Aspiring Product Manager with overall 8 years of IT experience in building scalable Mobile, Web Applications, and Dot net applications. Efficient in conceptualizing, wireframing, implementing and releasing enterprise services to scale product platform, and PGDBM degree from Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies
Case Study on Audible
Audiobooks brought almost $1 Billion in 2018, in revenue and this momentum is continuing to grow at rate of 24.5% year-over-year since 2017. Given the rising popularity of audiobooks, it’s incredible how dominant industry pioneer Audible has been and remains today. The major advantage of audio books over reading books is pretty simple — you can listen while you’re doing other things, such as driving or taking a bath. If you have a long commute, it’s a good way to profitably fill the time. Some people (especially slower readers) find audibooks relaxing to have the pace set for them, and to listen to every little detail and nuance. Also, once you are confortable with the story and narrators voice, you understand all that’s going on, you can speed the audio up to x2 or even x3 depending on the narrator and story.
It might be difficult for some people to concentrate when reading poetry, because some poetry is full of metaphors, obscurities and ambiguities, which make it easy to divert your attention to some floating thoughts. But listening to the audio book could help you to overcome it.
When pressed, even rabid audiobook fans (myself included) struggle to name a single competitor to Audible. As background, Audible sells audiobooks via subscription or a la carte pricing to end consumers. The company historically sourced content through publisher partnership; however, it has also launched a self-publishing platform to enable more rights-owners to turn written books into audiobooks. Audible operates as a subsidiary of Amazon, which acquired it in 2008.
Audible’s primary competitors are Nook Audiobooks, Audiobooks.com, and Scribd Audiobooks. These company have similar business models as Audible but have had difficulty displacing Audible’s leading market position.
Audible is strictly audiobooks. Yes, they have over 100,000 audiobooks, so if all you want to do is listen to audiobooks than Audible is your best option on the market. Audible, similar to Netflix Originals, offers original content exclusive to them. Specific titles aren’t available anywhere else except on Audible. From new releases to original content to classics, you can listen to Audible books in a dozen different languages.
When you purchase and download a book on Audible, that book is yours. It will stay in your library for you to read as many times as you would like on your device. Technically, you are buying a copy of the book. If you decide to cancel your subscription, you will still have access to your downloads.
Audiobooks have been around for years, as have the apps people use to listen to them. Audible, Audiobook and others have been dominating the space for the last decade. People generally feel comfortable using these apps. But could they be better? My goal was to find out how to make Audible audiobook more personal, useable and profitable. By understanding your readers’ pain points, investigating how to solve these pain points, and creating content to solve these pain points, we can increase traffic from a specific audience, and improve the chances of monetizing website
Let’s try to capture the different user behaviours, needs and frustrations of the book readers. Despite the stereotype of the typical bookworm, no two readers are exactly alike. Some like to stick with what they know, while others love to dabble in new genres, or take on multiple books at once. From the bookworms who are trying to stay on top of recent bestsellers to those who are loyal to a small group of authors, each one has their own preferences, habits and quirks. Based on the different behaviours we have divided into the three groups of readers:
Pain Point Assessment:
Now, once we have the understanding on the user behaviours, problems distributed in segments, we need to assess the common problems faced by the different personas and also evaluate the needs of users. User pain point assessment was carried out using ingenious RAPT framework:
Proposed solutions:
Prioritization:
Wireframes:
Home Screen
Purchase chapters feature will be available for customers across all the windows showings list of books under “Try Chapters”
Chapter wise Purchase
•Click on books under “Try Chapters” category on Home, or Browse windows
•Select from List of Chapters
•“Pay total” is calculated as per the selected chapters
Purchasing:
Members of the subscription will have an option to pay a discounted rate for each chapter
Chapter wise Purchase
•Select book from other categories to purchase For e.g.: from “New in Fiction”
•On the purchase page user is provided “Try chapters starting at Rs.XX” option
•Non subscribed users are shown discounted prices; can be availed on subscription
•On selection of “Try Chapters starting at Rs.XX” user gets to select specific chapters
Play screen with Recap and Precap
The play screen for the individual chapter will have an option to listen to recap and precap summary of the book
Playing Recap and Precap for Purchased Chapter:
•Select the purchased chapter from “My library”, similarly like an entire book, to play
•In addition to existing features, “Recap” and “Precap” buttons are available for chapter wise purchases
Lending chapter:
A user is allowed to lend a chapter only twice and each time the chapter can be lent for only 72 hours
Lending Process:
•In library select “Lend Chapter” from the list button beside the purchased chapter
•Select which chapter to lend in case multiple chapters were purchased
•Constraints (number of chances and duration) of lending is informed to the user on the page where user is making lending decision
The lender and the borrower would have a timer showing the available time for which book is available
Revenue Estimation:
The power of A/B Testing
What is A/B testing
A/B testing is essentially an experiment where two or more variants of a page are shown to users at random, and statistical analysis is used to determine which variation performs better for a given conversion goal. It is also known as bucket testing and split-run testing. A/B testing is a way to compare two versions of a single variable, typically by testing a subject’s response to variant A against variant B, and determining which of the two variants is more effective.
