<ul><li>In neurology, patients with amputated limbs commonly experience phantom sensations of their missing arm or leg.</li><li>Patients with brain damage following strokes may deny obvious impairments such as being unable to move their hands or might even deny that the hand is theirs.</li><li>People with body dysmorphic disorder become fixated on believing some part of their body is hideously ugly.</li><li>Patients with eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia tend to overestimate the width of their bodies.</li></ul>

People experience their bodies different to what it is

In one study, participants' hands were covered with a board and then asked to use a long baton to indicate the perceived location of the knuckle and tip of each finger. Perceptual maps of hand size and shape were constructed based on their judgements and then compared with the actual hand structure. These maps were massively distorted, showing overestimation of hand width and underestimation of finger length.

Distorted representations of the body appear to be a basic feature of mental life

One study that compared anorexia or bulimia patients with groups of healthy control participants found that anorexia or bulimia patients overestimated their waist width by 42 percent. Similar results have been found for several regions of the body, but the waist, hips, shoulders and face were most commonly measured. Healthy participants overestimated their bodies too. For example, one study found healthy adults overestimated the width of their waists by nearly 24 percent, the chest by 23 percent, and the hips by 13 percent.

The tendency to overestimate body width

Distortions of how people perceive their bodies are an exaggeration of a bias that seems to be a widespread, if not universal, feature. What factors might lead to these distortions becoming exaggerated is not well understood. Cultural factors could be involved such as the depiction of idealised bodies in mass media and lower ratings of social self-esteem. Body distortions, then, might be both a basic feature of mental life and can become a risk factor for mental health issues at an increased level.

Exaggeration of a bias

Body image distortions can be severe in anorexia nervosa and bulimia, but they’re also a normal feature of mental life

Stashed ideas

Body image distortions are a normal feature of mental life | Psyche Ideas

The PLG model is about showing users what your product can do for them. Our goal was for our product to be an MVP, and in doing so, it was essential to have a tight feedback loop between our users and the product. Basically, we needed as many people to use the app to gather feedback. This allowed us to adjust the product to the user’s needs so we could truly stand out.Starting as a <a href="https://productled.com/sales-to-product-led-organization/">product-led organization</a> was the quickest way to understand how we could lead our users to the value of our product.

Product-Led Growth(PLG): A Case Study

We discovered from looking at the organic ranking that the following factors came into play:<ul><li>Number of Customer Reviews</li><li>Overall Rating</li><li>Price</li><li>Feature Set</li><li>Word-of-Mouth/Referral</li></ul>Word-of-mouth became more important than we initially anticipated. Some of these apps don't even have a website because word-of-mouth alone was enough. A lot of the distribution comes from the Shopify app itself. These factors are crucial in getting high reviews to encourage merchants to use a product.

Competitive Analysis

We found the majority of the apps on the Shopify App store are product-led; however, nobody was giving users free access to the entire product before they bought it. We established that we needed the following to be competitive on the Shopify platform:<ul><li>Get feedback from users.</li><li>Bring greater value to our product from the feedback.</li><li>Improve marketing, messaging, and copy from the feedback.</li><li>Get reviews that comment on these differences.</li><li>Finally, get revenue from our product. </li></ul>We explored product-led models that could bring in revenue. <ul><li>Limited Freemium</li><li>14-Day Free Trial</li><li>Pure Freemium</li></ul>

The Business Model

We noticed that other quiz apps on the Shopify platform applied a limited freemium option, which meant you'd be allocated 5,000 quiz engagements every month for free. Anything over that, you would be bumped up to the basic plan at $39 a month. We didn’t find this a good model because, by the time people hit their limit, they would no longer be getting value from the product, and it would be harder to convert them.

Limited Freemium

When we thought about our product-led approach, we had to think about the steps for a user to derive value. The onboarding phase had the following steps:<ul><li>Decide on the quiz questions needed.</li><li>Put the quizzes together.</li><li>Implement it.</li><li>Design it. </li></ul>The user had to see it was driving traffic before they could derive value from it. So there were a lot of steps the user had to go through before arriving at the product’s value proposition, and 14-days wasn’t long enough. Plus, we needed users to use it at that moment, give us feedback, and provide us with a review.

14-day Free Trial

it was important to get as many users as possible to help us rank higher organically and improve our product. We saw the importance of tapping into a customer feedback loop as quickly and efficiently as possible. So we decided to go all-in on a pure freemium model.

Pure Freemium

Users have to experience a product without any sales pressuring them to try it or buy it. We then went through a slew of doubts about our product:<ul><li>What if our product is not an MVP?</li><li>What if it has limitations?</li><li>What if it has shortcomings other apps in the market don’t have?</li><li>Can we convert enough users on the free plan to sustain us?</li></ul>These are serious concerns in terms of the pricing model, but we decided to go for it, and that's why product-led growth can be scary.

