Recently Amazon Prime sent me an email regarding a price change in Amazon Prime related to Prime Video experience.

Here's the email breakdown from a perspective of the user reading with my side notes:

Subject - An update on Prime Video

Above subject line wouldn't catch my attention. I would probably think its some sort of compliance type email, and may skip it.

Dear Prime member

A bit generic, but fine

We are writing to you today about an upcoming change to your Prime Video experience. Starting June 17th, 2025, Prime Video movies and TV shows will include limited advertisements.

Perhaps some user concerns? Can I skip ads? How many Ads? How long?

This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time. We aim to have meaningfully fewer ads than TV channels and other streaming services. No action is required from you, and there is no change to the current price of your Prime membership.

This is good. They put some thoughts around how to clarify that it won't be too many ads relatively

We will also offer a new ad free add-on option for an additional ₹999 699 per year/ ₹129 per month* that you can sign up for starting on June 17th 2025.

This did not flow from the previous paragraph well. Also there are some concerns from user if this is worth it or not.

There will be no other changes to your Prime membership. Prime members will continue to enjoy a wide range of shopping, savings, and entertainment benefits, including:

• Unlimited same-day delivery on more than 10 lakhs items and next-day delivery on more than 40 lakhs items on Amazon.in• Access to blockbuster and exclusive content including Amazon Original shows and movies across languages like Paatal Lok, Mirzapur, Farzi, Panchayat, Dupahiya, Call Me Bae, The Family Man, Citadel, Made in Heaven, The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power, Fallout, Reacher, The Boys, The Summer I Turned Pretty, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Dhootha, Suzhal – The Vortex, Inspector Rishi, Be Happy, The Mehta Boys; and latest blockbuster movies like Stree 2, Singham Again, Kalki 2898 AD, Raayan, Roadhouse, The Idea of You, Culpa Mia, Culpa Tuya, G20, Red One, Vettaiyan, Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya and many more.

• Additionally, Prime Video is the go-to entertainment hub offering customers add-on subscriptions from partners such as Apple TV+, Lionsgate Play, Discovery+, Crunchyroll, BBC Player, Sony Pictures – Stream, MGM+, FanCode, Chaupal, ManoramaMAX, Eros Now, Hoichoi, Anime Times, to name a few, and movie rentals (for both Prime and non-Prime members)

• Everyday offers, exclusive access to Prime Day and early access to other Amazon sale events

• Unlimited 5% cashback on all purchases on Amazon.in using Amazon Pay ICICI credit card

• Unlimited access to millions of songs, ad-free and millions of podcasts with Amazon Music

• Access to monthly free-in game content and benefits with Prime Gaming

• Free rotating selection of e-books, magazines and comics with Prime reading

This is not helpful honestly. It's a blob of "personalized" text that is just making me feel I don't even use all this, why am I paying more? Not helping here. Does not justify the ads, signals the opposite actually.

Also the changes is related to Amazon Prime Video, why re-iterate all these other benefits? Adds too much cognitive load for the user to see if this entire para is relevant - It's not!

As mentioned above, no action is required from you. And, as always, if you have questions about your Prime membership, you can manage your account here. You can cancel your membership and receive a pro-rated refund or view your next renewal date by visiting your account here.

Why are they planting the seed of cancelation in their heads? As I am reading this, even if I was not considering cancelling, now I might actually! Also Pro-rated refunds makes it sounds like its a compelling option to consider cancelling it!

Thank you for being a valued member of Amazon Prime.

Sincerely,

The Amazon Prime team

*You can continue to enjoy Amazon MX Player content on Prime Video. However, the content will contain ads even when you decide to take the add-free option for Prime Video.

Not relevant, this is too much detail. Also makes you feel worse that this is not included which would make it sound like not worth it. This could be part of the page where I choose the 'ad-free' option.

Now here's the same email revised applying my learnings from Product Sense Course

Subject - Prime Video will start showing limited ads — here’s why

Idea is to catch users' attention among sea of emails they usually get. Otherwise they may completely skip it.

Dear Amazon Primer,

Makes you feel special, not just another 'member'. I am not 100% sure on the word 'Primer' but for now I am good with this.

