Create a product vision - Transcripts.pdf

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START AUDIO

Devin: Before we can jump in to actually designing the product we want to

create, we need to set up what we call the product vision. The

product vision is a way that we capture basically the goal of the

exercise we’re embarking on. This could be creating a whole new

app from scratch or maybe taking a really well established piece of

software and adding some new functionality to it.

It’s really important that either you or everyone you’re working with

has the same goal. That’s what the product vision does. A product

vision is made up of a lot of different components but we’ll be

discussing three main ones: a problem statement, which helps you

focus on what problem you’re trying to solve. Personas, which help

you capture the types of people you’re trying to help. Finally,

feature lists, which help you start brainstorming what the app needs

to do.

Throughout this section we’re going to be looking at collecting

information from our own minds and from the people that we’re

trying to help.

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Course 3: Develop and manage a digital product

Course provider: Founder Centric

Section: Create a product vision - Introduction

Duration: 0:00:56

http://learning.digitalbusinessacademyuk.com/course/view.php?id=5&section=3

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START AUDIO

Devin: You might be wondering, we’re learning all the product

development but am I going to be building a product myself. The

answer is yes. Throughout this course you’re going to be creating

your own little product along with all the learnings. What you’re

going to be creating is a mobile app that helps people buy coffee

online.

Now, you might be curious, what kind of customers will use an app

like that or what kind of influences or knowledge do I need to know

to create an app that’s useful? Well thankfully, you’re now going to

watch a case study, an interview, with Stephen Rapoport, the

founder and CEO of Pact Coffee. Stephen started this company to

help people easily buy coffee for their home.

In this interview he’s going to explain his motivations behind this

company, what they had to build to make it work, what the first

version of his product was like so pay attention. All this information

will be excellent to help you frame your work. In a nutshell you’re

going to be stepping into the shoes of a product manager at Pact

Coffee so pay attention.

Stephen: I’m Stephen Rapoport and I’m the founder of pactcoffee.com. We

stop you from running out of coffee that you love so we’ll send you

packs of coffee, roasted and ground to suit your brew method in

letter box friendly packaging on a subscription. We find out the



Section: Create a product vision – Problem Statement – Interview: Pact Coffee

Duration: 0:05:31

http://learning.digitalbusinessacademyuk.com/mod/lesson/view.php?id=442

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kinds of coffee you love, we’ve got a recommendation algorithm

that learns your pallet and how often you need a bag and we’ll send

it to you that often.

It’s really varied actually, we’ve got a few different groups that

we’ve noticed really, really love us. Broadly speaking, it’s coffee

drinkers who have drunk awesome fresh third wave, as it’s called,

bought awesome coffee in a café but are still make themselves

slightly shitty supermarket coffee at home. So sometimes that’s

students, young professionals, people my age and even the older

demographics. We’ve got a few Saga type customers out there as

well. Coffee is quite a universal product so I guess we don’t have

that one tight demographic right now.

I had recently sold my previous business which was called

Crashpadder and I decided to do something in coffee. I didn’t know

what but I followed some good friend’s excellent advice. In fact,

Paul Graham, I love his idea of solve your own problem perfectly

and then go and find out if anyone else has the same problem. That

was this business.

On day one it was your grind. We sold coffee by post, it was a rigid

subscription either a bag every seven days or a bag every 14. The

reason for that was my wife travels a lot for work. When she’s in the

country we get through a bag a week and when she’s not we get

through a bag a fortnight. Obviously shortly after launching I

realised that that was far too rigid and that really was just me and a

small handful of other people.

We built a lot of flexibility around the delivery, introduced a wider

range of coffees and actually changed the positioning quite a lot so

that it was targeting not just speciality coffee drinkers but the mass

market as well. It was really good fun. I’m non-technical as a

founder. I’m that guy. I worked with a couple of freelancers that I

know, Namit & Barnaby, who are absolutely awesome MVP

prototypers.

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We sat together in my flat. It took 48 hours to build and launch the

first site. We wrote all of the copy, took the photos, mainly on

iPhone, wireframed the whole thing and got some really basic

functionality and super basic, to the extent that actually if you

requested additional bags, it was so basic we didn’t even increase

the amount that we charged you. If you skipped a bag we still

charged you anyway and then we had to figure it out, apologise by

email and refund it.

