UNDERSTAND Your Product with CustomGPTs

Table of Contents

• Introduction: The U.S.I.D.O. Framework
• Step 1: Use AI to UNDERSTAND your product
• Step 2: Use AI to STRATEGIZE your product
• Step 3: Use AI to IDEATE your product
• Step 4: Use AI to DEFINE your product
• Step 5: Use AI to OPTIMIZE your product
• Custom Tool: App Store Review Analyzer
• Custom Tool: AI Product Manager in a Box
• Build Your Own: AI Product Manager in a Box

Introduction

For those new here, this blog series aims to demystify AI for Product People, helping you foster a deeper understanding and the confidence needed to integrate AI into your product management practices. With all the hype and hyperbole surrounding AI, this blog series aims to help you stay grounded by focusing on the craft, the nuts and bolts of building great AI products.

Every week we show up to help you answer two fundamental questions:

1. How can AI make me a better Product Manager in my day-to-day job?
2. How can I build AI features and capabilities into my product?

Let’s get started.

A Framework for AI Product Managers

In the last edition we covered a framework to help Product Managers leverage AI across five key steps of the product lifecycle. This framework can help you better 1) Understand, 2) Strategize, 3) Ideate, 4) Define and 5) Optimize your Product.

I call this The USIDO Framework for AI Product Managers.

This week we’re going deep on the first step. We’re looking at how you can use a CustomGPT to drastically speed up the process of understanding App Store Reviews for valuable insights.

Step 1: UNDERSTAND

The ability of LLMs to recognize patterns and trends in unstructured data sets is a game-changer. LLMs can sift through troves of unstructured data like user reviews and spot trends and themes around customer pain points that may have taken you hours or days to understand.

The Challenge with App Store Reviews

Product Managers face a significant challenge with App Store Reviews. With thousands of reviews posted across different platforms, sifting through each one to identify trends, pain points, and user sentiments is not just time-consuming but often impractical.

This mass of data, while valuable, presents a daunting task. Manually analyzing this feedback takes a ton of time. As a result many product teams find themselves chasing one or two of the most inflammatory reviews as they pop up; putting out fires but having no idea just how prevalent and wide spread various issues are.

The Shortcomings of ChatGPT for Reviews

While ChatGPT can offer assistance, it also has its shortcomings when it comes to analyzing reviews. First, you need to find a way to import the reviews into chatGPT. The recent ability to attach excel documents in chatGPT has made this easier. However, this still comes with its challenges. You need to source a CSV file from somewhere. If you don’t have access to a CSV file you will need to subscribe to an additional service such as appBot to generate CSV downloads of all your app store reviews — an added step and one more monthly subscription to pay for.

Next, you need to know what to ask chatGPT to get the results you’re looking for. Getting to valuable insights can often be tedious and time-consuming. And if you want to analyze your app again in future or perhaps analyze a competitor’s app, then you need to try and remember how you previously prompted chatGPT to get the kinds of insights you were looking for.

And what if other team members or a VP wants to do some quick analysis? Now you have to share your prompts with them. Again, not ideal. This is all rather tedious, cumbersome and time-consuming. Likely enough friction that you may not put in all the effort. And without the effort, the insights chatGPT produces will likely be mediocre and rather trivial.

Well, there’s good news. There’s a much better and easier way to go about this.

The Solution: CustomGPTs

What are Custom GPTs?

You can now create custom versions of ChatGPT that combine instructions, extra knowledge, and any combination of skills. GPTs are a new way for anyone to create a tailored version of ChatGPT to be more helpful at specific tasks — and then share that creation with others.

From OpenAI:

Anyone can easily build their own GPT — no coding is required. You can make them for yourself, just for your company’s internal use, or for everyone. Creating one is as easy as starting a conversation, giving it instructions and extra knowledge, and picking what it can do, like searching the web, making images or analyzing data.

A Game-Changer for PMs

CustomGPTs can help solve many of the challenges described above. You build it once and can share it with anyone on your team. As you can imagine, these CustomGPTs can be leveraged across the product lifecycle.

