Traveling Backwards
A fictitious press release experiment
At Amazon, new initiatives start with the product manager writing an internal press release announcing the finished product. The approach is called “working backwards” and is widely used.
When I first read this, it resonated with me so much I just had to do it (or at least try to do it). Here’s two reasons why:
- Practice
I wanted to take a quick try at it myself. Quick because I’m at the airport and my flight is leaving in two hours; also, tomorrow is November and I shall N*O*T break my resolution of writing once a month. - Delivering
I’ve had this product idea for a while now. It’s basically an app I would love to have, so it’s coming from a really personal perspective. This post involves trashing the dusty, oversized draft for the same product.
Here it goes.
Trivle
The easiest way to plan, experience and share your travels.
Summary
An awarded startup announces a new product, Trivle. The app promises to help users have a simple, delightful & intelligent process of planning, experiencing and sharing their travels.
Problem
Planning a vacation is often a daunting process. There are all these tasks — trying to figure out too much information in not enough time: everything from accommodation and food, to using (or not using) the public transportation. On top of this, travellers don’t have an easy way to collaboratively plan their stay and to focus on places discovery. Existing tools and content sources are scattered all across the board (and mediums), which means there’s no easy way for users to grab that content before heading out the door (and continue using it once they’re in the field).
This is where Trivle comes in.
Solution
There are three key points that this product is really good with:
1
Planing
For the avid traveler that likes to research and plan in advance, Trivle offers private and public collaboration boards. Travel plans created in the app are automagically grouped and sorted according to boroughs (neighbourhoods, or just logical city areas), venue work hours, user patterns and common sense (not an often feature in apps!). This means you will never again travel to the other part of the city just to figure out the restaurant is closed!
The product integrates with existing platforms and allows for easy addition of content with regards to accompanying multimedia content and notes addition.
2
Experiencing
Imagine this scenario for a second:
You’re in a foreign city, your girlfriend is cold and you’re both kind of hungry. You two are trying to take most of the four day visit (honestly, who knows if you’ll ever visit this city again). You’re in roaming. You want relevant information about the locations you spent weeks on researching beforehand. There was a nice restaurant in this neighbourhood. Was there? Was it Italian restaurant or just a bakery? Is it open now? …
Many of our users experiences something very similar. But inspite of meticulous planning, why does the execution have to hurt? It doesn’t. Trivle solves that. It has beautiful offline maps (the only feature that’s premium) with pinned venues in relations to the current location & time, rush hour relevancy, hungry / thirsty level and a set of contextual information.
3
Sharing
Spending so much time researching is truly valuable. We want it to cater to your friends’ travels as well. This is why the day-to-day plan that the user creates can be easily duplicated and used as a starting point, a template for someone else. Days can be reduced or expanded, new locations added, and certain profile preferences changed. Intelligent sharing relative to users’ social circle.
How to get started
Just go to www.gettrivle.com and download the app.
Customer Quote
My wife and I have planned our Paris getaway for weeks (dare I say months) now. I’m finally able to merge all of the Google Docs (that’s what she uses ☺, printed guides (more than one, some are really quirky), Foursquare and special login-required guide data into one source. I don’t know what algorithm they use, but their “neighbourhood group” feature is amazing! — Five star rating, Sasha, Ljubljana
Closing and Call to Action
The startup recognises that there are apps that help you to travel. But they continue with saying that “…we just want to reduce the number of tools from 15 to 1 and make the experience easy so you can focus on things that matter. Bon Voyage!”
I'll borrow Ian’s conclusion and invite everyone to give feedback via notes / recommendation / twitter. This is purely an exercise, but this article will keep iterating. That way the product can become truly ours.
If the benefits listed don’t sound very interesting or exciting to customers, then perhaps they’re not (and shouldn’t be built). Instead, the product manager should keep iterating on the press release until they’ve come up with benefits that actually sound like benefits. Iterating on a press release is a lot less expensive than iterating on the product itself (and quicker!).
Article iteration #1
Fri 31 Oct 2014 @Munich Airport.
Quick, dirty and unsuccessful. But it’s out in the world, living it’s life.
Note
This entry is part 10 of my New Year’s resolution project. All entries.