Yes, we got together and we came up with two broad hypotheses,

one that people would be really turned on by the idea that they

could drink coffee that was better than they’d ever had before, the

other was that they’d never run out again. Two versions of the

home page with different copy on, launched both to see which

would resonate better and just started signing people up.

From concept to first 695 of revenue was 48 hours, which I’m really

proud of. One of the earliest surprises was that people didn’t want a

weekly delivery, they wanted to skip a bag or request one

straightaway. It was either 7, 14 or 30 days at the time and I

thought, “That’s going to cover 90% of people’s coffee habits,” and

it doesn’t at all. It covers about 5 because the difference between a

bag every 14 days and every 15 days is actually really significant

for a customer.

It’s the difference between having one bag of coffee in your

cupboard and two. Two is a pain in the ass. The other huge one

was that I wasn’t stopping speciality coffee drinkers from running

out of coffee. I mean if we’d launched that business and stuck with

that goal, I think we probably would have hit our addressable

market at this stage, whereas instead I realised that whilst everyone

loves this coffee when they make it for themselves for the first time,

most people aren’t going to try it.

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The major opportunity for Pact is introducing this coffee to

everyone else, not selling this coffee to people who are

drinking it already. If I could give myself one piece of advice

on day one of starting the business, it would be to not look for

data to inform the product development decisions but rather

let customers drive those decisions and use KPIs to measure

how well you solve what customers are asking for.

Devin: Perfect, thanks very much, Stephen.

Stephen: Pleasure.

END AUDIO

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START AUDIO

Devin: The first thing to do when you’re starting on a new product idea is to

create what we call the problem statement. The problem statement

is just a simple sentence that sums up what the whole purpose of

this exercise is. Why are we trying to make this product in the first

place? A problem statement is made up of three parts: the goal of

the product, the problem the product is trying to address and a

specific but ambiguous request towards a solution.

To make sense of this, let’s look at this as an example. If we were

product designers at Instagram in the early days, our problem

statement might look something like this: Instagram is designed to

allow people to share snapshots of their life online. Current

solutions are meeting this by not allowing people to share just little

micro photos but everything they take at once. How might we

improve photo sharing online to allow for a more social experience?

This problem statement takes these three major parts into account.

It talks about what product you’re trying to create. It talks about

what problem you’re trying to solve and it mentions why the current

solutions are not meeting people’s goals.

END AUDIO



Section: Create a product vision – Problem statements – Create a problem statement

Duration: 0:01:04

http://learning.digitalbusinessacademyuk.com/mod/lesson/view.php?id=442&pageid=333

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START AUDIO

Devin: Now that we’ve created our problem statement, we’re going to

create what we call personas. Personas are sketches, not so much

of our product, but of the customers we’re trying to help. Personas

are great tools because a pitfall that many young product designers

often fall into it that they design a product for themselves rather

than for the actual people they want to help.

Persons are great tools that capture information about potential

customers, helping get the assumptions you have about your

customers on to a piece of paper so other people can see it and

basically help you make design decisions less abstract. Instead of

arguing about, “I think we should do this,” it’s more so, “I think this

customer wants to do this”. That makes it an easier conversation for

anyone involved.

There is a big warning label though attached to personas that you

must heed. Personas are not about inventing a perfect person to

make a product for. Personas are about capturing real people.

When we start creating personas in the following assignments, it’s

not about making up somebody, it’s about taking data that you have

from your experiences, from interviews or from market research

and translating that into an easy to consume format. Personas are

sketches but they’re sketches of real life.

END AUDIO



Section: Create a product vision – Personas – Introduction to personas

Duration: 0:01:11


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START AUDIO

Devin: Creating a persona is easy even in ultra-professional settings like a

digital agency or really mature start-up. They’re still made with just

a simple marker and a piece of paper. To create a persona, we

want to capture factual information about our customer and things

that they do in their day to day life that relate back to the product

we’re trying to create.

