Psychology in Product Management - Part 1

Psychology plays a important role in all stages of product life-cycle.

Cognitive

We need to understand what people perceive and factor it in our product design and management.  Cognitive psychology have a role here to play. If we able to foresee the customers problems and their expectation for our product, we can give a better customer experience. So, understanding customer behavior and psychology can helps to give a better customer experience.

I my  previous posts, I have talked about the Customer Experience.

http://www.juststartit.in/2012/08/movie-making-is-lke-start-up.html
http://www.juststartit.in/2013/01/approach-to-product-development.html

Small Things

Often small things makes a good impact with the users. Some examples below,

 A personalized email with a name rather than 'noreply@xxxxx.com' gives a sense of comfort and closeness with the product.

 A human face in a web page triggers a positive emotion.

Choosing a color, theme in designing the pages conveys a meaning to the product.

In branding, a tagline plays a vital role and  decides on how customer relates with the product.
Some good taglines: Disney – "The happiest place on earth": Kit-Kat – "Have a break. Have a Kit-Kat.".

Increase in response time by some milliseconds on a crucial page may impact the overall conversions.

Persuasion

We need to persuade the users to buy our product or to sell our services. There are some basic principles of persuasion coined by Robert Cialdini

Reference - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasion

I have added examples in the context of a web product.

• Reciprocity - People tend to return a favor,

    
 Give a free (or) trial version. They return a favor by buying them.

• Commitment and Consistency - Once people commit to what they think is right, orally or in writing, they are more likely to honor that commitment.

 If  there are constraints like age, location to use a product, we can make the users to declare and accept a form. Majority of them will not violate after this commitment.

• Social Proof - People will do things that they see other people are doing. 

Show what  other people have done with your product. It can be a review or a detailed case study. It gives a sense of confidence and they get involved.

• Authority - People will tend to obey authority figures.

  
Tone of FAQ and other important sections of the site can be in a little authoritative tone.

• Liking - People are easily persuaded by other people whom they like. 

People tend to get interested in a product if it is reviewed or bought by people they like. Social Media can be used to identify this.

• Scarcity - Perceived scarcity will generate demand.

  
We often see 'Limited time offer' (or) 'Limited items available'. It uses this principle.

All these can be a starting point to think in the perspective of  psychology and customer/consumer behavior

Really inspiring Reality TV

Reality TV is quite inspiring for their creativity and ability to sell anything from cooking, mining to house renovation.  Do some of these programs have common traits to make it appealing?.  I'm explaining this with the reality TV programs which I have watched in recent times.

Pawn Stars -  It chronicles the daily activities at the World Famous Pawn Shop.         

Property Brothers - Where Identical twin brothers  help home buyers to purchase and renovate homes                                                                              

Kitchen Nightmares - In which chef Gordon Rams spend time with the failing restaurant to revive the business.                          


Some emotions are common to most of us. These programs capture this to make it appealing. We get involved independent of theme and the background of the program. I have listed down some commonalities . . .

Detailing with interesting stories 

We love stories.  Detailing it with interesting stories creates a genuine interest with the audience.
In PawnStars, when someone walk into the store to sell an article, we hear stories and background about that article, which creates a curiosity and interest.

Show the difference of opinion

There is a difference of opinion and people debate in these programs.  In PropertyBrothers, couples have difference of opinion on which house to choose from the given options.

Build Anticipation

Audience likes a suspense factor.  In "Pawn Stars", there is an anticipation on how much the article actually worth. In "Kitchen Nightmare", there is an anticipation on how customers would react after the renovation of the restaurant

Capture the Emotion

These programs capture the emotion and make it more dramatic as possible. In PropertyBrothers, we see the happy emotions of  the couple after they found a home of their dreams. We also see the furious emotions of employees of the failing business in programs like Kitchen Nightmares.

A perspective on Big Data and Cloud

These guidelines and approaches are targeted mainly for first time users of  Big Data(Hadoop ecosystem) and Cloud. "Cloud" here refers to public cloud services like Amazon.

Big Data - Go with the Hadoop distribution

Start with the hadoop distributions like cloudera, hottonworks.  These distributions comes with all the required dependencies and packages to work. You also get an admin console to check and mange your hadoop cluster. Avoid setting up the  Hadoop cluster on your own unless absolutely needed. For development purpose, if you want to work on your windows machine, install a VM player and use the Cloudera distribution on top of it.

