UseCase Podcast with Mona Gandhi

What is PM?

• Intellectual curiosity, the ability to observe things and have an open mind, how you are affecting the problem that the user is trying to solve
• Identify TA/ identify natural behaviour
• Is your product creating a value/how badly do they need a product
• Is it a vitamin product vs painkiller product
• Power of storytelling is very important for user/stakeholder/team
• PM is both art and science
• Power of Observation is very important
• Not just how, ask why
• Going deeper is the art of PM, BE CURIOUS

How to identify PMF?

• NPS survey on how happy will you be when this product goes away
• Identifying your Northstar metric and consistently hitting it

Word of Mouth is underrated:

• Cult in a trial class says “we are cult”
• Uber adds emotional story about driver
• Zomato tells story about delivery guy
• Cred sent cake to office randomly
• Ikea gave vr headset to auto guys in Hyderabad

Skillset of PM:

• technical understanding
• product sensibility:good vs bad product
• changing your lens to a product lens
• understanding basic design principle
• have an analytical perspective

Hard skills of a PM:

• prioritise better
• what framework to use
• personality of constant curiosity
• personality of grit/motivation

On Growth: Growth is primarily acquisition/retention/monetization

Acqusition:

• Identify TA/Behaviour/where they are
• It is to try users to product once
• PR helped AIRBNB, PR is not news about your funding round
• Identify which channel user is coming from and identifying LTV
• Build compounding growth loops so 1 user brings 20 others

Retention:

• Core focus of growth is in retention not acquisition
• Build trust in the product is the biggest retention hack
• Consistently deliver what it set to delivers
• DO THINGS THAT ARE UNSCALABLE AT THE BEGINNING, DO THEM TO TAKE YOU TO YOUR IDEAL SETUP
• AIRBNB founders identified their AHA moment as good pictures of the homes and built around them
• Airbnb employees themselves tried the homes
• Value of retention was tied into the acquisition channels

When somebody pays you money, you get different engagement, thinking about monetization is important