All we have to do to do this is simply draw two lines on the piece of

paper to divide it into four sections. On this half we’re going to

capture facts about their life, who they are, how old they are, how

much money they make, what kind of mobile phone they use,

things like that.

On this half we’re going to capture their behaviours and goals. The

behaviours are things they do in their day-to-day life that relate

back to a product. Their goals are things that they want to be able

to do that maybe our product can help them with.

END AUDIO



Section: Create a product vision – Personas – Anatomy of a persona – Video 1

Duration: 0:00:48


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START AUDIO

Devin: Let’s create a persona together real quick. Let’s go back to the

Instagram example we used in the problem statement and let’s look

at a customer that a young Instagram might want to have. Come

and meet Carl. Now, Carl is a made up person in the sense that he

doesn’t exist, but all the points on Carl’s persona came from

interviews with real people.

Who is Carl? Well Carl is this guy in a cool hat. Carl is 29 years old,

he works at a digital agency. He makes £29,000 a year and he has

an iPhone but he works on a PC. We can then go over to

behaviours and goals which is the more interesting section of the

persona.

Behaviours are things that he already does in his day to day life.

These are bits of information that you could glean from interviews

or your own experience or observing other people in the real world.

It turns out that Carl snaps a lot of photos on his phone and he

often shares those photos via email with his boss at the agency, his

creative director or just with friends.

He also uses photos a mood board. As an employee at a digital

agency, he often sees stuff that he likes, snaps a photo and saves it

for later. His goals are things that he wants to be able to do, or

something you should glean from interviews that seems like it

would help them in his life. In this case, because he shares photos



Section: Create a product vision – Personas – Creating personas

– Video 2

Duration: 0:01:59


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often via email, we think he wants to be able to share photos with

friends and with colleagues.

We also found that he likes to follow thought leaders, he gets lots of

design magazines and he reads lots of news boards so following

what’s happening in the design world is really important. You might

notice that as a snapshot, this doesn’t talk at all about having a

mobile app that takes photos or anything like that, but it does

capture the wants and desires of a customer really well. That’s the

power of a persona.

This persona only took about a minute to sketch up but it took a

couple of days of research to build. In the upcoming assignment

you’re going to see interviews with three real people talking about

their experiences around coffee. From that you’re going to create a

persona from each one. Good luck.

END AUDIO

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Customer 1: I work at a start-up in London. I’m in design, so I do creative things.

I have an iMac and an iPhone, so I tend to be glued to my phone all

the time. At about 10 o’clock this morning. I got it at work.

Devin: Did you make it yourself or…?

Customer 1: I did make it myself, yes.

Devin: Fantastic. What kind of coffee was it?

Customer 1: It was a V60.

Devin: So that filter coffee?

Customer 1: Filter coffee, yes.



Section: Create a product vision – Personas – Assignment:

Personas – Customer Interview 1

Duration: 0:01:04

http://learning.digitalbusinessacademyuk.com/mod/page/view.php?id=445

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Devin: Perfect.

Customer 1: I tend to make cafetiere at home. I tend to mostly just drink it on the

weekend, really. I live with a shared house so I tend to make a big

cafetiere and we all drink coffee together. I get it delivered to my

house.

I love coffee, I like the emotions that come with it. It’s kind of like my

moment, I can make my coffee and just give myself five minutes off.

I quite enjoy my coffee moments. It’s just my five minutes to just

chill out and have a good cup of coffee. It’s definitely a necessity.

Devin: Perfect, thank you.

END AUDIO

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START AUDIO

Customer 2: I’m Tom, 22, and I work up at a startup as a digital marketer in

online growth. iPhone 5, MacBook Pro, and that’s pretty much it,

day to day.

It must have been last Friday at work. I don’t drink over the

weekends. I rarely make coffee at home, so it’s mainly just in the

workplace. I get it from the [pacts] online website, shipped through

the post. It’s usually through a V60 so it’s the drip method, just

because it’s so easy. It’s a quick thing in the morning, always

before lunchtime, just to get me in the mood, to get working.

Nothing more than that. It’s never a craving, it’s just a habit that I’ve

got into. Probably to have it with a few more people, rather than just

on my own at the kitchen desk. To actually make it and have a chat

with other people about it.

