For Sreemati, a great product strategy is always a work-in-progress. They should be able to adapt to the user's needs, team's growth but should always remain loyal to the user problems and company's vision.
In this talk, Sreemati will talk through Bluecalls' 6-month journey on creating a scalable product strategy that allowed for adoption and growth. She will touch on:
- The importance of consistent company vision and measurable goals,
- Why they used a Hypothesis-driven development methodology for the Bluecall app,
- What challenges and lessons they face, and
- What other future improvements can she foresee
3. Our vision
To help millions of people across the world
improve their mental wellbeing
4. About BlueCall and our start-up journey
Pivoted to B2B
Anonymous, Affordable and Accessible counseling
sessions with professionals therapist, focused on
preventative mental health care offered by
employers to their employees.
Digital therapies and …?
We needed a Product Strategy for
growth!
2016
2018
2020
Founded
B2C mental health network to match
volunteers with persons in need
5. Purpose of a Product
Strategy
Set clear direction on
how to achieve
the company vision!
6. Product Strategy - How to?
The Building Blocks The Development The Validation
Company Vision
Business Goals
Product Performance
Market
Competitions
Market Segmentation
Persona
Value / Benefit
Unique Value
Customer Experience
Timeboxing
Impact Validation
Effort Estimation
Data driven
End to End feedback
7. 01 The Building Blocks
Product
Strategy
Company Vision Market
Business Goals Competitors
Product
Performance
8. 1 week!
- Stakeholder interviews
- Market Research
- Internal data, even the unused /
under utilized ones
9. One of the biggest challenge identified!
- User segment had shifted
- Their mindset had shifted
- Our problem-Solution needed to be reassessed
11. 2 weeks
- Customers interviews
- User interviews
- Data analysis - Qualitative and
Quantitative
- Stakeholder collaboration - continuous
feedback
12. IMPACT
● Increase MAU
60%
● Customer
satisfaction
rating is over 8
● Reduce COP/
CAC by 5%
EFFORT
● Small = 1 week
● Medium = 2-4
weeks
● High = over 1
month
High
High
Low
Low
Impact
Effort
Easy Wins Big Bets
Incremental Money Pit
1 week solution
analysis
- 4 high level solution alternatives
- Evaluate them based on usability,
viability and feasibility
- Emphasis on unique value to users
- Best customer experience
- Confident in delivering and scaling
the solution approach
- High Impact-Low Effort methodology
prioritization
13. Our Mission
To be the employers’ preferred, trusted,
and loved wellbeing partner in preventing
mental health issues among employees
and managers
14. How we will achieve this - Solution Approach
BlueCall improves mental wellbeing in the workplace by helping employees and
managers in their day-to-day challenges, at work, and in private life. We provide a toolkit
with products and services that are
● Actionable, achievable, and measurable
● Designed to lower the barriers to act proactively
● Data driven and science based
15. Challenges
- Unclear if the market drivers in B2C will translate into value creation for B2B users?
- New product and tech stack meant lower level of confidence in effort estimation
- Lot of unknowns with the ways of working - New team, New methods
- We needed to experiment, learn and also show results quickly
17. Better understanding
of Impact
Smart low-cost validation
● Surveys
● Smoke test (coming
soon landing pages)
● User interviews
● MVPs
Better effort estimation
Slice or smell the onions
● Time boxed analysis
● Spikes
● Get data from past devs
● Lean on other
departments
● Leverage network
Built in confidence
Aim for 70% confidence
● Stop onces you are
closer to 70% confident
● Invest in ideas that has
higher degree of
collective confidence in
the impact and effort
estimation
Hypothesis driven development
18. Outcome!
● 4x increase in Monthly Active Usage
● Q4 2020 - 20% increase in MRR from
existing customers
● 3x increase in customer conversion rate
20. Learnings from the validation work
- Clear understanding of your customers and users is the key to a successful product
strategy
- Hypothesis driven approach from strategy to backlog helps create the innovation culture
of experimentation, failing fast to increase learning curve and good enough mindset
- Product strategy for growth needs to be regularly validated - Always Work In Progress
- Never be afraid to Pivot, Preserve or Kill a product
21. Challenges we foresee
1. Scaling our Product Strategy work with a rapidly growing team
a. How to build continuous customers and user feedback loop within our product
development process
b. Communicate changes and create alignment
2. Creating collective focus with the “Work In Progress” mindset
3. Creating shared understanding of impact and effort to move forward together
22. Key takeaways!
Product Strategies for Growth are work in progress
and must be continuous validated!
1. Have a strong foundation to your strategy
2. Hypothesis driven approach needs to be end
to end - Strategy to implementation
3. Timeboxing strategy work, especially
validation period
4. Stay continuously aligned with feedback
loops
