Manifesto 2016 — Part 1
Date: 31 March
(Read Part 2 here)
Manifesto is a half-day product design conference. There was solid networking at the breaks and the speakers did a great job of switching between strategic ideas & tactical suggestions, which I love. Definitely recommend this!
Keynote: Tinder- Jonathan Bedeen
- 1.4B swipes/day
- Released ability to send gifs Jan 7- 20MM sent since launch
- The invention of the swipe solved a lot of problems on mobile. It’s a natural gesture that can be done: (1) with one hand & (2) walking down the street
- Deciding how to seed the app was really important: Release to college crowd- they are dense/located within a small search radius; they are trend setters, want to meet new people. Figured if it could work with college students, it could work with others
- Hasn’t changed much since 2013: Stick to the core mission & avoid adding anything else
- Don’t just be rooted in data — your app is for humans, solve a real problem by talking to people
Imgur Ajay Arora
- 30B tracked events happen per month on their site. This is so many that they cannot look at averages — must review each cohort’s experience
The buzz in the bay area is “head of growth”… Ajay recommends improving engagement with current users [rather than only trying to get new users]
- Mobile traffic > desktop on imgur
- Tips for managing two app platforms: He carries both an Android & iOS phone! (because users might switch between platforms)
- Focus on onboarding: Coach users through new features that are coming
- Having personality in your product is a good idea
- Organize the Dev team based on user’s experience: onboarding team, add to cart team, etc
- There is one thing that is likely- hypotheses as product manager is probably wrong
At one point, SC Moatti acknowledged that the Manifesto organizers had had a hard time finding female speakers (all males in the first half), but said they would work harder on this in the future
Panel
Yelp- Eric Singley /Getaround- Elliott Kroo /Salesforce-Greg Gsell
- Everyone on this panel had been with their company for 6+ years! Yowza
- Greg: Realized by looking at cohorts, we are not just a sales app for a salesperson- we are a collaboration tool. This completely changes the prioritization of features
- Recommended site: useronboard.com
- Tip: Send a push notification once the user pauses in the middle of doing something
- Balancing supply & demand on Getaround is tricky- in the summer, they get a lot of demand because they tell people the weather is nice- also use lots of email & FB ads
Asana — Sam Goertler
“We were giving a bad first impression” so they decided to do a redesign of their tools
Very different instincts between product manager and designer when redesigning:
To resolve this: they organized the redesign into structural changes and visual changes. They decided to iterate & incrementally make structural changes, and to do the visual changes all at once (accepting the PR hit that was likely to come).
Thumbtack — Audrey Liu
- We had an empathy gap between ourselves (tech people, located in SF) & our users (two groups: people needing to get things fixed vshandymen & women)
- Their philosophy/mindset: “We are… designing an app for the nooks & crannies of someone’s life”