Big Data -  Use Pig or Hive for Hadoop

Do your development using Pig or Hive for your big data map reduce problems. You can absolutely handle all big data uses cases with these tools.  You don't need to write  java programs to work on map reduce part unless you have very specific use case that cannot be handled by these tools

Big Data - Use Cloud to scale

Make your code run on your local distribution(cluster). If you want to scale, you can check cloud options like amazon EMR. Your big data code for data crunching,  recommendation.etc are not going to change if you want to  run in cloud service like EMR.  If you read the documentation and follow the steps you can set up your code in the cloud in no time.


Cloud -  Just start using it

Cloud providers like AWS abstracted the underlying virtualization part and they made easy for the end users. Read the documentation, best practices and you can start using it  without worrying much about the underlying implementation. Don't consume so much information(lot of information available in this space) without proceeding with your product/project goal.. More can be learnt, great insights and knowledge can be acquired as and when you start using it.

Big  Data - More handy tools

There are many handy tools and connectors available in this space. Always search for the options before you start doing  your development. For example, part of your big data problems, you may have a requirement to export the data to database. You can use a tool -  "Sqoop" for this purpose instead of writing your own.

Big Data - Understand the Use Cases

Understand all the use cases where Big Data fits in your application.  Some use-cases I have listed here..

1) Counting and Grouping from large data sets.
Example: Grouping a user based on some criteria, Counting the most visited page. etc

2) Filter the data set using some parameters.
 Example: Get the user list who accessed your app via Iphone.

3) Process, Filter the data and combine with various data sources like RDMBS, Mongo Db
 Example:
 Get the user list who accessed via Iphone.
 Get those user's profile details from mongo db.
 Process the message with these details and put a entry into the Email delivery table of some database.

4) Analytics, Recommendation algorithm leverages Hadoop
Example: Finding the related items and recommend to users. What Amazon and other sites do.

Analytics, Machine Learning  problems are not entirely dependent on Hadoop/ Big Data 

Analytics, Machine Learning problems are not entirely dependent on Hadoop/Big Data.  Machine learning libraries like Mahout  have specific distributed algorithms which can leverage Hadoop/ Big Data for processing huge data sets. It can work without Big Data/ Hadoop as well. So learn and understand the algorithms, check which suits your need without worrying the Hadoop part.


Cloud -  More offering apart from Scaling and Cost

Cloud services like Amazon, Rackspace are not only usedul to scale your app or to reduce the cost. You can  explore their ecosystem and check various services they provide with storage, cache,CDN .etc and leverage in your app

Cloud  - Things Fail.  Don't investigate. Have a fail-over strategy

If a instance or virtual machine fails,  hardly you can restore it.  Have a good failover strategy(Load Balancers, Backup.etc) .

Cloud  - Application Abstraction Layer

Have a abstraction layer in your application wherever possible when you use cloud services like cache, CDN. etc. All your program interacts with this abstraction layer and real implementation should be hidden. So there will be minimal change,  if you switch over to a different cloud provider in future.

Cloud  -  Collect Metrics and Analyze

Collect the essential metrics, analyze and check how your application performs in cloud. Amazon has a excellent service - CloudWatch for this. Even you use best practices, it is better to analyze how your application performs in cloud and do the necessary tuning.

Big Marketing Shift

We are seeing a major shift in how people find a business and engage. Advertising is no longer sufficient to drive customers to your business. We are seeing a big shift in how we market our business

Build Communities

There are various ways to build a community.

You can build a community around your product theme. For instance, if you are selling a walking gadget, form a community something like "Joy of Walking" in social media and through other channels . Engage the audience and  talk about it. Don't pitch in your product directly and try to sell there. You can give out the coupons and through other means you can leverage this community.
Forming a community directly with the name of the product is  also efficient in some cases.

Review Driven

First check the reviews and then decide. This is how people now make choices. We check Yelp, TripAdvisor, Play store .etc. for reviews. One good thing about this is if your product/business/service satisfies the customer,  you get positive reviews. So it boils down to give an excellent service or doing great product. Rest automatically taken care of.
Alternatively, you can also form a strategy to get positive reviews  Register your services and engage/reply in review sites. Get the feedback from the customer who walks into the store and assure them you'll address the concerns they raised. After that, it is very rare they go and put a negative review.

