Author: marcabraham

Product review: Whisk

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Recipe apps seem to be rife, enabling people to share and learn new recipes. I’m wondering whether there’s still room for recipe apps to stand out and differentiate, both from a value proposition and a product perspective. It’s with this in mind that I’m keen to look at Whisk and learn more about it’s (iOS) app:

My quick summary of Whisk before using it? – I expect a standard recipe sharing app, include both recipes curated by Whisk and recipes shared between peers.

How does Whisk explain itself in the first minute? – Whisk’s welcome screen tells me that I can save all my recipes to a recipe inbox and ‘build, smart collaborative shopping list’. The inclusion of the word ‘smart’ there suggests to me that there’s a strong machine learning component to Whisk. When I swipe across, I learn that I can have the items in my app-generated shopping delivered through Whisk.

 

 

 

Getting started with Whisk – Once I’ve signed into the Whisk app via Google, I can start creating a shopping list in the app. Curious to see what happens when I press the plus call to action on the screen below and what my shopping list will look like. How can I best use the sorting function at the top right hand side of the screen?

 

Once I’ve pressed the plus icon, I land on a screen which shows me ‘favorites’, enabling me to save my favourite items to quickly build (future) lists. As a starting point, I can choose from five ‘popular’ items, which I can keep expanding in groups of five at a time.

 

 

 

I then select a number of popular items and expect the app to now generate a shopping list for me, with relevant products:

I now realise that all I’ve done up till this point is editing my favourite items, which I shop for on a regular basis, instead of creating a ready-to-go shopping list:

When I click on the individual items, the items get checked and I think that means I’ve got these items and therefore don’t need to be added to my shopping list. Sorting by ‘Aisle’ or ‘Recipe’ doesn’t seem to make a difference here.

Clicking on the shopping cart icon, triggers Whisk’s shopping cart integration. First, I need to select from the shops available in my region:

 

 

Having figured out how to create a shopping list in Whisk and buying these items directly through Whisk, I’m keen to learn more about the recipe saving feature of the app. Saving online recipes top the app is very easy and intuitive, mainly because it’s exactly the same as adding things to the likes of Pinterest and Instagram.

 

 

I guess that this is where Whisk’s ‘smartness’ comes into play, both in terms of ingesting a recipe and its individual ingredients and converting this understanding into an automatically generated shopping list. I press the “Add to list” call to action on the recipe in Whisk:

 

 

 

Did deliver Whisk deliver on my initial expectations? – Yes. Exceeded them in fact. Didn’t feel the most intuitive at times, but Whisk does feel like much more than just a standard recipe app!

 

Related links for further learning:

  1. https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/17/whisks-a-i-powered-recipe-app-lets-you-send-the-ingredients-to-your-door
  2. https://whisk.com/
  3. https://www.grocerydive.com/news/walmart-instacart-partner-whisk-launches-multi-platform-app/569192/
  4. https://thespoon.tech/whisk-launches-consumer-facing-app-that-makes-any-recipe-shoppable/

 

Book Review: “Shape Up” by Ryan Singer

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Basecamp is a project management and communication platform, widely known for its innovative software development practices and novel ways of working. Ryan Singer, Basecamp’s Head of Strategy, recently captured Basecamp’s approach in Shape Up, which is freely available online and as a PDF. The product development process at Basecamp consists of three distinct stages: shaping, betting and building.

Taken from: https://basecamp.com/shapeup/4.1-appendix-02

Basecamp typically work in six-week cycles, building and releasing new features within that timeframe. The work is shaped first before it’s given to a team to work on. A small senior group works in parallel to the cycle teams. They define the key elements of a solution before considering a project ready to bet on. Interestingly, shaping is less about traditional estimation of development work, and much more about appetite. Instead of asking how much time it will take to do some work, people at Basecamp will consider how much time they want to spend on a specific piece of work; how much is this idea worth?

