Beyond the Numbers: Designing for Data Success and Product Revolution
Helping to reach 400k+ charging points, mastering data success, learning how to build your value proposition, and more.
From the Product People Desk
Happy 2024! Thank you for joining us in this new year. We are excited about the fresh opportunities and wealth of ideas and product knowledge we want to share.
In this edition, you will discover how our team contributed to achieving over 400k charging points for Volkswagen and how to build a compelling value proposition for your product. Also, don't miss an exclusive article by one of our PMs, focusing on designing products for lasting impact.
Are you ready for today’s journey? Keep reading!
Helping to Launch an Internal Product and Reach 400k+ Charging Points for Volkswagen Elli
Elli is a brand from the Volkswagen Group that provides energy and charging solutions. They are the first provider to offer electric car drivers and fleet managers a seamless and holistic energy and charging experience.
In 2022, Tomas Pinjusic, Leonor Guedes, and Viktoria Korzhova joined the team with a clear mission: to develop further the tools to operationalize an independent charging network. At that time, the Product Owner responsible for this initiative was about to leave in two weeks, so our Product People trio quickly jumped in, onboarded swiftly, and started working on the mission.
Read the full story here.
Mastering Product Success: Designing for Seamless Adoption and Lasting Impact
By Ola Bak, Associate Product Management Consultant at Product People
In today’s saturated market, standing out and maintaining product relevance is challenging. Designing with adoption in mind is crucial for creating products that capture attention and ensure lasting engagement. Emphasizing ongoing user relevance and utility is vital in Product Management beyond just bringing a product to market.
Three U’s of Sticky Product Design
The Three U’s of Sticky Product Design refer to the principles of designing products that are not only useful and usable but also used—meaning that they are seamlessly integrated into users’ lives. Understanding the nuances between being Useful, Usable, and Used is integral to this approach.
A product is ‘useful’ if it fulfills a specific need or solves a problem. ‘Usable’ refers to the ease with which a user can interact with the product, referring to its intuitiveness, accessibility, and simplicity. However, the ultimate goal is for a product to be ‘used’ and become an integral part of the user's day-to-day activities.
The transition from ‘useful’ and ‘usable’ to ‘used’ is the essence of designing products for adoption.
The Segway Paradox
Can a product be useful and usable yet fail to be widely used? Absolutely! Take the Segway, for instance: it was useful as a novel transport device and usable due to its innovative technology, yet it wasn’t used much. This shows that factors such as high costs, societal perceptions, and urban practicality can make or break product adoption.
The Key to Designing a Product for Adoption
Ensuring user adoption of the product requires a multi-faceted approach that emphasizes key aspects of product design. Specifically, when creating products with adoption in mind, we should also consider designing for:
Ease of Use
Designing for ease of use is crucial to boost product adoption. A straightforward and effortless interaction with a product naturally attracts and retains users. Product Managers, who play a key role in this process, evaluate user feedback, identify pain points, and iterate on design to enhance user experience. Ensuring intuitive navigation without a steep learning curve not only boosts adoption but also fosters user loyalty.
Accessibility
It’s a common misconception that accessibility features benefit only a small segment of the population. In reality, everyone experiences some form of temporary impairment at some point in their lives, whether due to injury, illness, or aging-related changes. Integrating accessibility into product design allows the expansion of the potential user base, thereby enhancing the chances of widespread product adoption.
Appropriation
Designing for appropriation involves creating a product that users can adapt to their unique needs and contexts, such as using Excel sheets for planning vacation itineraries. This approach provides flexibility and a deeper sense of ownership, leveraging the ‘IKEA effect’ which states that allowing users to tailor products to their needs increases emotional investment and boosts product adoption as a result.
Flow Chart of the Month - How to Build a Value Proposition
We loved this incredible flow chart, brought to us by Fletch PMM. Fletch PMM uses Loom, a software for video messaging, as an example. In this sample canvas, you can see the critical relationships between the product capabilities and the current limitations experienced by customers without the use of Loom.
We believe this is an excellent illustration of how to do a value proposition canvas right, and we thank Fletch PMM for it!
The AI-Powered Product Manager by Ofir Natan
Thanks to AI, we are currently living through a remarkable technological transformation, with news and novelties popping up almost every day. During this time, we’ve found ourselves recalling this talk by Ofir Natan, Chief Prompt Officer at Practical AI.
In the talk, Ofir shares a wealth of tips and tricks about how Product Managers can leverage AI to improve their productivity and products. Ofir was also generous enough to provide a list of helpful AI resources you can find here.
For future talks, you can check out our events page.
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