The Product Gene — July update

Written by Eugene Nikiforov, PM at The Product Gene

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

I’ve entered July with nothing but a bunch of hypotheses and excitement about building a new product. Our premise was that people don’t really learn via watching videos or reading books — you remember 5% of what you’ve learned at best. People learn when they struggle to achieve something, when there is a suffering story attached, when they live through the experience of doing something and incorporate it. The alternative way approach to learning that addresses the mentioned problems is solving cases. So we wanted to do something related to solving cases, but had very little understanding of US market and target audience. Hence the first step — user and market research.

I’ve conducted 30+ problem interviews with Product Managers of different level and background. That brought me to identifying target audience: Junior (Associate)Product Managers at startups (starting from Round A) that transitioned into a product role less than two years ago. This guys have a lovely bouquet of problems:

• Lack of engaged mentor (that’s a painful one, pain on 9/10)
• Frustrating communications with stakeholder and engineers (pitching your ideas, persuading, being on the same page with engineers turns out to be more important than theoretical knowledge of product management concepts, 9/10)
• Lack of technical background (this one’s at the essence of coding bootcamps, 7/10)
• Not knowing how to prioritize (this one can have heavy implications — burning company’s money on features that nobody needs, 7/10)
• Lack of useful frameworks, templates (“AAAAH, I feel stupid, I don’t know what I should do, plz help me”, 6/10)
• Doing meaningful impact on key metrics (6/10)

Another potentially super interesting segment is those, who want to transition into product management from another role. The transition is extremely difficult (juniors usually ranked the suffering of it on 10/10) and their job story is completely different from juniors. But there are two main issues with focusing on that segment:

• They require another product: they dont’ really need to get the PM skills at the moment, they need the skills of undergoing interviews and selling themselves — something we have little expertise on the US market.
• They are much less financially stable and they definitely would be paying for themselves (unlike juniors, whose training may be covered by their employer).

Apart from user research, I’ve conducted 5+ expert interviews with senior-level PMs / VPs of product, they helped me a lot with picking the segment and framing problems of junior PMs. Basing on the insights from the interviews (I used Miro.com for structuring, visualizing and analyzing insights from interviews), I’ve created a product concept — subscription for 2 cases per week and assembled a short demo on the Thinkific (platform for launching online-courses). The demo looked shitty (as it should :), but I wanted to validate the hypothesis that juniors would be ready to commit for the product (ideally agree to make pre-payment with discount / pitch the product to their manager).

So I got back to the same people, I’ve done problem interviews with, and asked them for solution interviews / product demos. I tried pitching the price in $49–99 range for a monthly subscription. The feedback was mixed. People love the concept of learning by solving cases, improving skills by performing real-life tasks (the simulation aspect), the interactiveness, the storytelling and the group dynamics. But there were few critical flaws to the concept:

• People didn’t like the concept of subscription — the infinity of training with no particular end or certification seemed meaningless.
• The randomness of case you get turned out to be an issue — people want to solve cases on a particular topic they need to grow in, don’t want to waste time on smth that they don’t really need at the moment.
• Juniors shared their anxiety that they might not be able to follow the
  two-cases-a-week rhythm and would prefer to learn at their own pace.
• The demo was visually mediocre and that backfired — people were reluctant to give commitments without social proof and shiny pictures.

So I started working on that feedback with building a landing page on tilda.cc. Along with addressing issues that came out on demos, I wanted to test different ways of communicating product as well. I’ve repackaged the product: now you buy a block of cases on a particular topic (each block addresses a specific job story that a junior PM will likely hire someone for). Each block has 15–30 cases to solve, cases are logically consistent and united by a story. The block costs between 200–500 dollars. With that price the unit economics would add up even with huge CAC. I did couple corridor tests and improved communication on the landing page several times. The main issue that prevented users to commit now were high price (seems like with that range we’d mostly be looking with companies paying for their employees) and absence of trial. The obstacle here is the following: “The product is as good as the cases are. Without being able to try solving cases, committing for the product implies huge risks that the cases are shitty / not relevant for me”.

I guess the next milestone is to complete a ready-to-play-with trial and get the next round of feedback. Stay tuned!