I recently completed an amazing certification course in Product Management at Santa Monica Product School. This course teaches product management best practices and tools by coaching students through building a product requirements document, prototyping and pitch deck. Skills learned throughout the class include scrum, user testing, wireframing, A/B testing and key metrics definition, etc.
What to Build?
As mentioned earlier the course is centered on building a product for a company of my choosing. When deciding on which company I had to choose, my criteria were:
- Industry experience
- Potential for a product manager position
- Confidence in my ability to create a useful product
Understanding the Company
Tillster is a tech company that specializes in creating software solutions for restaurants by simplifying digital ordering, improving customer engagement and growing sales. Companies such as Pizza Hut, Burger King, KFC and more use Tillster’s software and services. This was a perfect choice for me because of my personal experience owning and operating multiple restaurants. This gives me great insight into the inner workings of this industry.
Since Tillster also creates mobile apps, I decided to look in the App Store and review the restaurant brands that they work with. I analyzed the apps that had the most downloads and reviews, since utilizing an app with a significant amount of user feedback and ratings would be a great way for me to collect data and hear pain points from actual customers.
The restaurant I chose to work on is Pizza Hut. The Pizza Hut app had over 2 million downloads and over 140,000 customer reviews. They are the largest pizza brand in the world generating, $1.2 billion in annual revenue. They own 25% of the global pizza market share
Pizza Hut’s Core Value
Pizza Hut’s company core value states:
“We don’t just make pizza. We make people happy. Pizza Hut was built on the belief that pizza night should be special, and we carry that belief into everything we do.”
Tavel’s Hierarchy of Engagement
Using Tavel’s Hierarchy of Engagement I put Pizza Hut in the retaining user stage.
Pain Points
Analyzing their ratings and reading the customer feedback it was clear that Pizza Hut had major issues with their mobile app.
More than 15% of reviews received for their current app release were 1-star ratings. Taking a deeper look at all released versions of the app, I discovered that out of 140,000 submitted ratings, 25% of them were 1-star ratings. This raised a red flag that something urgently needed to change with this app. I decided to use qualitative feedback to help me determine an opportunity hypothesis. I analyzed over 200 4-star and 1-star reviews to determine what users loved and hated about the app. By reviewing the qualitative feedback, I was able to narrow down the customer pain points to the following:
- Customizations of specialty items are not possible.
- Not Intuitive
- Menu navigation is confusing
- Legal and Copyright information consumed a huge portion of the interface
Personas
I created two personas to represent my target user:
Opportunity Hypothesis
With the qualitative feedback and user personas I was able to create this opportunity hypothesis:
“We can improve our customer satisfaction for Chill Tom and Working Mom Jane if we improve the UX design to make it easier to order food.”
Product/Feature
Using the information that I collected, I created a list of prioritized product features list that would help address my user personas pain points.
- Capability to customize any pizza
- Maximize visibility of all categorized menu items
- Simplify interface for returning back to the previous screen
- Legal and Copyright information not visible
I decided to create a product called “Simple Ordering” which would address the features is the list of above. Simple Ordering makes the app more intuitive, provides an enhanced user-friendly mobile ordering experience and allow customers to customize specialty pizzas with ease.
UX Design (Wireframes & Prototypes)
I used Balsamiq to create my initial wireframes from “Simple Ordering” which are shown below.
From InVision here I used to bring my wire frames to life. Below are animated demos of the new Simple Ordering features.
Simple Ordering provides a permanent main menu to make it easier for our customers to find their favorite food items.
You can also customize and add toppings to any specialty pizza with the click of a button.
Simple Ordering makes it easier to get back to the main menu screen just by clicking the “X” button in the upper left corner of any food item screen.
What is Success?
The goal for Simple Ordering is to increase customer satisfaction by:
- Increasing the app store rating to a 4.5 from the 3.5.
- Increasing the NPS score by 10%
Metrics
The key metrics that we want to track and measure are:
- App store rating change, month over month
- NPS score change, month over month
Go To Market Plan
Upon the approval of Simple Ordering, I created a launch plan to take the product to market
Pre-launch/Launch would look like this at a high level:
- For the Pre-launch, we plan on performing Internal testing with various members from other departments in the company
- We will automatically opt-in 200 of our most frequent ordering customers into the beta test
- They will receive free food credit to order anything that they want so that we can get real world results
- Once we are we complete with our besting testing a Demo Day for key stakeholders followed by one for the entire company
- An internal press-release for the company wiki would be created
Certain assets also would need to be created to accompany the launch, such as:
- Training video and support material for franchisees and customers
- Screenshots and documentation for App store
- Updated print and signage material for actual Pizza Hut locations
- Post on company blog
- External Press Release for Tech and Food Publications
- Email blast
- Twitter post
- Facebook post
Post launch:
With Pizza Hut being such a large global brand for the post launch stage I would continue to promote the new feature creating video ad campaigns for:
- TV
- YouTube
In summary, this is the framework I used to research, validate, build and launch a product/feature. Product School has definitely given me great insight on how to be a better product manager, and I’m ready to put this or similar plan in action.