AMA: Square Product Manager, Abhiroop Basu on Product Strategy

Release planning requires 5 things: * Define the goals of the project. What outcomes are you hoping to achieve? Clearly articulate your success metrics * Understand your customer needs. Conduct qualitative (surveys, interviews, etc) as well as quantitative (funnel analysis, engagement metrics, etc) research to better understand what you should build. * Prioritize your roadmap. Create a roadmap and use a prioritization framework (RICE, Kano) to create your roadmap. Next break down the large scale vision into smaller chunks. Each release should ideally take 2-4 weeks. * Launch your first MVP. Use this as an opportunity to gather customer feedback and learn what's missing. * Iterate. Continue launching and refining until you reach your targeted goal!

Those aren't mutually exclusive. But, customer retention is a marathon, while differentiation is a sprint. Customer retention is crucial for long-term success, while differentiation can provide a short-term boost. I typically follow a simple framework when determining what to invest in: 1. Start by looking at the top customer requests and compare our product capabilities with those of our closest competitors 2. Next list the features based on which are "table stakes" (i.e. all your competitors offer them), those that are nice-to-haves, and those that are differentiators. 3. The, use a prioritization model (RICE, Kano, etc) to rank the features in each group 4. Finally, decide on your investment with roughly 70% in the table-stakes, 20% in the differentiators, and 10% in the nice-to-haves. If you aren't providing your customers the basics they're likely to leave no matter how exciting your new AI feature is.

Validating your product strategy is essential, particularly before investing in new features. There are two techniques I use to ensure my strategy is most effective: 1. Customer validation: Talk directly to potential customers to understand their needs, wants, and pain points. This helps you assess if your product idea aligns with their problems and if they would be willing to pay for your solution. In addition, conduct user testing by developing prototypes and getting real people to interact with them. Observe their behavior, gather feedback, and identify areas for improvement. 2. Market validation: Look at competitors to understand where your strategy fits into the broader landscape. Similarly, pressure test your commercial model - are customers willing to pay for your product or service? Often they will say "yes", but fail to do so when you open it up.

A single customer conversation will enable you to generate a product roadmap for the next 1 year. While looking at competitors, speaking to thought leaders and industry experts, and prototyping new tech will always have their place, nothing beats speaking to a customer to generate new feature ideas. After all, who better to understand what's missing from your product than the ones who will use it most. Now, it's critical to understand that you should never just build whatever your customers ask for verbatim. The famous Henry Ford quote comes to mind: "If I had asked people what mode of transport they wanted, they would have said faster horses." You are the expert in your field and know the product and tech the best. You should take your customer's feedback and translate it into a solution that addresses their pain point. Netflix's biggest competitor is sleep A surprising take on non-obvious solution is what Reed Hasting (CEO of Netflix) said when asked what their biggest competitor was. It was the usual suspects, Amazon Prime, HBO, Disney+. No, Hastings said that their customer falling asleep was their biggest competitor because streaming wasn't zero sum. So, what's a "non-obvious solution" to sleep? Creating 10+ binge worthy shows and dropping all the episodes on a Saturday. Strategies to translate customer feedback to product solutions: * Build for the problem: If you ask your customer for product feedback they will tell you a feature they'd like. For example, at Square some customers requested simpler tools for configuring an online site. Instead of building those tools, our team created an automatic site generation tool that converts existing data into a site, without the customer having to do anything. The problem was the complexity of website development, not the lack of tools. * Uncover the "Why": Keep asking the customer "why" until you get to the root of their problem. For example, customers kept saying they didn't have enough information about certain hardware devices. Upon probing them "why", we realized that we were showing them too many products and overwhelming them. They didn't want more descriptions, they just wanted to be told what device was more relevant for their business * Focus on Behaviors: Using qualitative and quantitative insights uncover what common behavior patterns are like. For example, we found that many customers were complete a specific task when setting up a new Square account. The obvious implication was that this task was most important to customers. However, what we learnt was that this was actually the first task we surfaced for customers and so they clicked it first. Prioritize based on what creates most value: Once you have a list of features, build based on a prioritization framework. While there are numerous frameworks (RICE, Kano, Value/Effort) and you can use any, it's important to be consistent across all the features. For example, if you use RICE - you would rank the features based on Reach (number of users impacted), Impact (level of user benefit), Confidence (certainty of the outcome), and Effort (development time).