Why A/B testing:
A/B testing allows individuals, teams, and companies to make careful changes to their user experiences while collecting data on the results. This allows them to construct hypotheses, and to learn better why certain elements of their experiences impact user behavior. In another way, they can be proven wrong—their opinion about the best experience for a given goal can be proven wrong through an A/B test.
Version A might be the currently used version (control), while version B is modified in some respect (treatment). For instance, on an e-commerce website the purchase funnel is typically a good candidate for A/B testing, as even marginal decreases in drop-off rates can represent a significant gain in sales. Significant improvements can sometimes be seen through testing elements like copy text, layouts, images and colors, but not always. In these tests, users only see one of two versions, as the goal is to discover which of the two versions is preferable.
A B2B technology company may want to improve their sales lead quality and volume from campaign landing pages. In order to achieve that goal, the team would try A/B testing changes to the headline, visual imagery, form fields, call to action, and overall layout of the page
How A/B Testing Works
Construct your hypothesis
A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon, and A/B testing is a method for determining whether or not the hypothesis is true. The hypothesis may arise by examining existing data, it may be more speculative, or it may be ‘just a hunch.’ (The ‘hunch’ hypothesis is particularly common for new features that enable new metrics.) In the navigation example, the hypothesis could be articulated in this way: ‘Switching to bottom navigation instead of tabs will increase user engagement’. You can then use this hypothesis to inform your decision about what, if any, change to make in the navigation style of your app, and what effect that change will have on user engagement. The important thing to remember is that the only purpose of the test is to prove that bottom navigation has a direct, positive impact on average revenue per user (or ARPU).
What to test (What is A? What is B? Etc.)
The following table outlines broad scenarios that can help you determine how to choose what variants to test. I’ll use our hypothetical navigation experiment as an example.
Allocate Traffic
If the hypothesis is true, and the new variant is preferred to the old, the ‘default’ configuration parameters being passed back to the app can be updated to instruct it to use the new variant. Once the new variant has become the default for a sufficient amount of time, the code and resources for the old variant can be removed from the app in your next release.
Incremental rollout
A common use case for A/B testing platforms is to re-purpose them as an incremental rollout mechanism, where the winning variant of the A/B test gradually replaces the old variant for all users. This can be viewed as an A/B design test, whereas the incremental rollout is a Vcurr/Vnext test to confirm that the chosen variant causes no adverse effects on a larger segment of your user base. Incremental rollout can be performed by stepping up the percentage of users (for example, you can go from 1%, 2%, 5%, 10%, 20%, 25%, 50%, 100%) receiving the new variant and checking that no adverse results are observed before advancing to the next step. Other segments can be used as well, including country, device type, user segment, etc. You can also choose to roll out the new variant to specific user groups (e.g., internal users).
Targeting Rule
Target specific subsets of your customers based off of any attribute you want. (e.g. location or last-login date) These subsets will be placed into a specific treatment or we’ll take these subsets and randomly distribute customers in that subset between your treatments based off of percentages you decide.
How to test
Now that you understand what and where you’ll test, it’s down to how. There are numerous applications that enable A/B testing. Some of the more popular options:
- Split
- Google Analytics
- Optimizely
- Visual Website Optimizer
- Adobe Target
- Evergage
- Crazy Egg
The Principles of A/B Testing:
- Rake in and rank continuously:
While everything can be tested, one needs to thoroughly evaluate and prioritize experiments that have a high potential impact on the key business metric in order to accelerate product optimization.