Contents..Contents..Contents..

Content rules. Put quality contents across channels. Let it be the photos of your business (or)  video tutorial in youtube (or) exhaustive Help /FAQ section in your site (or) posts in facebook/twitter.

More Engagement

Engage more with the existing and potential customer in forums, web sites, groups and social media as much as you can.

Developer in a Startup

Best part of being a developer in a start-up is you get exposure to core processes apart from coding. Interactions you  have with people from other divisions are mutually beneficial and  in-turn do goodies for the company. To give an idea of what I'm talking about , I'm listing some of the possible interactions you can have in a web startup

With Marketing Folks - Understand the marketing initiatives and campaigns. Get clear visibility on how and where people interact with  your site seeing the campaign.  With this input you can design your landing page and other things more efficiently and be in line with the marketing goals and expectation of a user. You can also work out on other strategies to create further interest for the user to make them stay in your site.

Give various insights to the marketing folks on how the campaign performed like the type of  users registered, their demographics, how active are they .etc. Marketing people can use this data to align their campaign and strategies.

With Customer Support Professional - Interact with the support team. Analyze the user's queries, feedback and emails. It gives great insight on the customer's reaction to your product. You can try to address that in your future releases.

Also you can guide the support team on various workflows and help them to answer some specific queries.

With Product Managers -  Interact with product mangers , understand their vision and product development strategy. Give insights to them about user adoption to a feature and other things so that they can take informed decisions

You can check  forum, social media, blogs  and other places where people talk about your product to get various insights. You can also set up a Google alert for your product name to not to miss any information on the web about your site/product.

Again it all boils down to your interest to participate. It is perfectly fine if you are interested in only development and coding. After all, coding you do only can help a product to sustain and be successful.

Approach to Web Product Development

How we approach the product development, dictates its success. I have put some pointers here..

Minimum Viable Product

Find out the minimum viable product and start the product development.

For example, if  you want to develop a site like Yelp, then the minimum viable product would be business listing, search and review. Start detailing it and kick start the development. Other features like profile, fans, friends can be added later. Also while doing your minimum viable product, keep in mind the features that are going to come in future and make it extensible as possible

Visualize the Complete Workflow

Always visualize the complete workflow and how they are going to interact. For instance, if you  are going to design and develop an eCommerce order page, take some time to understand the inventory, delivery, support functionality. Think how would interact between each other to give a better customer experience.

Consistent across Channels

Make sure your customers get consistent experience when they interact with your application through various channels - Laptop, Tablets, TV, mobile, tablet.etc

Customer Experience is the key

Customer experience is a pretty broader sense right from designing the UI, giving them the support what they needed and understand what they expect seeing your marketing campaign. Foreseeing the customer expectation and fulfilling it is the key.

Iterative Model

Product can be iteratively built and improved. Be clear on what level/depth we need to do a functionality, be clear on how far we need to think in terms of technology and do the coding,  Understand what is the operation and support requirement at that point of time.  

Time is crucial!

Win - Win model

Day to day, we encounter many models in technology and business(both digital and physical). Some of them captures our attention because of their uniqueness and novelty. Below models fascinates me, it solves a problem both in producer and consumer side. For now, I just name this as a Win -Win Model.

Recaptcha: Recaptcha creates a model, mutually beneficial for google to translate books, improve their OCR(Optical Character Recognition) and  for site owners it helps to avoid spam and bots. 

For further read - http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore 


Stanford Online AI Class: Another similar model we see from the Stanford Online AI Class. Artificial Intelligence classes are automated. Ranking questions, assigning homework and grading are done via AI systems. For a student it is useful to learn great concepts from the veterans of the field and in-turn they help the AI system to measure its teaching and continuously improve.
(Now, new classes moved to Udacity - http://www.udacity.com/ )













Reference - http://singularityhub.com/2011/08/18/100000-sign-up-for-stanfords-open-class-on-artificial-intelligence-classes-with-1-million-next/

Movie Making and Start-up - Comparison

I believe movie making is like a start-up, building a company from scratch. It goes through all the phases of a startup life-cycle. I have put the similarities here..