Constant innovation is exciting! One of the most exciting aspects of being a product manager in software is the constant innovation. Every day I come across new a technology or process that can improve the product I'm working on. Not only do I need to stay on top of what's new, I need to have a perspective on how it can be incorporated into what I'm building. For example, despite the hype, it's hard to overstate how important AI is for technology in general. It is game changing. Automation has always been important for product development, but the AI tools released in the past couple of years have made prototyping and data analysis significantly much more efficient. Don't mistake tools for strategy All that said, tools are just that tools. You should never build a product strategy around a tool - even one as generational as AI. For example, if you're building a simple weather app you should focus on the key features - location, forecasts, alerts, maps, and historical data. Can AI augment any of these features? Absolutely, but "AI" should not be the feature. So, how do you incorporate AI into your strategy? Just like any product development process, you should first start with what problem you are trying to solve. For example, one of the challenges we face at Square is understanding what customers want to use us for. We have all kinds of businesses using our payments platform, from simple yard sales, to coffee shops and florists, all the way to stadiums. We decided that we could use AI to better understand why a seller wants to use Square, making the process more efficient for us and our sellers. Start with your customer's problem, identify the appropriate solution, and figure out how you can incorporate the new technology into it.

Customers don’t care about your solution — they care about their problems. Dave McClure's most famous quote is essential to build products people will actually use. I hate to bash other PMs and their products, but I couldn't help but laugh when I first heard about Juicero. In 2016, Juicero launched a wi-fi enabled juicer. At $700 it was nearly the cost of an iPhone. What was the game changing solution that Juicero offered? You would buy proprietary juice packets from Juicero and the Juciero would crush the packet and you'd get juice! Not a terrible idea, after all who doesn't like freshly squeezed juice. Eventually the company went bankrupt when a journalist discovered that you could just squeeze the juice packet using your hands, making the $700 device completely redundant. Why did Juicero fail and what does it tell us about focusing on the customer's ideal outcome or Job-to-be-Done ("JTBD")? Juicero's key failure, and a common one amongst many products, is that it did not identify the JTBD it was solving for. Instead, the founders built, arguably, a very cool piece of tech - the $700 juicer - and decided that customer's would want it. The JTBD's of a customer using a juicer, could include: * Increasing fruit and vegetable intake * Living a healthier lifestyle * Prepare specific juice recipes The Juicero certainly addressed these JTBD's, but at 10x the cost why would someone buy it over an ordinary juicer that equally performed the same functions. The founders believed that by adding wi-fi and other tech they were making the Keurig of the juicing world. What they failed to realize that their solution did not address or uniquely solve the customer's problem - thereby falling into the trap called out by Dave McClure. What could Juicero have done differently? I'm not an expert on food tech, but there are techniques Juicero could have used to build a product that their customers actually wanted. First, the company should have looked at what problems existing juicers created and how a new product could address those. For example, standard juicers are noisy, inefficient at extracting the pulp, and notoriously difficult to clean. Interestingly, Juicero actually solved these issues - just not with the Juciero device. The bags that came with the Juicero actually allowed customers to make juice without the noise and cleaning that comes with standard juicers. Second, when build features (e.g. wi-fi integration), always consider what problem is it solving. While wi-fi in other home appliances have become common, there is typically a reason to have it. For example, you may want to be informed when your laundry is done. There is no reason to have wi-fi on a juicer as you will always be physically present. Lastly, make sure you have a target customer for your product. Very few people have the disposable income to spend $700 on a juicer. Those that do, are likely willing to pay for freshly squeezed juice from a store.

There are three steps I typically use when developing a strategy for a new product: 1. Identify vision and goals: Start by defining the core problem your product aims to address in the market. What need are you fulfilling for users? Who is your ideal customer and what are their pain points? Next write out your vision, goals, success metrics, and vision. This will motivate your team and hold yourself accountable. 2. Understand the market: Once you've identified the "why", conduct research to understand the "what". Look at competitors strengths and weakness, research current and emerging industry trends, and conduct customer interviews, surveys, etc to gather insights into your target audience. 3. Build your roadmap: Once you understand the "what", now you must figure out the "how". Use a prioritization framework like RICE or Kano to identify and prioritize individual features to build. Make sure you keep these solutions relatively narrow to ensure you aren't overengineering a solution. Start with a minimum viable product ("MVP") so you can gather feedback and insights before iterating.