Undermining Revenue Potential

The biggest challenge might be that users don’t value the product if they don’t pay for it. We know users typically always value a product they have a stake in. If it’s free, it’s easy to fall into that pile of tools that are left behind and forgotten.

The Value Of Free

To be competitive on the PLG platform, you need to:<ul><li>Get feedback from users.</li><li>Bring greater value to the product from the feedback.</li><li>Improve marketing, messaging, and copy.</li><li>Have reviews that comment on these differences.</li><li>Finally, get revenue from your product.</li></ul>

Challenges of Making Freemium Work

Product-led growth has a customer-centric mentality and prioritizing which is vital to success.<ul><li>Delivering Value Fast</li><li>Make onboarding easy, don't make users do anything too complicated, and create a quick path to the "Aha! moment."</li><li>Play the long game</li><li>We succeed when our customers succeed</li><li>Prioritize users - whether they are free or paid.</li></ul>

Our Core Differentiators

The main goal of starting as a product-led organization is that we were able to get the product used by more users than if we had started as sales-led. In addition, giving users a free product to use eliminates a barrier to entry – pricing. From there, we received real insights into the needs of our users. This feedback showed us how to deliver value from our product to the user quicker. Finally, the word got out that we had a great product, and more users came to try the product through the freemium model and became paying users.

The Bottom Line

The founder of Prehook shares insights into their product-led model strategy, and how they're making freemium work with real-worls insights

Making Freemium Work: How Prehook did it

NPS stands for net promoter score, and it is used by many companies to map out how well their products are doing with their current customers.

NPS for Product Managers 

<ul><li>Carry out a survey of your existing customers, asking them to rate your product out of 10.</li><li>Split them up into three groups, depending on where they fall on the scale.</li><li>Detractors: Scoring 1–6, these customers either actively dislike or have some significant issues with your product, and they will probably tell others to avoid it.</li><li>Passives: Scoring 7–8, these customers think your product is alright and continue to use it, but they would easily switch to an alternative that better solves their problem.</li><li>Promoters: the holy grail of customers. Scoring 9–10, these customers are loyal and would probably recommend your product to others.</li><li>Calculate your score by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the number of promoters.</li><li>NPS is expressed as an absolute number between -100 and 100. For example, 20% detractors and 25% promoters leaves you with an NPS of 5.</li><li>An NPS above 0 is generally considered a “good” NPS score.</li></ul>

How to calculate NPS

Promoters are long-term customers, but they’re much more than that. You can rely on promoters for word-of-mouth marketing. They’ll be the ones most likely to tell their friends and family about your product and recommend it to them.They’re also very useful for your marketing team, engaging with your content and getting involved in user-generated content strategies. They can also be more easily incentivised by referral schemes, and they will be more willing to leave you with constructive feedback in surveys.

What do we want from promoters?

Your NPS score opens the door to more conversations with your customers about your product. Those who are willing to answer an NPS survey may be open to contacting you further on what could make them happier.NPS also gives you your promoters, the people who will act as cheerleaders for your brand. They’ll help you build growth loops into your product, and they will be incentivized by marketing and referral schemes.

What is NPS  actually  good for?

NPS stands for net promoter score, and it is used by many companies to map out how well their products are doing with their current customers. With NPS, what we’re trying to achieve is a number…

NPS for Product Managers and How to Use it (Properly!)

Product Marketing, much like digital and traditional marketing, involves getting the product to market and making sure it reaches the right customers.When we hear the word ‘marketing’, it’s usually followed by things like ‘social media’, ‘email campaigns’, and ‘blogging’, but Product Marketing is so much more than that! Product Marketing sits at the intersection between Product, Marketing, and Sales.

What is Product Marketing?

A Product Marketing Manager will constantly be working on different tasks for customers at these three levels of the funnel.<ul><li>Acquisition: Getting the customers attention, making people aware that your product exists and peaking their interest.</li><li>Social media, newsletters, blogs, copywriting</li><li>Engagement: Getting people involved in your community of fans.</li><li>Events, CTAs, lead scoring, special offers/campaigns</li><li>Retention/Conversion: Either keeping customers around (for subscription models) or converting them into paying customers (for one-time purchases).</li><li>Building growth loops with Product.</li></ul>

What Does a Product Marketing Manager Do?

A Product Manager is the voice of the product within the company, and a Product Marketing Manager is the voice of the product to the outside world.A Product Manager is more focused on getting the product built. Owning and creating the go-to-market strategy is one of the most important parts of the Product Marketing Manager role.