Experiment’s Impact = Users Impacted x Needle Moved
The potential impact, along with the development effort, together drives the decision of picking experiments. The more objective the process the better. - Refine and repeat:
Insights from most experiments drive newer hypothesis and further testing. The success of the new FAB icon can incite further testing of different icons, colors, button type, communication mechanisms, etc. Which ones do we prioritize depends solely on strength of hypothesis and implementation effort. - Run Controlled Experiment:
The outside world often has a much larger effect on metrics than product changes do. Users can behave differently depending on the day of the week, season of the year, or even the source of the app install. Controlled experiments isolate the impact of product change while controlling the influence of external factors. It’s important to run the experiment on users under identical conditions until sufficient number of data points are attained to gain statistical significance . - Put Mission in Perspective:
While A/B testing is the path to product optimization, the only thing that trumps metrics is Mission. Keeping a view of the long-term mission and direction of the company prevents the product roadmap and optimizations to move in a direction that could inevitably require future course correction.
Beyond that, though, cracking the code of A/B testing is synonymous with building a world-class product.
Understand Segments
Over what segment are you going to run your test?
Business segments which product types or markets? which devices? which users?
Rather than looking at this from a simple testing perspective consider:
Operational constraints can take the findings in the tested traffic, roll them out to the business at large and keep a well maintained codebase. Nobody will be able to manage the complexity of running a different version of the code for every different product line.
Reporting constraints how dow we report uplift from testing to the business? What is it worth over the course of the year and how will this be reconciled with budget and financing and forecasting? Web development costs money and is a seriously important reason to report uplift with KPIs.
Technical constraints your split tests probably depend on cookies. They might depend on users. If you can’t get the data, clean it up and report on the conversion, you can’t run the test. You need the infrastructure to segment your traffic — if you can’t pick out users with 2 or more items in their shopping cart, you can’t test this segment.
Case Study: The Product Design Overhaul of a Housing Rental Platform
Problem:
To Build a feature which will eventually help NowBroker website to gain customer insights and increase the revenue by attracting more sales from housing rental channel and building efficient end to end transaction based model.
Introduction:
Living in a dream house is everyone desire where every individual wish to have decent rooms and dining area, and easy connectivity to the office, easily accessible for kids manage schooling and getting the grocery from closer by. Now, Every individual have their own behaviour and priority while choosing the house based on their priorities in life, and age group. Old age group would definitely prefer to stay place accessible to the some open area, lots of greenery and convenient place for yoga/exercise, whereas Young people would more prefer to stay somewhere close to the happening area where they can visit to dining places easily.
Customer interviews:
While building customer centric solution, Customer interviews are among the best channel to understand the current ecosystem problems and getting the in-depth customer reviews. And to understand more on the problem I reached out to few of my friends living in different cities on rented houses and asked the questions related to the difficulties faced while moving to the new house or shifting from the different cities. Interestingly, after reaching out to the around 12 friends, I figured out everyone had different expectation before moving to the house and how difficult it turned for them to find out the desired house. Majority of the interviews which I conducted people were unsatisfied with the current ecosystem which we have today to find out of house and moreover, its time consuming process to find the house.
Few friends also said that lot of houses which is been posted online have the half-filled information posted online. Also, many complaint about the fake phots of the housed posted.