We hope you are enjoying the benefits of Amazon Prime, which includes Amazon Prime Video experience. Starting June 17th, 2025, Amazon Prime Video movies and TV shows will include limited yet meaningful ads as part of your existing plan. This small change would allow us to bring you even more beautiful stories that make you laugh, cry and sometimes be awestruck. We promise to keep the ads meaningfully fewer than TV channels and other streaming services, but we know even limited ads might feel disruptive.

Why the increase in few words that captivates the gist of it for the reader. Also the last line makes you feel Amazon empathizes with my feeling - "Yes we know you hate ads and would not want it". & sets the foundation for next para

Hence, we are introducing an add-on that allows you to continue enjoying uninterrupted viewing at a nominal price of less than a slice of cake per month (₹58/month, paid annually), starting June 17th, 2025.

I didn't call it an "ad-free" but uninterrupted viewing as that's what the user really feels about ads. I also felt the math was not easy to visualize. Added a relative math to make it sounds like that's not a lot . But Why reference of Cake? Because it's a "sweet" deal 🤗.

There will be no other changes to your Prime membership and its benefits.

If you have questions about your Prime membership, you can reach out to our support or talk to us here.

Still have questions? - We are here for you. Amazon values Customer Support, hence emphasising this

Thank you for being a valued member of Amazon Prime.

- The Amazon Prime Team

Feedback

What do you think of the original email and revised email? Any thoughts on it?

Happy to hear!

Recently, Shishir Mehrotra (Co-Founder & CEO at Coda) shared some of his insights at a TPF webinar named: Lessons for Product Leaders. In this webinar, he covered various topics.

However, I’ll talk in detail about two of the topics that he touched:

1. Measuring the performance of your product team.

2. Conducting meetings effectively.

About Shishir

Shishir Mehrotra is the CEO and Co-Founder of Coda. Earlier, he served as the Vice President of Product and Engineering for Youtube/Video at Google Inc. He also served as the Director of Program Management at Microsoft. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Topic #1: Measuring the performance of your product team

When Larry Page took over as the CEO of Google in 2011, he split the company into eight divisions based on business operations instead of functional. Shishir headed the Youtube division. While this decision allowed everyone to move a lot faster, there were some issues that they noticed. One of them was how to evaluate promotions with the new setup. Promotion at Google (termed as Calibration) was done by a committee instead of your direct manager.

Shishir was asked to set up the new Calibration process. After looking at the current rubric, they concluded that the current metric is designed around an increase in scope, i.e. "Feature > Feature Group > Product Sub Area > Multiple Sub Area of a Product > Product > Product Line". However, defining promotion solely based on scope resulted in several issues.

Issues with promotion solely based on scope:

1. Unfair across teams of various sizes: Some groups had only one product like Google Search, while others like Google Ads had 50 products. Because of the large number of projects in a single group, everyone wanted to work with Google Ads and not Google Search.
   ‍

2. The scope is an input, not an output: It is unfair to evaluate a PM based on the scope which was handed over to them. They didn’t choose it.
   ‍

3. Devalued experimental projects: Current rubric pushed people to work on larger existing projects instead of new smaller experimental projects. This resulted in some of their best PMs avoiding experimental projects, even though it could grow over time.
   

While everyone agreed that scope is a useful dimension, Shishir suggested adding another dimension to the rubric. This new rubric was already being using at Youtube for a while. It was called PSHE (Problem, Solution, How, and Execution). Here’s how it works:

Adding PSHE (Problem, Solution, How & Execution) as another dimension:

Given: SPSH / Manage Execution

At an early stage of their career, a PM would be handed a Problem (what problem we are trying to solve), a Solution (What is the proposed solution) & a How (what meetings to attend, what documents to write, etc.). They were required to manage the Execution of the given project.

Given: SPS / Manage How

‍As they get more senior, they are given a Problem statement & a Solution too. They need to figure out the How:

• How should I set up the milestones?

• How should I set up the meetings?

• What should the cadence be like?

• Which write-ups should we do/not do?

Given: SP / Find Solution

‍As they rise further in their careers, they are given a Problem statement. They have to figure out a Solution:

• What target market to go after?

• What are the different possible solutions?

• How to price it?

Given: S / Discovering Problems

‍Finally, you hand senior PMs a Space, and they come back with Problems that need to be solved.

In the above diagram, you can see that the Scope dimension is on the X-axis while PSHE dimension is on the Y-axis. To test this rubric, they marked various PMs in Google on the graph to check where they landed up on the graph. They noticed that people naturally fit along the black line.