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Duration: 0:00:54


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START AUDIO

Customer 3: Hi, I’m Gary Nice and I work in film. I produce videos for early stage

start-ups. Technology-wise, I have everything because technology

is basically my life. I have an iPhone, an iPad, an iMac, a MacBook

Pro.

I’ve genuinely never had a coffee, I don’t like coffee. Every now and

again, say once a year, I’ll try coffee again to see if I like it, and I

just reconfirm that it’s still something I find unpleasant.

Not really, no. I’ve tried drinking tea because people tell me that

caffeine is important (Laughter) to wake up in the morning, but

again I’m not really a fan of that either.

I think for me it’s the bitterness of coffee that I don’t particularly like,

so maybe if someone could tell me there was a blend that wasn’t

too bitter, or something that made it in a way- Even if I make it

sweet I still don’t really like it, so I don’t know.

We have an espresso machine at home, so when we’ve got a box,

a selection of different capsules, you just go up and I go, “Which

one do you want?” and then they tell me which one is their

preferred option.

My housemates drink coffee, so I just use their machine. I don’t

mind making coffee, I just don’t ever drink it myself.

Yes, I do think it’s quite amazing how coffee has become such an

integral part of everyone’s lives. It’s still not persuading me that it’s

something I need to do, and I’m pretty much fine with that.

END AUDIO





Duration: 0:01:27


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START AUDIO

Devin: Now that you’ve created your problem statement which describes

what you want to create and you’ve created your personas which

describe who you want to create it for, it’s time to start jotting down

ideas on what you actually want to make. That’s where a tool called

feature lists comes into play.

Feature lists have two different stages. The first stage is

brainstorming and getting all your ideas on to the table. The second

section involves curating them and making them a little more

accurate. The first phase is simple: simply grab a stack of paper or

some post-it notes and start brain dumping all your ideas on to it.

If we take the Instagram example, we would put things down like

take a photo, or like a comment, or snap a photo to a feed, or share

the photo with friends on Facebook, literally anything that pops to

mind. It doesn’t really matter right now whether or not it’s accurate.

The second phase is more important, which is the curation phase

where we translate those simple ideas into much more structured

ideas that we call features. Features have three main parts: what

the feature is, who the feature is for and why we need the feature in

the first place. The “what” is easy enough. It’s literally what it can

do, so take a photo for example or like a photo.

“Who”, is who the feature is for. This is usually a persona so, for

example, Carl could go there. Finally, why describes why the

feature exists in the first place, what purpose does it have in the

system.



Section: Create a product vision – Feature Lists – Introduction

Duration: 0:02:15


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Let’s take a quick example of liking a photo on Instagram. The

feature would be to like a photo. Who this would be for would be for

one of our personas, like Carl for example. The big question is why

does Carl do this? The simple answer in this case is to show that

he appreciates the photo from a friend. When you combine these

altogether you get a feature.

The really key part here is the why section. If you can’t come up

with a real why on why this should exist, it probably doesn’t deserve

to be in the feature list in the first place. In the section below you’ll

find a worked example for most of the Instagram features. In an

upcoming assignment you’re going to translate your problem

statement and your personas into a large feature list.

END AUDIO

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START AUDIO

Devin: That’s it, you’ve just created your first product’s vision. You’ve

made a problem statement. You’ve collected your personas and

you’ve even started making a feature list which is going to really

help you in the next stages of designing and building your products.

All these things together form the little ball of knowledge that will

help you guide the mission and purpose of your product.

It’s important to note though that is isn’t a one-off exercise. Every

time you want to add something new to your product or do a new

version, this is something you should do. You should update your

personas with real information from your customers. You should

make sure your problem statement still reflects what you’re trying to

do. If you have new feature ideas, definitely make a new feature

list.

This kind of data is useful for not only you, the product designer, but

also marketers, business owners and even customers. They’re

great things to have around.

END AUDIO



Section: Create a product vision – Product vision wrap-up

Duration: 0:00:50

http://learning.digitalbusinessacademyuk.com/course/view.php?id=5&section=3

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Create a product vision - Transcripts.pdf