Another dimension that’s more generic regardless of the nature of the product is planning and execution modes. Think of a lion that’s picking a cattle from a herd. It keeps observing the herd to pick which one is the best opportunity. Then comes execution where the lion starts running until it achieves its goal (sorry vegans, c’est la vie).
The same applies in product. There is a mode where you observe, collect, brainstorm, think, and talk. Then there is the mode where the team executes and you work with them to eliminate any barriers to success.
Your influence in each mode depends on multiple factors. For example if you work with an inexperienced team, you will have to interfere a lot in the execution mode to make sure the team is working on the right things. If you are in a customer obsessed/centric culture, you will spend less effort having to convince the team why something is necessary during the planning mode.
Understanding the factors that influence your work and which of them you can influence by how much is crucial to become successful at what you do.
I was in a planning meeting few weeks ago and one of my colleagues said something wasn’t done because the team was “Yak Shaving”. We didn’t understand so we googled it during the meeting and this is what we found
Yak shaving is programming lingo for the seemingly endless series of small tasks that have to be completed before the next step in a project can move forward.
Then he said I have a very good video that explains what it is. We also played it in the meeting.
We were discussing how the favicon should report the status of a deployment pipeline, and I showed my team the following example from Booking.com
Once you land on the Booking page of the website, the title says “Your Details”
If you leave the tab, it changes to “Don’t forget your booking”And if you wait longer, it turns into yellow and adds (1) to signal something like a notification
This is master persuasion. Even the smallest thing like the favicon and tab title can have a big impact.
N26 recently launched “Spaces”. It is some sort of sub-accounts in your account that you can create and configure to save money in.
While n26 is a leap forward to the German market, for me it is quite disappointing compared to the bank I used in the Netherlands.
Yesterday I realized I can’t edit/delete a scheduled transfer once it is scheduled (unless it is a recurring one). This is scary.
This spaces product is half baked. I can’t automate transfers between spaces making it almost useless and hard to build savings habits.
And the most scary for me was when a friend’s card got hacked, someone withdrew money from India on a Sunday evening, we called the number on the back of the card and guess what? They are off on Sunday. And here is what they say on their support page
Freak out and destroy your card
Overall my experience with n26 so far is that they invest in those useless user interface changes (spaces, dark themes…etc) without improving the core experience of their banking services. I hope it gets better because right now it is far from my expectations.
Booking.com tried making the experience of finding accessible hotels better, unfortunately they made it worse, and I was part of this.
Facilities for disabled guests
I am planning a trip to Dortmund and noticed that they changed their “Facilities for disabled guests” filter – which allowed filtering for accessible properties on the site – to a more granular set of filters such as “Wheelchair accessible”, “Toilet with grab rails”…etc.
You can see the filters on the left
The problem with “Facilities for disabled guests” was that it didn’t mean anything. I still have to call each hotel, ask if they have wheelchair accessible rooms of the type I am looking for, and if the rooms are available for the dates I choose. After sometimes few, sometimes many calls, I would find a hotel that meets the criteria and book it. It is a tedious process, but it is the best available option that I am aware of.
More details ≠ better experience
Back in 2015 – when I was working there – I complained about how hard it is to find accessible rooms on the website. The best thing about working for Booking is that you can quickly ramp up an idea and run an experiment. That’s what we did back then. We ran a few experiments.
The experiments were no success. We thought the problem might be in the data we had. We only had this “Facilities for disabled guests” which is self reported by the hotel and subject to their interpretation of understanding what it means. That’s when I did a lot of research of what makes a hotel accessible and came up with a list of data points that we should collect from hotels. We collected them, and finally it is now live as you saw in the previous screenshot.
The problem with the new more granular filters is that they show less properties. I did the same search on the mobile website, which still has the “Facilities for disabled guests” filter. I was able to filter for more properties (26 properties) than the one on desktop (8 properties in the best case).
Mobile site
Desktop
Finding really accessible rooms
In retrospect, I think my approach back then was wrong as I didn’t travel a lot and didn’t understand the problem from both sides, the “disabled” traveler and the hotel. Now that I did my homework contacting 300+ hotels in Berlin, I realized it is not a problem of collecting more data, well, it is about information but not the way I tackled it earlier.
My hypothesis (it is always a hypothesis until the data punches you in the face) is that there is no way to make a wheelchair user find and directly book accessible rooms online unless they are their own room category just like Twin and Double. There should be Accessible Twin or Accessible Single.
Some hotels already do that on their own website (I have a few examples but I am too lazy to dig into my data to find them), and some already do this on Booking.com but they are like unicorns. It is almost impossible to find them as it is only mentioned in the room title which you can’t search for.
I hope this post triggers some change for better. Booking is full smart people, and they can definitely make this better. Until then, please return the “Facilities for disabled guests” filter, because I can’t plan my trip to Dortmund.
Fortnite game will no longer be supported on Android. Players are asked to disable the security features and install the application outside of Google play store. I wonder if others will start doing this, or if there will be a new Android store with better economics at least for games.
This is not possible on iOS. Today I was on YouTube app on my iPhone and it prompted me to try YouTube premium free for one month. As usual I like to check those funnels and noticed something weird. It costed 16 Euro per month after the trial even though I saw it before on the web version costing 12. I went to YouTube mobile web version and surprise surprise, it costs 12.
So Fortnite is circumventing Google, and Google can’t circumvent Apple so they are charging more, and probably Spotify have a similar dynamic with both Apple and Google since they can charge less for their music services since they both own Apple and Google music respectively.