Taken from: https://basecamp.com/shapeup/4.1-appendix-02

 

Shaping

When shaping a solution, the aim is to strike the right balance between ‘too vague’ and ‘too detailed’. Wireframes are deemed too concrete, whilst words are often too abstract. The reason why this balance is important is that the scope of a project needs to be flexible enough for the team to come up with appropriate design solutions whilst not running the risk of growing out of control due to a lack of boundaries.

Taken from: https://basecamp.com/shapeup/1.1-chapter-02

These are the main steps to shaping:

  1. Set boundaries – First figure out how much time the raw idea is worth and how to define the problem. This provides the basic boundaries to shape into.
  2. Rough out the elements – Then comes the creative work of sketching a solution. At Basecamp, they do this at a higher level of abstraction compared to wireframes in order to move fast and explore a wide enough range of possibilities. The output of this step is an idea that solves the problem within the appetite but without all the fine details worked out.
  3. Address risks and rabbit holes – Once there is the feeling that a solution has been found, the goal is to find holes or unanswered questions that could trip up a team. The solution gets amended accordingly, tricky things removed from it, or specified details at tricky spots to ensure that a team doesn’t waste time or gets stuck.
  4. Write the pitch –  When the solution is shaped enough to bet on, things are packaged up formally in a pitch. The pitch summarises the problem, constraints, solution, rabbit holes, and limitations. The pitch then goes to Basecamp’s betting table for consideration.

Ryan Singer writes about how Basecamp uses the technique of breadboarding, a concept borrowed from electrical engineering. When breadboarding, three things are drawn:

  1. Places – These are things you can navigate to, like screens, dialogs, or menus that pop up.
  2. Affordances – These are things the user can act on, like buttons and fields. Interface copy is considered to be an affordance too, as reading it is an act that gives the user information for subsequent actions.
  3. Connection lines – These show how the affordances take the user from place to place.

I like how words are used instead of pictures, focusing on the solution’s components and the connections between them and allowing you to figure out an idea. Importantly, this technique allows you to judge if the sequence of actions serves the use case you’re trying to solve.

Taken from: https://basecamp.com/shapeup/1.3-chapter-04

 

If the idea being considered is a visual one. In this case, breadboarding would be insufficient because the visual representation is the fundamental problem. At Basecamp, wireframes wouldn’t be created in this circumstance, but fat marker sketches would be created instead. A fat marker sketch is a sketch made with such broad strokes that adding detail is difficult or impossible.

 

Taken from: https://basecamp.com/shapeup/1.3-chapter-04

 

Bets, Not Backlogs

Singer explains how at Basecamp backlogs are viewed as time wasters; the time spent constantly reviewing, grooming and organising ‘tickets’, working on a list of items that might or might not get done. By contrast, Singer talks about holding a betting table before each six-week cycle. At the betting table, stakeholders evaluate pitches from the last six weeks, or any pitches that somebody purposefully revived and lobbied for again.

 

Taken from: https://basecamp.com/shapeup/2.2-chapter-08

 

The betting table at Basecamp consists of the CEO, the CTO, a senior developer and product strategist (Ryan Singer himself). The main reason why Basecamp use bets instead of plans, is the difference in expectations set when talking about bets:

  • Bets have a payout – Solutions are deliberately shaped into six-week projects so that there’s meaningful finished at the end. The pitch defines a specific payout that makes the bet worth making.
  • Bets are commitments – If a bet is made for six weeks, then the relevant people will get six weeks to work exclusively on that thing for six weeks, without distractions.
  • Bets have a cap on the downside – When a bet is made to work on something specific for six weeks, the most that you can lose is six weeks and thus avoiding a situation where you’re spending multiples of the original six-week commitment on a solution.