Product Management vs Product Marketing Management

If you’re currently a Product Manager but would like a job with more creative flair, Product Marketing might be the one for you.<ul><li>The best way to make any transition is within your own company. You could start by asking a current PMM to grab a coffee and talk shop. Many larger companies organize rotational shadowing schemes which would allow you some exposure to the role.</li><li>When applying for a role, try to highlight any experiences you’ve had which correlate with PMM responsibilities. Have you had any previous experiences working closely with a marketing team?</li></ul>

Transition to Product Marketing

In a field as vast and diverse as Product Management, there are so many different types of Product Manager. One of the most common, aside from a regular PM is a Product Marketing Manager. If you’ve…

What Is Product Marketing Management?

The expectations on Product Managers are so different and it’s important that you really take the time to understand what’s your unique skill set and what you really enjoy doing, so that you can match that with the company’s expectations.&nbsp;Some PMs may focus more on faster product iterations (e.g. Growth hacking), others may well work on very large and complex technical problems (e.g. my work at Google Health).

How does the PM role vary across teams and companies?

<ol><li>Identify what the criteria for success are. These are what you’ll measure your various options against.&nbsp;</li><li>Map out all the various options that you can think of. If you struggle to find options and can only think of one, think again.</li><li>Assess your options against your criteria. Write a clear explanation of how each option meets your criteria.</li><li>Use 3 colors, red, green, and amber. Make sure that green means good across all criteria, otherwise it’s hard to read.</li><li>Make a decision, just do it. Make a recommendation based on the colors you identified. Is there a clear decision with all greens?</li></ol>

Have a framework for decision making

This week, Product School hosted Valerio Magliulo, Facebook Product Manager, for an exclusive #AskMeAnything session. Valerio shared his experience working at Facebook and what it takes to be a…

Building Frameworks for Decision Making with Facebook PM

Here we are providing templates for job posting for the following roles: <ul><li>Product Manager </li><li>Associate Product Manager </li><li>Senior Product Manager </li><li>Technical Product Manager </li><li>Product Marketing Manager </li></ul>

Hiring A Product Manager: Job Posting Templates

These templates have been created to provide you with a base for your own job posting. To attract the right candidates, be sure to personalize them and tailor them to your company.Are you a fun, young, fast-moving startup, looking for someone who will fit in your sociable company culture? Or are you a larger corporation working within a heavily-regulated vertical which requires more professionalism? Make it obvious by starting your job posting with a ‘Who we are‘ section.

The Idea Behind the Free Templates

To suit all needs we’ve gone for a more formal tone in these Templates, so be sure to bring in your company’s personality. To suit all needs we’ve gone for a more formal tone in these Templates, so be sure to bring in your company’s personality. If you want a team member who’s excited about the Margarita Fridays you do, make sure the job posting tells them about it.

How to Use These Templates

Your responsibilities: <ul><li>Lead the end-to-end success of projects from discovery to launch </li><li>Own the product vision and work with our data scientists to create meaningful problem statements. </li><li>Maintain and manage the product roadmap. </li><li>Collaborate with engineering, design, marketing and data teams. </li><li>Identify new areas for growth through quantitative search and UX studies. </li><li>Analyze market trends and maintain an awareness of competitor activity. </li><li>Provide support to the sales and marketing teams by communicating product features and functionality. </li></ul>

Template 1: Product Manager

Your responsibilities: <ul><li>Own products and drive feature development.</li><li>Deliver clear and concise briefs.</li><li>Collaborate on the creation of product strategy.</li><li>Pull and analyze data.</li><li>Develop OKRs, determine the metrics for success, and keep track of your team’s progress.</li><li>Work closely with the product management team to manage the product roadmap, taking input from stakeholders and users.</li><li>Assist in conducting user research.</li></ul>

Template 2: Associate Product Manager

Responsibilities: <ul><li>Manage a cross-functional team from conception of the project to launch.</li><li>Be the end-to-end owner of the product; define the customer experience, manage the business case, identify value propositions, and build out the product requirements.</li><li>Turn high-level project objectives into a comprehensive set of technical requirements.</li><li>Develop & document requirements, specifications and use cases for new product features.</li><li>Collaborate with cross-functional teams, both locally and internationally, to align business strategy and support growth.</li></ul>

Template 3: Senior Product Manager

Responsibilities: <ul><li>Working closely with Data Science and Engineering teams to prioritize product features.</li><li>Working with commercial and technical teams to gather insights from technical and non technical product users.</li><li>Own the up and down responsibility for the delivery of the product.</li><li>Translate product roadmaps and feature requests.</li><li>Creating specifications.</li></ul>