Research and story: A start-up is to fulfill a story and  research should be put into it. Visualizing as a story and dig into features  is the best way to approach the product development. In movie making, story is the crucial element and basic research should be done around it for authenticity.

Start Fresh: A start-up is full of energy and fresh mind with no hangover whatsoever. Approach to a movie should be like this even for an experienced film maker

Creativity: Creativity is the core aspect in movie making and you cannot proceed anything further without it.

Being creative is essential quality to run  a start up in implementing new business models, creating a better customer experience, forming a culture inside the company, working on process improvement, product development, customer support

Detailing: Detailing is an essential and handy skill to have and very critical in building a product. In movies, detailing every aspects from characterization, screenplay and choosing best out of it is important.

Observation and Log: To succeed in film making,  you need to observe the outside world and follow the daily affairs. Even you can get new characters, ideas for your movies from people you meet and news you read. When running a company, we need to observe different business models, emerging technologies, practices. Maintaining a log of all the observations is handy

Coordination: In a start-up,  we need to co-ordinate with various resources from marketing, development, finance, legal, admin..etc.. We need to utilize the services of external vendors who are best in it and get the things done. Care should be taken on contracts and negotiations. Its all the orchestration of these things make the product successful. Same applies to movie making.

Copied vs Inspired: There is a thin line between copied and inspired. You can inspire from anything from successful business models to great customer experience. Use of best practices always do goodies for the business. Similarly, in movie making you can inspire from screenplay,camera angles,background , characterization.etc from other movies.

Small Things Matter: Small things matters and  add value to overall objective and goal. For instance, even changing the size, color of an action button in a website or changing the tone of  FAQ section may plays an role in overall conversion. In a movie, even a small eye reaction, a minor object in the background plays a role in catching the attention of audience and makes a scene likeable (knowingly or unknowingly).

On Track: Product should be on track with the vision(Project Requirements). We have to clearly identify what level we need to do a particular feature at that point of time and plan our time, effort and resource accordingly. Finding which is important at that point of time is the crucial aspect in running a company.

A movie should be in line with story and screen play and not to carried away with non important things.

Scope of Improvement: A product can be iteratively improved and even rework can be done. Similarly a scene can be re-shoot latter, patched up and even can be improved during editing. One difference - In-case of a movie, nothing can be done after launch.

On Budget: We may need to do some adjustments here and there to manage within the budget. Similar case applies to a start-up.

Cognitive Psychology: If we know what people perceive,think and react to a scenario, we can try to capitalize through product features and services. Same applies to a movie. We have to think in the audience shoes and predict how would they be reacting to a scene.

On Time: Meticulous planning helps to complete a movie within a schedule and launching at the right time.

A proper product road map and planning helps to complete and launch the product on time.

Scope of Marketing: Finished product can be marketed in all unique and novel ways depending on the context of the product. Same applies to a movie. Apart from posters and ads, I believe lot of potential is there in marketing movies in all  novel ways. For instance,  for a children movie we can uniquely target children of particular age groups with campaigns and competitions. Leveraging social media and engaging the audience is also important.

Launch and Post Launch: Product Launch is  important to create a hype around the product. Same applies to a movie. Press release, music release, still release, trailer release, road shows  plays a crucial role in creating a hype around movie.

Doing in a phased manner with the audience feedback is very important. Doing by this way(phased manner) also helps in building up the necessary hype.After the launch, engaging the audience and make them talk about your product gives tremendous result.

Customer / Audience  - The Ultimate Decider: Finally, the customer/audience decides the success independent of hype and who creates it..

Starting Point for Business Research

We need to do research in our line of business to know the current trends, best approaches and industry insights. Below techniques can be the starting path for the research. It can be used by the business of any form(Online, Brick and Mortar) . 

Google Alerts: "Google Alerts are emails automatically sent to you when there are new Google results for your search terms" - Google.

Set up extensive google alerts related to your line of business.  For instance, someone who runs (or) planning to start  an online gadget store in Brazil can set-up alerts like below:

  1) "Brazil Ecommerce"
  2) "Brazil Gadget Store"
  3) "Online Gadget Store"
  3) "Brazil online buying behavior"
  4) "Online buying behavior"
  4) "Gadget store"
  5) "Ecommerce"
  6) "Brazil Ecommerce Trends"
  7) "Online customer acquisition"

Glancing through the alert emails, you can consume the informative articles and insights which you many not come across using search or other means.