Among the interviews conducted by me, 5 were bachelor girls, 4 were bachelor boys and 3 were married. All of them had different problems while searching for the rented house. Of course all the them had different expectations in their mind which makes the search process different for everyone. Below are the categorized based problem for them:
| Bachelor Boys |
| Expectations |
| Renting a house/room at decent location Easily accessible to restaurants, pubs Should have fitness center nearby Less interference from the Owner Guest should be allowed at home |
| Issues |
| Finding a house is time consuming task as it requires to visit in personal to all the shortlisted places Too much deposit amount is being quoted by the owner Clarilty on the move out norms and reduction of painting charges Less clarity on Maintenance cost, as many times these charges is being revealed after move in In case of moving to different city, Its get difficult to know which area is best to live and under budget, and also easy to commute to the office |
| Bachelor Girls |
| Expectations |
| Decent room size Preference of house near to the busy or moving road or organised society due to safety concerns Friendly neighbours House should be at 15-20 min travel time distance from office Reachability to nearby malls, metro station |
| Issues |
| No clarity on place to stay while moving from different city No option to book house online Many landlords doesn’t accept the card or online payment, they still demand the cash only No specific format of photos posted online by landlords, and that make difficult to understand size of the house and rooms Agreement norms vary from owner to owner Brokers charge almost a month money for finding any house |
| Married Family |
| Expectations |
| Renting a house/room at decent location location Shopping market should be nearby for buying groceries Play area for kids Nearby meditation/fitness center Parking space availability for vehicle |
| Issues |
| Pets should be allowed at home Not enough area for kids to play House landlords does not update the availability status after being rented out Water issues, and dependent on water tanks at many places Trust issues on brokers |
Feature Table:
As we dig down in the problem, knowing your competitor is the important step to understand the market sizing, what feature others offer, and at what price. It also helps to understand the behaviour of customers on which they shifts to different brand on providing some unique feature or service. I have captured some of the competitors data and there offerings below:
Although most of the competitors solutions provide renting house solution in different ways. Few targets the more customer by putting more posts, more regions covered, but not bothering about the detailed and complete information the user.
Only few of them provides the end to end ecosystem from searching a house to scheduling house visit, getting all paper work done and managing the monthly payments. Although I believe setting up complete end to end infrastructure is complex and requires more man work, and also a premium charge on users for their service, but this solves various problems faced by the user on finding a house to getting the paper work done. Also, provides one platform for all the queries, payment and raising any issues.
User persona:
After conducting the user interviews, the next step is to capture their behaviours and frustrations to understand their needs. For that, we will have to break down the user personas into the different segments, as different people might have the different problems, frustrations and needs. Based on the interviews, I have concluded the three segments for defining the problem and those are mentioned in user persona comparison diagram below:
In above user persona we discussed about behavior, needs and frustrations of the various categorized group. All the different segments of groups define the different needs and might lead to have different solutions as well. Besides the fact that our one of the largest consumer segment comes from the Bachelor Females to rent property so in Version 1, We are just focusing on one sort of category first and will try meet the needs for them.
Proposed solutions:
Additional filters to house searching:
Detailed onboarding terms and condition, water and electricity bills included or not in monthly rental, clarity on exit charges, painting charges
3D based image lookup modelling:
Based on our user personas, Bachelor females shows their dissatisfaction on the house images posted online because of low clarity images, not getting the exact size of the rooms, and also posting only few of the phots online. So, having a 3D based image modelling model would solve all the problems and customers will not have to visit the house all the time.
End to end transaction-based model, to solve user problem related to the concerns about the house, brokerage, monthly rental payment, instant deposit refund and dedicated place to raise concerns.
Imagine having a single platform for people looking for house, where they can find the out the desired house and have better clarity of house location and details, about the nearby locality, and norms even before visiting the house. This will drastically reduce the efforts by customers to visit all the houses for comparison.
Having the payment integrated solution will lead to more customer satisfaction and easy settlement of month payments to landlords, and instant deposit refunds also.
Validation of properties before onboarding:
Currently, there are no rules or standard set by the companies to put only high-quality photos or completing all the house details while posting ad. Also, even posting the house ad without having the phots are allowed, which make the customers difficult to have the clarity and that add more visits to house.