For example, you could build a customGPT to help you:

• UNDERSTAND your product by analyzing user feedback
• STRATEGIZE by generating a SWOT analysis
• IDEATE by generating feature ideas based on user pain points
• DEFINE your product by writing first drafts of user stories
• OPTIMIZE your product by generating ideas around personalization

A CustomGPT for App Store Reviews

Now, I have even better news…

To get you started, I’ve already built one for you! 🥳

Let’s try it out. Start by following this link.

App Store Review Analyzer

For the demo, I will analyze the Spotify App listed in the US app store.

To use the tool follow the steps below:

👉 From the GPT landing screen, simply select the prebuilt prompt: “App Store Review Analyzer”.

👉 When prompted, simply provide the Country Code and App ID:

👉 Tap “Confirm” to allow the CustomGPT to talk to the Apple App Store via an API.

Et voila! You immediately get an analysis of the Spotify app.

We begin with some General Information…

Followed by an Executive Summary to give you a quick gut check of where users are at…

From here, it provides a quick Sentiment Analysis…

And explores Main Themes with real-world examples of comments from users…

It lists the the Top 10 Issues users are complaining about…

And quickly identifies key Trends…

Before offering some high level Recommendations for consideration…

A Very Strong Starting Point…

Of course, this is just a starting point. But it is a very solid one. One that can quickly point you in the right direction for further exploration. Not bad, to say it was generated in under one minute!

From this initial analysis, we already know that premium subscribers appear to be relatively happy while the free tier users are much more dissatisfied given heavy advertising and limitations of the free tier. We can now hone in on this (or any other area of interest)…

Going Even Further…

There are many different directions we can take the follow-up questions based on our specific goals as a Product Manager. Here are just a few of the follow-ups I would be eager to ask:

1. What are the top pain points for freemium users?
2. How can we reduce churn and drive more conversions to Premium?
3. What are the top issues caused by the recent updates?
4. Can you provide a more in depth analysis of the Top Issues and provide suggestions on how to address them?

For example, probing a littler deeper on the issue of excessive ads we can quickly generate a few useful suggestions and potential feature enhancements:

Again, perhaps not perfect but not bad for a few more minutes of your time!

Other Use Cases

The versatility of CustomGPTs extends far beyond just analyzing your own app reviews and can be applied to other use cases.

For example:

• Analyzing Competitor Apps: Dive into competitor app reviews, unveiling user feedback on their features and services. This insight can inform how to refine your product to outpace competitors.
• Understanding a Market: Aggregate insights across multiple apps in your category to spot trends and user expectations, helping you identify gaps your app could fill.
• Preparing for a New Assignment: Analyze the app and market segment, gathering insights on user feedback and industry trends to hit the ground running with informed, actionable strategies from day one.

Final Thoughts

App Store reviews are a goldmine of insights. They reflect the unfiltered voice of the customer. The ability to rapidly UNDERSTAND this feedback is invaluable. CustomGPTs enable you to have your finger on the pulse of user pain points, preferences, and suggestions, providing a solid foundation of recommendations in just minutes.

This approach not only accelerates understanding and insights, but can also cut through internal biases and preconceptions. It allows for an unbiased, comprehensive view of how users interact with the app — what they love, what frustrates them, and what they wish for.

By leveraging CustomGPTs to analyze app store reviews, you’re equipped to make informed decisions, prioritize product improvements, and strategize new features with confidence. This method ensures that product development is aligned with user needs and market demands, fostering a user-centric approach from the outset.

Armed with a solid UNDERSTANDING of your users, you’re now equipped to leverage AI in the next step of the USIDO Framework. Join us in the next edition as we look at how CustomGPTs can help you STRATEGIZE!

Table of Contents

• Introduction: The U.S.I.D.O. Framework
• Step 1: Use AI to UNDERSTAND your product
• Step 2: Use AI to STRATEGIZE your product
• Step 3: Use AI to IDEATE your product
• Step 4: Use AI to DEFINE your product
• Step 5: Use AI to OPTIMIZE your product
• Custom Tool: App Store Review Analyzer
• Custom Tool: AI Product Manager in a Box
• Build Your Own: AI Product Manager in a Box