Build your way uphill

                     Taken from: https://basecamp.com/shapeup/3.4-chapter-12#build-your-way-uphill

 

This section of “Shape Up” starts with a great and very true point about the unpredictability of development work: “This goes back to the notion of imagined versus discovered tasks. In our naive notion of a list that’s planned up-front, somebody populates it with items that are gradually checked off. In real life, issues are discovered by getting involved in the problem. That means to-do lists actually grow as the team makes progress.” Also, numeric estimates of pieces of work often don’t take into account the level of uncertainty involved in different tasks. Basecamp have recognised this and instead use the metaphor of the hill, which concentrates on what’s unknown and what’s solved:

 

                      Taken from: https://basecamp.com/shapeup/3.4-chapter-12#build-your-way-uphill

 

The idea behind this hill is that anyone in the company can see at a glance where things are at. If a task been ‘uphill’ for while, why is that? What unknown is holding it up? Or perhaps the item on ten hill consists of a number of smaller items. The hill helps to see what is stuck and what has been done, or getting close to being completed.

Conclusion: I found “Shape Up” a very helpful and insightful book. Not only does it provide a great insight into Basecamp’s approach to developing products, it also made me reflect on my own ways of working – and the teams that I’m part of. Highly recommend reading “Shape Up” if you’re interested in learning about alternative ways of developing software products or collaborating during the product development lifecycle.

 

Book Review: “Unlearn” by Barry O’Reilly

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“Disruption does not actually apply to organisations. The truth is it applies to individuals.” states Barry O’Reilly early on in Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results. O’Reilly goes on to explain what great leaders and their companies have in common: a capability within themselves to innovate, adapt, and anticipate the future. Barry O’Reilly is a business advisor, entrepreneur, and author who operates at the intersection of business model innovation, product development, organisational design and culture transformation.

In order to adjust, O’Reilly argues in his latest book, we’ll need to unlearn, which starts with acknowledging that what you’re doing isn’t working for you. You need to let go of past viewpoints or behaviours, and take action to do what’s needed to progress. The Cycle of Unlearning contains four distinct steps to go through each time we need to adapt and innovate.

Barry O’Reilly, The Cycle of Unlearning

 

Step 1: Unlearn – Unlearning starts with the recognition that what we’re doing isn’t working. The core premise of “Unlearn” is a strong willingness to learn and to unlearn those behaviours and mindsets which once served us successfully. The first step in the process of unlearning requires courage, self-awareness, and humility to accept  that your own beliefs, mindsets, or behaviours are limiting your potential and current performance and that you must consciously move away from them.

Step 2: Relearn – O’Reilly makes the point that as you unlearn your current limiting but ingrained methods, behaviours, and thinking, you can take in new data, information, and perspectives. This is the process of relearning, which comes with its own challenges: (1) you must be willing to adapt and be open to information that goes against your inherent beliefs (2) you may need to to learn how to learn again and (3) you must create an environment for relearning to happen in a meaningful, yet often challenging, space outside your existing comfort zone. The point of relearning is that you’re trying to get better information and learn to see, sense, and listen differently, to respond and act differently.

Step 3: Breakthrough – Breakthrough is the net result of unlearning and then relearning. O’Reilly stresses in his book that breakthrough isn’t simply a matter of telling people to think differently, with the expectation that they will act differently as a result. Instead, the way to think differently is to act differently. This isn’t a one off event; it’s continuous and a deliberate practice or habit in its own right, often triggered by specific unlearning prompts:

  • Where are you falling short of your expectations?
  • Where are you not seeing the outcomes you want?
  • What are you willing to do to affect those outcomes?
  • How could you get out of your comfort zone and succeed?
  • What would thinking BIG but starting small be for you?