Search visibility based on office and nearby location:
People moving from different cities find it difficult to know the places to stay and they end up with putting lot of question online or through friends, so having a feature which helps those segment to put the office location in search and tells the best places to stay near in desired budget
Hassle free shifting to house:
We discussed the frustration in user personas that different house owners have their different rules and onboarding and exit charges. This becomes the issues of awareness of those norms and people complain about ending up paying more amount. Having one place and one set of rules will give the more customer confidence and clarity on the rules and charges
Monthly payments and deposit management:
One place to have the monthly payment and deposit submissions will increase the on payments cycle and reduce the cash transaction. This feature will also help the owners to get instantly paid the monthly bills and customers to get the instant deposit on exit
Additional one-time service of essential house repairs:
This service will attract the more customers, if customer finds the house in good condition. House repair option is to have used only once within a week period of moving the house and completing if any house repair work is needed
Direct deals with NowBrokers: One place solution to have the booking house online and directly dealing with the NowBrokers for bookings and exits
Prioritization:
Now once we have all the proposed solutions, next step is to prioritizing the solution and further breaking into the different segments which would be most beneficial from the feature/service implementation. Although all the solution might add the value to customer and increase the revenue but implementing all of them at once, would not be possible based on the effort and implementation cost required. So we will have to find the most feasible solution to implement first which would be feasible to develop and most impactful to generate the revenue
Now, as we have the scoring of features, we will put them in value-complexity matrix to see which feature will add more value and have the less complexity to develop to get prioritize
Blockchain
Useful terms in Blockchain:
Block
A bitcoin block contains the header, transaction count, and block content. The block content section contains all of the data regarding the individual transactions, and the transaction count is the number of transactions in the block. The block header is what links one block to another and contains the following elements:
- The block version number (i.e. the software version)
- The 256-bit hash of the previous block header
- The 256-bit hash derived from all of the transactions in the block (this involves the Merkle Root)
- A timestamp
- The current difficulty target (a 256-bit number, usually starting with a string of leading zeros).
- A Nonce (a random 32-bit number). Miners change the value of the nonce in order to find a hash that is below the current difficulty target.
https://www.ssl2buy.com/wiki/symmetric-vs-asymmetric-encryption-what-are-differences
Truffle is a development environment, testing framework and asset pipeline for Ethereum, aiming to make life as an Ethereum developer easier. With Truffle, you get:
- Built-in smart contract compilation, linking, deployment and binary management.
- Automated contract testing with Mocha and Chai.
- Configurable build pipeline with support for custom build processes.
- Scriptable deployment & migrations framework.
- Network management for deploying to many public & private networks.
- Interactive console for direct contract communication.
- Instant rebuilding of assets during development.
- External script runner that executes scripts within a Truffle environment.
web3.js API (command line tool to run nodes). Once a Solidity contract is compiled with solc and sent to the network, you can call it using the Ethereum web3.js JavaScript API and build web apps that interact with contracts. (No need to install this yet, read up on DApp Frameworks below first.)
testrpc (test environment). You can run a test network using geth, or another fast way of getting a testnet running is using testrpc. Testrpc will create a bunch of pre-funded accounts for you that will be listed when it starts up. It’s is also super fast, so easier to develop and test with. You can start with testrpc, then when your contracts are in good shape, move to geth on a testnet, which can be started by specifying a networkid like: geth — networkid “12345”. Here’s the testrpc repo but I’ll review everything you need to install again in the tutorial part later. [Update: The developer of testrpc is now focusing on ethersim as a replacement for testrpc and I’ll update this tutorial eventually to use ethersim too. You can start using it now in if you’d like.
Meteor (client). Another stack a lot of DApp devs use include web3.js + Meteor which is a general webapp framework (The ethereum-meteor-wallet repo has a good starter example, and SilentCiero is building a lot of Meteor integrations with web3.js and DApp boilerplates).
APIs (outside network with blockchain). BlockApps.net is creating a RESTful API for DApps based on a Haskell node they run as a centralized service to save you the trouble of running a local Ethereum node. This departs from the completely decentralized model of DApps but is useful when running an Ethereum node locally isn’t realistic. For example if you want to serve your DApp to users who won’t be running local nodes either and reach a wider audience with just a web browser or mobile device. BlockApps has a command line tool called bloc in the works that can be used after creating a developer account with them.
The Solidity real-time compiler and Cosmo are both a fast way to get started compiling your smart contracts right away in a browser.
Sample Contracts and DApps. Search Github for DApp repos and .sol files to see what cool stuff people do and how. A big list of DApps with repos is also here: dapps.ethercasts.com, although some of the list’s details are a little out of date. Ether.fund/contracts also has some examples of Solidity and Serpent contracts people have written, but not sure if these have been tested or verified for correctness.
nonce. To validate duplicate transcations
The nonce is basically just a counter that keeps track of how many transactions an address has sent.
https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/27432/what-is-nonce-in-ethereum-how-does-it-prevent-double-spending
ABI. The ABI, Application Binary Interface, is basically how you call functions in a contract and get data back.