What I like about this interesting dynamic is how it shows the strength of the big players, and that there is no single playbook for how to do things.
Fortnite will sacrifice the revenue drop from play store, because apparently they expect to make more from their fanatic users who will just do anything to download the game. And Google is charging more on iOS, expecting users to not bother and still pay.
One of the things I observed many times in different jobs is that I am skeptical of something, I raise my voice, no one listens. I talk privately to other people that were part of the same discussion, they have similar concerns to mine, but they they didn’t raise them.
One reason could be not wanting to sound the skeptic in the room, or they don’t feel comfortable speaking in a group setting, or there was this particular person (most of the time a big manager) they don’t want to speak in front of. Regardless of the reason, it is one of those cases where multiple people have concerns but wouldn’t raise them.
I was listening to the knowledge project episode with Annie Duke, a world poker champion. One of the things she mentioned about decision making is premortems. I searched it further and found this Harvard Business Review article from 2007. I normally don’t like HBR articles due to their repetitive boring pattern and lack of insights most of the time (I can write a post specifically on that), but this one is a good start on the topic.
Here are the parts I like the most:
A premortem is the hypothetical opposite of a postmortem. A postmortem in a medical setting allows health professionals and the family to learn what caused a patient’s death. Everyone benefits except, of course, the patient. A premortem in a business setting comes at the beginning of a project rather than the end, so that the project can be improved rather than autopsied. …… A typical premortem begins after the team has been briefed on the plan. The leader starts the exercise by informing everyone that the project has failed spectacularly. Over the next few minutes those in the room independently write down every reason they can think of for the failure—especially the kinds of things they ordinarily wouldn’t mention as potential problems, for fear of being impolitic. ….. Next the leader asks each team member, starting with the project manager, to read one reason from his or her list; everyone states a different reason until all have been recorded. After the session is over, the project manager reviews the list, looking for ways to strengthen the plan.
I didn’t know about premortems before. Sounds interesting as it provides this safe environment where different people can raise their concerns. I imagine the biggest challenge would be when to organize one? which decisions need a premortem? and how open are the people involved to facing their potential failure before a new exciting initiative they are going into? Those are questions I am yet to answer.
A developer friend of mine approached me asking for a template on writing user stories. He said that he is doing this at work but the feedback he got was that his way is too technical. The internet is full of templates, so here is another one.
Questions list
Who is the user?
As a customer…
What is the problem you are solving for them?
I waste a lot of time reordering things I already ordered before.
Based on what do you know it is a problem (Numbers, user research, survey, or just a guess)?
We know this because for the past 2 months, 30% of customers reordered the same items.
Why is it a problem?
An order takes on average 5 minutes to create, we can save this time for customers leading to higher sales and customer satisfaction.
What’s the proposed solution?
We will experiment showing customers their most recent orders. Allowing them to add the items to a new shopping cart without having to type in the search bar.
How will you measure success?
We will use % of orders created from already existing ones vs those created from scratch as success metric. We expect this % to go up.
You should end up with something like this:
As a customer, I waste a lot of time reordering things I already ordered before. We know this because for the past 2 months, 30% of customers reordered the same items. An order takes on average 5 minutes to create, we can save this time for customers leading to higher sales and customer satisfaction.
We will experiment showing customers their most recent orders. Allowing them to add the items to a new shopping cart without having to type in the search bar. We will use % of orders created from already existing ones vs those created from scratch as success metric. We expect this % to go up.
Product management is interdisciplinary. There is strategy, tactics, communication, process, design, user research, engineering, data, analytics…etc. Each of those is a lever in the PMs arsenal of tools, and it is a topic on its own. Great PMs know how to use their highest impact levers to achieve the goals of the product they are managing.
My recommendation is to pick a few topics, and dive deep into them, while experimenting on the job with what each lever does and how can you get better at it.
Now to answer your question, here are a few books I read that are relevant to different topics/levers (Not sorted in any order):
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products >> Do you know that FB figured out in their early days that if a new user adds 10 friends in the first week, they don’t leave Facebook? This book is about what makes users stick, what goes into their minds, and what are the elements that drive this habit formation. The book is a bit overrated in my opinion (maybe because of all the buzz I see from its author), but it is worth a read.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion >> The book is mainly written for marketers in 1995, but If you want to understand the psychological tricks companies apply on users today (What if an ecommerce company show users the fastest selling items, creating a fear of missing out? How about some social proof from their FB connections? Or showing very expensive items next to less expensive ones to create a contrast effect, making the less expensive item being perceived as cheap?). This book is about those ideas.
Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth >> If you want to understand what are the available growth channels and how to use each of them. Understanding growth is essential to building great products.
Lean Analytics >> For different metrics models related to different product types. What metrics are relevant for e-commerce? SaaS? Social Networks?..etc. By experience those will become natural to you, but if you are new to the topic or want to understand the bigger picture, this is a good start.
Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology >> Although it is written for those looking for a job, what I like is that different chapters cover different skills that are applicable to the PM job. I recommend reading it if you don’t know your biggest levers, it will open your eyes to some topics that you may not be fully aware of. One caveat though: If you are reading it to find a job, it is highly tailored to US companies processes and interview questions (Google, FB, Yelp…etc). If you are interviewing with European companies, the ideas and the questions might be a bit different.
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On >> Important for navigating tough stakeholders.
There is also this list which combines a few books I saw recommended by multiple people I trust.
