Welcome back to the third update of my product management summer internship at Twitter, covering weeks 7, 8, and 9! 🎉 If you haven’t already, you can check out my first and second updates to gain a better understanding of the first half of my internship. I hope you enjoy them and let’s get right into it!
#BuildingTheFoundation (Week 7)
With the home timeline upsell prioritized as the new first milestone, we continued ahead with technical scoping and focused our energy on the home timeline use case. Mark (the primary Twitter Blue engineer working on upsells) created a detailed technical design document (TDD), which outlined the distinct technical steps and considerations needed to implement the home timeline upsell. The TDD was especially important because even though we were using a framework created for in-app prompts, the specific use case of upsells had never been built before at Twitter. This meant that all the steps and questions we listed out on the TDD, from determining how to access the subscription status of a user to creating a comprehensive set of use cases for testing, had limited or no prior references. Although the limited references and examples added additional complexity to the technical work for the home timeline upsell, we knew it would set a strong foundation for building future upsells — with each upsell being built faster and easier.
Personally, what I found really valuable going through this TDD and technical scoping process with the Twitter Blue engineers was a new perspective on the level of depth needed when technically constructing a feature from the ground up. At face value, it’s quite easy to say a feature or product can be built. I was able to see that a lot when reading Twitter Blue feature requests on Twitter! However, when you are actually given the task to define and technically execute on a feature, it’s an entirely different story. Learning about the considerations and decision-making processes that the engineers went through when scoping out the work for upsells gave me more clarity into the level of detail needed when engineering a product.
As a product manager, my job isn’t to write the code — but it is my responsibility to have enough technical intuition where I can converse with engineers and understand overall how the product can be built. A great experience putting this technical intuition into practice was during our weekly upsells standup meeting, where I met with Mark, Scott (Twitter Blue data scientist), and other Twitter Blue engineers to discuss progress made and goals for the upcoming week. Being able to have these weekly conversations about the progress of upsells and discussing the technical challenges was an experience that helped me to grow my technical understanding. I really enjoyed talking through roadblocks and pivots with the engineering team, and seeing our progressive wins each week!
#DeliveringForTheCustomer (Week 8)
Week 8 was one of my most memorable weeks at Twitter because we took a deep dive into learning from Twitter Blue customers. Since Twitter Blue had launched in early June, the team had received a lot of feedback and requests from users on what they would like to see in the subscription service. To gain more clarity into what the future of Twitter Blue may look like, the Twitter Blue research team organized two events: an all-hands brainstorming session and user research interviews.
The all-hands brainstorming session was focused on getting all the people who worked on Twitter Blue together in one video call to brainstorm future features of Twitter Blue. I had participated in brainstorm sessions before in my previous work experiences, but this particular session really stood out to me because of the thoroughness in which it was conducted. We first recapped initial feedback from users and how that feedback would contribute to our outlined goals for the next version of Twitter Blue. Then, we identified some areas of growth for the subscription and spent the majority of the time ideating in each of these defined areas. The goal was to come up with potential features in each of these growth areas, without any worries of limitations or restrictions. Seeing how everyone approached each area from so many different angles was a really fun experience because, on a typical day, we’re focused on approaching problems in the most feasible manner. Being able to set aside that mindset for the brainstorm session and imagine what Twitter Blue could eventually become was honestly quite invigorating!
For the rest of the week, Morgan (Twitter Blue researcher) set up multiple user interviews with prospective, current, and lasped Twitter Blue customers to learn more about their experience using the subscription. What I found most interesting about these user interviews was being able to hear the similarities and differences in customer feedback. As I mentioned before, Twitter Blue had been receiving a ton of feedback on Twitter, but this feedback was only useful to a certain extent. It helped the Twitter Blue team to identify general areas that could be improved in the subscription, but the user interviews gave us the opportunity to really dig into what users actually thought and felt.
One of Twitter’s main goals when building its product is to always deliver for the customer, and listening to customer feedback is essential towards achieving this goal. Going through these interviews was a great experience for me because it not only helped to further refine my focus on how to build the best upsells for customers, but it also reinforced the power of taking the time to talk to users. Oftentimes, it can be easy for people in tech to be swept up in building the product and it is important to always keep in mind why we’re building the product — which is for the customer.
#AllAboutNUX (Week 9)
With upsells primarily in the implementation phase, I began to focus more of my attention on other areas of Twitter Blue that I could help out in. Another important feature in the Twitter Blue roadmap was creating a new user experience (NUX) to help new users make the most out of their subscription experience. Although NUX may be an unfamiliar term, everyone has definitely encountered some form of NUX in their everyday life. Whether you’re subscribing to an app or using a website for the first time, NUX is a way to introduce new users to an app, feature, or product. Based on recent user interviews, we learned that multiple new subscribers did not fully understand how to use Twitter Blue’s features, which contributed to some confusion. Our hypothesis was that implementing NUX in Twitter Blue would help new subscribers to more quickly find value in the subscription, therefore reducing confusion and increasing overall user retention.
What I think makes NUX interesting and challenging is that there is no one way to implement it. Each NUX is unique to the product it is guiding the new user through, which makes it really important to identify the NUX best practices to apply. To gain a better understanding of the NUX industry standard for subscription products, I conducted another competitive analysis on 10 different subscription products. I first audited the NUX’s by focusing on what occurs right after a user signs up and then analyzed the NUX’s to find any overarching similarities in how they were implemented. One big takeaway from this exercise was discovering that all 10 NUX’s began with a success message (ex: Congrats! You successfully subscribed.) and provided the user with detailed descriptions about the subscription benefits. Twitter Blue did have a success message, but knowing that we should repeat the subscription benefits was important. Additionally, the most compelling NUX experiences had what we call “guided onboarding”, which is where the user is guided along specific action items to get them involved in the product.
With these takeaways in mind, I began to form some recommendations for Twitter Blue’s first NUX and started to translate those recommendations into actionable steps on a product proposal document. The goal with the document was not to build and ship an entire feature like upsells, but rather focus on gathering information to start the foundation of what NUX could be like in Twitter Blue.
Read on for my last internship update to learn more about NUX, my other work for Twitter Blue, and the final stages of upsells!