An ABI determines such details as how functions are called and in which binary format information should be passed from one program component to the next…
use cases list
https://www.cbinsights.com/research/industries-disrupted-blockchain/
AI Chatbot
Developed AI based chatbot assistant, service, powered by rules and artificial intelligence, that you interact with via a chat interface. this can transform the way you interact with the internet from a series of self-initiated tasks to a quasi-conversation.
#AI #chatbot #Azure
Matota App – New mobile app in market to connect with anyone, search for anything, buy/sell anything.
This is the post excerpt.
Think if you need something urgently but you don’t know where to get it from, whom to contact and where to go for it. What if we find answers to all our concerns at one place. What if in the world everyone gets connected with every other person and aid/help for everything is available at the blink of the eye.
MATOTA-mobile app is the answers to all our problems. It is a platform where anyone, anywhere at any time can reach out for a tiny thing to large. It provides a place to sender/buyer where they can post their requirement and all other registered app users will be notified regarding help. A live notification will be triggered to all users whenever a user posts something about its requirement hence connecting everyone at one single point.
A user who needs help , find or want to sell something etc. would be required to post an advertisement and he/she can sets various filters regarding its visibility within city or specific area along with other categories.
The unregistered users need to check for advertisement explicitly.
While registered users will be notified about the post. The Users can comment on the post along with bidding amount and other relevant information. Similarly other users would also bid at the same aid. The owner of a post would come into picture and select the helper’s comment/bid (selection can be dependent on various factors i.e. aid’s owner personal choice with respect to bid amount, time constraint, area, etc.) and approve it. This kind of business would be like C2C i.e. customer to customer where only two parties are involved in the business.
The agreed parties i.e. both the aid owner and approved user would contact each other separately via chat window, exchanging all the relevant information required for exchanging money and item such as sharing contact number, location etc.
User can just filter out his/her list of aid in my aid and list of aid on which the comments being posted.
User also can bookmark his/her favourite aid and the same will be available in his/her bookmark list.
User has to register for notifications if interested in providing help without monetary thought or interested in buying/selling specific to city or area.
What makes us different is that product could be anything from small item (desi) tulsi leaves for tea to large items say Gold/Car. We are not restricting the product type in the application. There are various scenarios in which Matota would be helpful such as:
• Carpool available from Chandigarh to Delhi on Thursday around 4:30 PM.Seats : 3 Share: Rs. 500 pp
• Forgot my clothes. Anyone coming from Delhi to Chandigarh?
• Need Bebanica sweet of Goa. Anyone coming from Goa to Delhi?
• iPhone 6 for sale
• Volkswagen Polo for Sale.
• Required cylinder urgently. please let me know in case someone interested to provide.
• Reviews required for hotel booking from *****.com
• Car Registration in Chandigarh. Please share any Agent number to complete registration Process.
• Anybody interested in buying gym equipment?
• Need Microsoft Certification Vouchers
• 1st Floor for Rent is available in Sector – 32 Chandigarh
• Samsung S4 Display repair. Any pointers on from where I can get this repaired around sector 17 Chandigarh?
• Anyone is selling external HDD, please mail/ping me.
• Need Pointers for Good DJ in NCR region.
• Need B+ blood group urgently.
• Feeling hungry. Does anyone have Maggi around MDC-4 Panchkula?
• Tennis Racket required.
• Anyone having PCM medicine around sector 35 Chandigarh?
• Anyone selling CAT material?
• Suggest Good ENT doctor.
• India Vs. South Africa tickets for sale.
• Developer Required. Need a pointer or someone who has expertise and have good work experience on PHP coding, HTML5, CSS3 with Word Press as Platform. Please contact me as undersigned.
Available on Google play store for download and coming soon on iTunes.
Please do share your valuable ratings, feedback on play store and app page
FB page: https://www.facebook.com/MatotaApp
Please do share page and app link with your friends.
For detailed description please do visit page link.
#MobileWorld #Android #iOS #Startup #Matota #MatotaApp #Help #Aid#DigitalIndia#MatotaAndroid #MatotaiPhone
Aspiring Product Manager 