How to let users guide your product Roadmap? Pratilipi x Hellomeets

Last weekend it was all about knowing how to let the user’s guide your product road map and if ever you aspire to become a product manager in the near future, you should give this a read.

The session was taken by Shally Modi, who is the co-founder of Pratilipi and also looks at the product side of it.

Just to let you know, Pratilipi is a vernacular storytelling platform.

Here are the highlights of the event.

The session started with the introduction of the attendees followed by the case studies.

And then an interactive Q&A session and networking marked the end of the session.

I am jotting down the key insights that I could get from the session:

1. Being in product = constant trade of priorities.
2. Even if you are a non-technical PM, you can still ace up the sphere by getting the knack of business aspects and a constant urge to learn because tech is a skill that can be acquired, it need not be an innate skill.
3. Use your own platform as a regular user.
4. Look up to data. Get cues from it. Just like the way Pratilipi did.
5. The concept of pushing the episodic format of storytelling came in just by looking at the small set of data available, betting on it and taking proactive measures to multiply the numbers.
6. There will certainly be experiments that will fail, features that you were betting high on drastically underperform. So, it’s very critical to double down the efforts on the experiments that aligns with the growth and kill the features that aren’t doing justice to the platform.
7. Build features to support and direct the users to the core use case of the product. It may or may not align with the vision of the product but can serve as an engagement channel which in turn can be used as the redirection to the core use case.
   Ex: Pratilipi launched a discussion feature on their platform using which they can now redirect the participants to their core use case.

The Numbers game — Pratilipi

One of the big tasks in today’s OTT dominated world is to produce below numbers from a text-reading community, for PURE VERNACULAR AUDIENCES:

• The Stories are average content lengths of 2500 words
• They onboard 5L new users / month
• Writer side retention of month 12 = 30% and writers who have published more than 10 content pieces for them is 80%.

Talking about numbers regarding the experiments performed by Pratilipi team and their success, here it goes

Important learning to help push P2P messaging

• % level of such users was small, but engagement was very high, retention was also very high for those, and hence, Pratilipi took a chance on it and decided to go ahead with it.

Important to highlight the focus on making “Creators” from the “Consumption-Users”

• 90% have organically grown from readers to creators, over a year. (amateur writers)

Above can be categorically attributed to users getting inspired from the Pratilipi platform

Important feature — “ success of ‘Collections’”

• 26% users who visited a profile page, engaged with an attribute from ‘Collections’ and that was a major success because, it establishes a consumers rapport in the platform.

So, these are the learnings/insights that we could draw from the event. It was insightful and all thanks goes to Volunteers, Sahradayi Modi and HelloMeets team.

Sahradayi Modi has also jotted down her experiences which you can have a look at here.

Thank you.

Some Pictures of the Event

The learnings and Insights are also contributed by Atin Garg (Product Manager at Hotstar). Do connect with him.

I also blog at UX Sprout. Do check it out.

Thank you.