Template 4: Technical Product Manager

Your responsibilities: <ul><li>Lead segmentation, positioning, messaging, and adoption tactics for new and existing products.</li><li>Work closely with the product management team to run experiments and shape feature development based on market needs.</li><li>Work with user-facing teams such as sales and marketing to keep messaging on-brand and accurate.</li><li>Be informed of our competitive landscape, running analysis and identifying gaps in the market.</li><li>Define metrics for product marketing success.</li></ul>

Template 5: Product Marketing Manager

<ul><li>Clear and reasonable job requirements.</li><li>A clear call to action.</li><li>Ask for input from the team members who will work with the prospective candidate.</li><li>Work with human resources to ensure your posting is aligned with company guidelines.</li><li>Personalize the post to reflect your company/team culture.</li></ul>

Recipe for The Perfect Job Posting

<ul><li>The ability to think about measurement and metrics,</li><li>The ability to think creatively and use logical frameworks to talk about your product ideas,</li><li>Empathy and resilience.</li></ul>

Tips on Hiring a Product Manager

The job market is a tough place, and many do not yet have the experience that is truly reflective of their capabilities. If you're a small startup that's fresh on the scene, and you only choose candidates who have worked at big name brands, you're going to have a bad time. If you're a smaller startup that's fresh on the scene, and you only choose people who have worked at big name brands, you're going to have a bad time.

Final Words

Hiring a new teammate can be stressful, and not having the right job posting can make that ten times worse! With the wrong job description, you’ll be flooded with resumes from candidates you don’t…

A product roadmap is the essential strategy document for all product managers.  It answers fundamental questions like “what are we doing, where are we going, and how do we get there?” It's useful to have a roadmap as a centralized, collaborative document, where the game plan for development is clearly laid out for all to see.

A Product Roadmap

The product roadmap is owned and updated by the Product Managers. It serves as something everyone in the team can refer back to and understand where they’re at and how development will progress. Sharing your roadmap with the rest of your teams can help you to gain valuable input from your multi-disciplinary colleagues.

Sharing the Roadmap

When you have a roadmap, you have a written agreement of how development will proceed and what the strategic motivations are behind certain decisions. If at some point communication breaks down, you can point at it and say, ‘ look, this is what was agreed ’.

Why Your Team Needs a Roadmap

<ul><li>The product vision. The vision is what you want your product to be, how you want it to work, and how it will improve the world for your users.</li><li>Goals. You also need to think about your goals, which should be concrete and measurable. It includes metrics and a timeline. However, it isn't just a list of deadlines.</li><li>Status markers help keep the whole team up to date on when specific actions can be completed.</li><li>Features. It helps stakeholders understand which features are prioritised for a version and which can be added later.</li></ul>

What to Include in Your Roadmap

Create a product roadmap with the expectation that nothing is set in stone. <ul><li>Be open to change.</li><li>Communicate with all teams involved. </li><li>Know when to say no. What gets added to the roadmap should be based on data, business goals, and vision, not just opinions.</li></ul>

The Principles of Building a Product Roadmap

When you’re just getting started in product, or even just dipping your toes into the technology industry itself, there are a lot of questions that you’re afraid to ask. When everyone is talking about…

What is a Product Roadmap?

Rafayel Mkrtchyan has made 6 product manager mistakes which you should avoid. If you are making one and the same mistake twice, then it’s not a mistake, it’s a choice.

6 Mistakes I Have Made as a Beginner Product Manager

Market research is vital for validating a product idea. Research helps understand potential users, see demographics, learn what they care for and what their problems are. There are a lot of products out there that seem to be generating problems rather than solving them. Research helps you come up with a product that solves a problem.

Failed to pay enough attention to market research

Cohort analysis is a behavioral analysis tool that helps observe how groups of People/Cohorts experience something, usually over time. The net promoter score is a measure of your customer’s overall loyalty to your product. But it’s a good idea not to focus on the numbers a lot. Instead, focus on user feedback and try to improve the NPS over time. Back to mail Online home. Back to the page you came from.

Failed to use success metrics to measure the success of a new feature

I was once naive enough to think that more features could make a stronger and better product. But a product is not like a pyramid, it does not need to have a lot of bricks to look cool. Even pyramids do not need them. It’s all about the structure, the inner organization of things, the idea behind it and the problem it solves. A product should serve a purpose.

Believing that more features=stronger product

I have seen a lot of development teams who create their own product and who make this mistake. Developers usually want to see it perfect. We all want to see our products perfect. But, dude, there are no perfect products! Give it to user testing, they will find a new bug every time. Something will need to be changed or rethought. And that’s normal. There is nothing to worry about. Just release it, then collect feedback, then improve it.