Be a user of your competitor : Find out your competitor (or) someone who do similar type of business.  Register with their service/product and use it.  In case of offline business, you can go and visit the actual physical store. 

Things you can do, 

• Understand their business models and analyze it.  
• Use their forums,blogs and analyze the user's problems and feedback. You can address that as a feature in your business
• If you find any best practices, you can check how you can implement in your business. 
• If you find any flaw in their model,  you can address that in your business.

Google Reader: Subscribe to quality journals and blogs using google reader (or) any other feed reader of your choice. One way to find the quality sites/blogs is - when you subscribe to alerts,  you get to know many informative blogs and web sites. You can go and subscribe to their feeds.

Google Insights: "Google Insights for Search is a service by google similar to Google Trends^[1], providing insights into the search terms people have been entering into the Google search engine"  - Wikipedia

I'll explain this with an example,
In India gold market is huge. I just put "Gold" in insights with region as "Tamil Nadu" and duration as 1year.
You can see from the result, towns like Erode,Vellore,Sivakasi are on the top of the list and are ahead from some of the prominent cities. This data may be usefull for a jeweller who want to expand his business or to run a targeted campaign. To know more on how to leverage Google Insights, you can check this post -
 http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/competitive-intelligence-analysis-google-insights-for-search/ . You can also check Google Trends.

Research Log: Maintain a research log with references, url and important points. You may come up with various situation in your business where this log is very handy and referring to them can guide you to take better decisions. Also by this way, duplication of the research effort can be avoided.

Business research is not limited to product managers. Anyone who is interested and involved in the business can do it and you can share your valuable insights to the stakeholders. 

Conversion Rate - The Ultimate Goal

Everything we do to develop and run a web/mobile product is to achieve this single goal.

                      "Better Conversion Rate"

We can measure the conversion rate only after launching the product. So, most of us bring this after product development and more into marketing activities. Objective of this post is to share the approach we can take to bring conversion rate in the ideation, design and development phases of the project.

Desired actions performed by the user which helps to achieve product owner's business goal = Better Conversion Rate. 

So, achieving better Conversion Rate should drive the functional specification, technological choice, usability, product development, performance improvement, marketing, customer support and everything.

What we can do?

Bring in Project Decisions: In all project decisions (technical, design, functional and operational), bring the focus on achieving better conversion rate. Approach the decision making process as below,

"I'll get better conversions if user queries are handled  and  pro-actively supported, so I'm going to build a customer support team"

"I'll get better conversions if the core workflow's are more usable, so I''ll work with the usability experts and come up with a better design.."

"I'll get better conversions if there is a recommendation based upon user's buying behaviour, so I'm going to develop a recommendation engines using libraries like mahout.."

"I'll get better conversions if an active community is present for the product, so I’ll go for experts who can tell the digital stories and help to form a community"
     

"I'll get better conversions if a page loads fast, so I'm going to investigate and do necessary things to resolve" 

"I'll get better conversions if user discover the products easily,  so I'm going to develop a search functionality using  SOLR(or any other library)."

Now, it looks like reverse may also work.

For example,

I’ll build the best search engine to aid the conversion

But the flaw on this approach is that it may not required by the product at that point of time. A basic search may do the purpose, which can be expanded later and iteratively improved. So in a way, it encourages iterative development.

Time is crucial; Churn out important things which can aid the conversion rate.

Instill a Culture: We need to instill a culture in the team whereby everyone talks about the conversion rate .For instance, take a team where each developer do different screens/modules/workflow. Let them discuss how best possible way things can coordinate between their modules to achieve a  conversion goal

Introduce Analytics: Introduce Google analytics or any other analytics engine from the beginning of the project.  Let people understand the goals and conversion funnels from the start. We can mock-up goals similar to Google Analytics and have it as a reference for the team. Let the developer, usability expert and marketing people work keeping these goals in mind. Analysis and correct metrics is the key to improve conversion rate. Good thing is conversion rate can be improved iteratively.

It’s all the approach we take make the product successful.