In the book, O’Reilly outlines what he sees as the four necessary conditions of unlearning:

  1. Identify a challenge you wish to address – Pick a challenge you want to tackle and don’t worry about waiting for the right moment to do so. O’Reilly suggests that the best place to start is where you’re right now.
  2. Define success as though you have dissolved or conquered the challenge – What are the behaviours you, your team, or your customers would be exhibiting to confirm that you had addressed that challenge and not only solved it, but dissolved it forever?
  3. Channel courage over seeking comfort – O’Reilly makes the point that seeking comfort over courage often results in taking the easy option of avoiding situations where you feel you’re not in control of the outcome. As a result, you’re stuck in the status quo and not growing. Whilst not easy to do, moving outside your comfort zone requires courage and a willingness to be vulnerable.
  4. Commit to, start, and scale the cycle of unlearning – Once the three previous conditions are in place, it’s important to commit to moving forward through the Cycle of Unlearning and to do so continually (see above).

Helpfully, O’Reilly has included necessary conditions for relearning and breakthrough too. Reflection, for example, is a necessary condition for relearning. Continuously reflecting on what has happened will lead to valuable, breakthrough moments and insights. You break through by stepping back and reflecting on exactly what it is that you’re doing and the results your effort is yielding.

 

Main learning point: Having not really thought about the concept about unlearning before, Barry O’Reilly’s book provided much clarity about discarding old beliefs or approaches and replacing them with new ones. Never does the book feel like unlearning is a silver bullet that will magically solve all your learning or innovation challenges. Instead, O’Reilly pains a realistic picture of the courage required to unlearn, and the ongoing nature of un- and relearning.

 

My product management toolkit (39): go-to-market checklist

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Thinking about how to best launch a product or feature to market can easily become an afterthought. I’ve certainly made the mistake of being so immersed in the execution of an idea that I forgot to think about how to best take a product to market. It doesn’t matter whether your product or feature is consumer facing or aimed at internal customers, I recommend considering the following as part of your go-to-market checklist:

Pre-Launch

  • Positioning statement – Write a positioning statement which explains succinctly who the product is for, what the product does and why it’s different from other products out there.
  • Internal announcement – Do an internal announcement of some sorts – e.g. at a staff meeting or via email – to let people know that a new product or feature is coming. This helps to build momentum and excitement as well as get valuable internal feedback in the run-up to launch.
  • Success criteria – Agree on the measures of success for your product, both quantitative and qualitative. What does ‘good’ look like post-launch and why? What kind of customer feedback are you hoping to receive once your product is live, which metrics are you expecting to be impacted positively? How do you manage ‘bad’ customer feedback? Upfront alignment on success or failure will also mean that you’ll be able to iterate quickly on your product or messaging if things aren’t heading in the right direction.
  • Training and demos – When launching a new product or feature, it’s important that people across the business have seen the product in action and have been trained on how to use it. Think for example about the people in customer support who might get inundated with customer questions once the product has been launched.
  • Launch date – Set a date and time for the launch and communicate to both people within and outside of your company. Your colleagues and a select group of customers can both provide you with valuable feedback prior to launch and spread the word. Also, make sure that your launch date doesn’t coincide with national holidays, other planned launches – by your company or a competitor – etc. as you don’t want the announcement of your new product to snow under.
  • Promotional content and FAQs – This covers all content and materials that will help explain the product, its benefits, who / what it’s for, and help (target) customers of the product. Drafting FAQs and sharing them internally and a select group of potential customers first, is a great way to make sure you’ve pre-empted any questions or concerns your target audience might have.
  • Media planning – As Pawel Lubiarz explains, launching a product without a media plan in place is a considerable risk. You’re only going to launch your product once, so you need to make the most of that occasion. Which digital and print media would you like to help message the launch of your product? Which journalists are likely to report on your product?
  • Press release – Draft a press release that captures the key aspects and benefits of your product and share with journalists and media outlets that you’ve identified (see my previous point).
  • Test. Test. Test – I know it sounds obvious but even if you think have tested your new product or feature, please make sure you test again in the run-up to a big launch. get people who aren’t as close to your product as you and your team to use the product, and look out for any glitches and gotchas.
  • Social media strategy – Create the launch announcement and content to be posted on relevant social channels, and think about appropriate content formats and frequency for the different channels that are relevant to your brand. The content you share on TikTok is likely to differ widely to what you put out via TechCrunch, for example.

