Customer to Product Idea Iteration by Amazon’s Product Manager

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Akshay Kerur

Tonight’s Speaker

Customer to Product Idea IterationAKSHAY KERUR

Agenda

• Importance of putting your product on paper

• Essential new product customer centric questions

• Press Release

• FAQ’s

• Product Guiding Principles

• Resources

Importance of putting your product on paper

Why you should put your product on paper?

• Communicates real vision

• Allows for sharing of vision without grandiose claims or worrying about the “How”

• Saves money

• Iterating on paper is less expensive than iterating on a prototype

• Saves time

• Allows for much faster iteration/refinement of initial concept

• Makes pivoting easy

• Pivoting is a lot easier when no engineering is involved

• Especially useful for new product ideas – Pre MVP Concept

Essential new product customer centric questions

What should I write down about my customer before I even think about a product?

• Who is my customer ?

• What are his/her pain points ?

• How are they solving this problem right now ?

• How do I know what he/she needs ?

• What can I do to provide them the best benefits ?

• What will their new experience look like?

Press Release

Press Release• What is it?

• A 1-page forward looking tool to imagine the future

• Written in customer facing language

• Imagines how you want a customer to feel and what you would want them to say when they use your service or product

• Tips

• Focus on the customer benefit/experience ( their comfort/time/enjoyment )

• Don’t use marketing buzz words ( best/greatest )

• Tell a compelling story that is self-understood without you

• Use succinct definitive words ( Eg. Use “Will” not “Could/Should/Might” )

Format

• 1-page vision doc

• Attention grabbing headline that a customer will read and be intrigued

• Summary of what you are launching, for whom and why (No product names)

• What is the pain point?

• What is your vision/solution?

• What is the customer experience?

• What will the customer say?

• What should the customer do next?

FAQ’s

FAQ’s

• What are they?

• FAQ’s are a tool that help you get into the details

• Split it up into Customer FAQ’s and Stakeholder FAQ’s

• Allows for preparation rather than anticipation

• Leaves no room for assumptions and interpretations

• Tips

• Share your FAQ early and often

• Get a lot of inputs - You are the owner but you don’t know everything

• Prioritize the questions in the FAQ based on what’s asked the most

• Customer/Stakeholder questions should be written as if talking to a Customer/Stakeholder

Customer FAQ’s

1. Can I try this before I buy it?

2. How do I find this? How do I get started?

3. Can I use this on my mobile devices?

4. How do I use the product?

5. How can I get help if I have a problem?

6. I'm located in XYZ country – can I use this?

7. Is this suitable for kids?

Stakeholder FAQ’s

1. Why will this be a superior customer experience?

2. Why is this customer problem/opportunity important right now?

3. How are you going to measure success?

4. Do you need any external partners that are must have’s?

5. What’s your plan for rolling this out globally?

6. Will there be a desktop version?

7. What are the hard decisions?

8. Are there any one way doors?

Product Guiding Principles

Product Guiding Principles

• What are they?

• Overall long-term goals that are agreed upon by the team

• Rules to guide product strategy when data may not be available

• Tiebreakers that helps decide between multiple available options

• Forces to think critically about how your products provide value to a customer

• Tips

• Ensure you have no more than 6 principles

• Each principle must have only one underlying idea

• Stack rank the principles in the order of importance

• Evolve principles over time through product launch experience

Product Guiding Principle Examples

1. Customer Service: Customers that rate us less than 3-stars will be contacted within 24 hours

2. Product Specification: Any feature used by more than 20% of active user base is important for the company

3. Operational: Incremental fixed costs incurred must be offset elsewhere

4. International: Product X will be available in Y countries in 2 years

5. Financial: We will invest in all features that are net positive to our core product

6. Technical: Our system will be scalable and capable of 3X our peak workload at any given time

Resources

Part-time Product Management Courses in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles

and New York

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