Thinking that the product is not ready for public release yet

You need to ask for opinions, for a critic, for feedback from nearly anyone. Are you travelling on public transport with a friend? Ask them to test that app for 5 minutes. Or go see what people say about your product on social media or app review sites. Try to get as many impressions from them as you can. Do not sell the product, do not pitch it. Just show it to people.

Failing to ask for opinions

We can all make the mistake of failing to see the big picture. There were times when I used to concentrate on short-term goals more and I could sometimes forget about my long-term product vision. Be careful with this because it can end up ruining your whole product. Don’t get stuck, do not work too long on improvements, don’t do too much bug fixing, stop procrastinating, move that thing forward. It will evolve naturally if you keep going and keep looking at the big picture.

Losing the big picture

To err is human. And I should admit that like any other product manager, I was a noob once, too. And I have made mistakes, too. Were they stupid mistakes? Sometimes they were. Did they teach me…

A wise man once said that success doesn’t just happen, it’s planned for. But you have to plan on everything if you really want to achieve success. And then you have to work your ass off in order to act upon your plan. While planning your market research project, you should go through the phrases mentioned next.

Planning: The First Step in Market Research

<ul><li>Do people need my product or service?</li><li>Who is going to use it for free?</li><li>Who is going to pay for it?</li><li>Are people going to pay for it at all?</li><li>How am I going to convince them to pay?</li><li>Is my pricing fair and competitive?</li></ul>

Phase N1: Asking yourself smart (and sometimes not so much smart) questions

You will have at least three people in your life who are going to support you whatever crazy idea you have. They are your mom, your partner, and your best friend. But these people are not your potential customers. Your potential customers are people whom you don’t even know. So, go get to know them first!

Your Potential Customers

Based on the above questions, you can come up with a few good ideas regarding where you can start your research.For example, if your existing users seem to be abandoning the app because of the high prices on selected Premium features, you might want to reconsider the pricing or think about adding new cool features to the packages. Maybe you need to survey the users, ask for their opinions, establish a conversation with them and gather insights to act on.

Phase N2: Decide what kind of data you should be looking for

Before diving into surveys, interviews, and stuff like that, make sure to form a research hypothesis. It’s like predicting what the results will be. And be prepared to be astonished by the results. A lot of the time, your expectations won’t match with the actual data. And that’s perfectly OK.Just make sure to have a few options in place. Think about plan B if something seems to be going off track.

Phase N3: Form a hypothesis for your market research project

I don’t know when and how I came across with this idea. But, man, I bet it’s true. It’s so true that it comes to my mind at least once a day, especially at night when I put my laptop on my knees and…

Products can be different and it all depends on the type of product you are trying to present and the audience as well. It really matters to whom you “selling” that product. So, in some cases, a long product tour full of action-driven tooltips and various UI patterns might work quite well. But in other cases, the potential users might not want to be guided a lot. So make sure you take your audience into consideration.

Know your users

Ask yourself the following questions: <ul><li>Are there a lot of things to do within the app? </li><li>Is it an app with only one main functionality or it’s something more complicated? </li></ul>If you are offering a lot of functionalities, then it might be OK to have a more detailed product tour.

Functionality

Is your product UI unique? Sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn’t help the users to navigate through the app. But if UI is unique anyways, then you might want to teach a few things about it to the users before they get started.

Ask yourself the following questions:<ol><li>Are your users motivated and excited about trying the product?</li><li>Have you marketed the right audience to get to try the product?</li></ol>The more engaged the users are, the more they will try to take out of the product tour.

Users

Some folks use tooltips, some use short video tutorials, others use modal windows or hotspots to take their product tours to the next level.It’s up to you to decide which pattern to choose and which tools to combine with what. Of course, you need to do all of this considering the things I have mentioned earlier i.e. the functionalities of the product and the potential users.

Choose the right UI pattern

Whatever you do, don’t view it as the ultimate truth. Test it! Once you are done implementing your product tour, use analytics to track and measure whether it works or not. It’s not that scary to dive into user data, so make sure you do so. Otherwise, you might end up with a cheesy product tour that no one has time or nerves to take.

Test it, test it, and test it

Product tours can indeed be effective tools for helping users better orient within your product. If done right, they can serve as an introduction for new users, they can show the product UI and help…

Body image distortions are a normal feature of mental life | Psyche Ideas

Making Freemium Work: How Prehook did it

NPS for Product Managers and How to Use it (Properly!)

What Is Product Marketing Management?

Building Frameworks for Decision Making with Facebook PM

Connor Williams