Post-Launch

  • Launch evaluation – How did your product launch go? What did we learn? How we can iterate on our product and marketing our product, based on the initial numbers and customer feedback.
  • Reach out to customers – Customer learning doesn’t stop once the product or feature has been launched. Reach out to customers who have bought or used the product, people that left feedback or raised support questions. Consider creating new content to share now that the product is out in the market.

Main learning point: I’m sure that there’s a lot more items that could be added to my go-to-market checklist so please feel free to leave a comment or reach out with any suggestions of things to include!

Related links for further learning:

  1. https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/release-management/what-is-a-good-product-launch-checklist
  2. https://tinuiti.com/blog/ecommerce/product-launch/
  3. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/product-launch-checklist
  4. https://moz.com/blog/product-launch-checklist
  5. https://backlinko.com/product-launch-checklist

 

 

Product review: Getaround

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Getaround.com is a peer-to-peer car rental platform, headquartered in the US, which only recently came to my attention when it raised a $200m Series D funding round. I’m keen to better understand how Getaround is looking to change the ways in which we rent cars and how it differentiates itself from well established car rental companies such as Hertz and Avis:

My quick summary of Getaround before using it? – I expect a consumer driven car rental platform that gives people more flexibility with respect to renting a car when and where they want it.

 

 

How does Getaround explain itself in the first minute? – “Rent cars by the hour or day” it reads when I check Getaround’s UK site on my desktop, followed by “For moving into your new home.” Staying on the homepage for a few minutes, the secondary strap-line changes, highlighting the various use cases for Getaround, varying from “For surprising grandma on her birthday” to “For meeting a client, in time and in style”. I can’t see an obvious option for me to list my car for hire, which is surprising given that this is a peer-to-peer car rental platform.

Getting started with Getaround – I start my search by entering a location, a check-in date / time and a check-out date / time, and click “Search”:

 

 

 

What happens next? – The search generates 31 pages of vehicles for me to choose from. These results haven’t been filtered yet and the site offers a number of filters to apply in order to narrow down the search results.

 

 

Getaround’s filters feel pretty standard, but I’m curious what’s involved in self-service cars. Where do I pick those up? Or do they get dropped off at my exact location? What do I gain by selecting “Reserved parking”?

 

 

When I disable the “Self-service cars” filter, I can select the “instant booking” option which means that vehicles can be booked without waiting for confirmation from the owner.

 

 

I like how I can filter by “vehicle age”, presumably as a way of ensuring that I don’t hire an ancient car that might be more prone to engine failure or other issues. However, I’m not immediately clear what is meant by “acceptance rate”. Clicking on the tooltip clarifies this.

 

 

 

When I select a car, I land on a pretty intuitive but detailed product detail page. This page includes pictures of both the exterior and the interior of the car, information about where the car can be picked up and free mileage included. At this stage it still isn’t entirely clear to me how Getaround’s self service works, but I presume that I can go to the car at the location indicated and unlock the car with my phone (assuming this is a feature I can access via Getaround’s app once I’ve signed up and booked the car).

 

 

 

A quick check of the description of the Getaround app on the app store confirms my assumption around automatic unlocking the car via the app.

The page also includes customer reviews which I find particularly helpful here, given that I’ll be driving someone else’s car and would naturally be unsure about the condition of the car, responsiveness of the owner, etc.

 

 

More information about insurance and roadside cover is only a few clicks away, but I can’t help still feeling somewhat apprehensive about the ‘small print’.

 

 

 

It’s only when I click on the “book” call to action at the top of the page that I have to sign up for the service.

 

 

Did Getaround deliver on my initial expectations – Yes. The site felt intuitive whilst containing a good amount of detail. However, I wasn’t clear about the process involved in listing my car for hiring, and I felt that key parts of the experience – both online and offline – could be explained better.