Early on, one is growing mostly along the scope axis. Similarly, later in their career also, they are growing mainly along the scope axis. i.e., more significant divisions, larger products, and so on. It was in the middle where they grow vertically rather than horizontally. At this stage of their career, what they are doing in their job is not very different, but how they are doing it. The majority of the candidates for evaluation by the calibration committee were in this middle region.

Trough of Disillusionment

Shishir named this region: “Trough of Disillusionment.” It's because this is often the area where product leaders get stuck as there is no way to see that they are growing. However, if they evaluate it from the new lens, it’ll become more evident that they are growing but on a different dimension (i.e., PSHE).

But is this applicable beyond Product Managers?

Although this idea was designed for evaluating Product Managers, the concept can be applied to every role: Designers, Developers, Marketers, Salespeople, etc. To give you an example, if you asked your sales team who would you say is the best salesperson:

• An obvious answer might be the one who has the best quota attainment. But if one looks deeper, they can see that this may not be the case as higher quota attainment is all about negotiating. If you set your quota low, you’ll get good quota attainment.
  ‍

• However, the correct answer would be the one who can take on an unknown path, go after new markets, identify the problems, define solutions, and figure out how to execute them. As you might have noticed, it has the same “Problem > Solution > How > Execution” pattern.

Topic #2: Conducting meetings effectively

I’m sure you must have landed up in a meeting (many times?) where the lack of structure resulted in it going nowhere. Shishir counters that it doesn’t have to be. Referring to a book: Game Storming, He explained that if you define certain rules to any meeting you can switch it from being a no-outcome play to a productive and effective game, a game where people abide by certain rules and have a clear goal and outcome.

From the book:

“Imagine a boy playing with a ball. He kicks the ball against a wall, and the ball bounces back to him. He stops the ball with his foot and kicks it again. By engaging in this kind of play, the boy learns to associate certain movements of his body with the movements of the ball in space. We could call this associative play.

Now imagine that the boy is waiting for a friend. The friend appears, and the two boys begin to walk down a sidewalk together, kicking the ball back and forth as they go. Now the play has gained a social dimension; one boy's actions suggest response and vice versa. You could think of this form of play as a kind of improvised conversation, where the two boys engage each other using the ball as a medium. This kind of play has no clear beginning or end; rather, it flows seamlessly from one state into another. We could call this streaming play.

Now imagine that the boys come to a small park and that they become bored simply kicking the ball back and forth. One boy says to the other, "Let's take turns trying to hit that tree. You have to kick the ball from behind this line." The boy draws a line by dragging his heel through the dirt. "We'll take turns kicking the ball. Each time you hit the tree you get a point. The first one to five wins." The other boy agrees and they begin to play. Now the play has become a game; a fundamentally different kind of play.”

The authors suggest that meetings are not different than games. They have the same dynamics. You can design your meetings like a game, resulting in effective meetings. Here are a couple of examples:

Upvote/Downvote Game

Instead of asking attendees what do they think of ideas, let people upvote/downvote on ideas. Here’s an example of how it might look using Coda (you can do it in any other way too, however).

Here are some benefits of why you should do this:

• Equalize the audience: Every meeting has that one person who will skew everyone’s opinion as they speak the loudest. This results in a biased view of the larger group. Instead, let the group vote on it instead. This will result in equalizing everyone’s opinion. Thus collecting an unbiased view of the group.
  ‍

• Discuss what matters: If used for answering QA meetings, it can be an effective tool to order in decreasing order of what matters most to the group. You have high confidence that what matters to most people is being answered first.
  ‍

• Well-formed questions: By asking everyone to write it down, there is a high chance that the question is well thought out and elaborate. It reduces the chance of wasting everyone’s time in a meeting.

"Pulse Check" as a way to remove group-think:

This tool can be used in many different ways, like to know what everyone is concerned about, where everybody stands, etc. Here’s an example of how it looks using Coda.

Some of the benefits of using this game:

• Avoid group-think: It removes an implicit bias to go along with what the first person said.
  ‍

• Equalize hierarchy: Voicing what you are feeling against your manager/boss can be intimidating. Sharing a private pulse can help get an honest pulse check.
  

To read more about such games you can check out the following resources:

• Game Storming

• Shishir’s guide to distributed teams

• Gokul's S.P.A.D.E. Toolkit

• An inside look at how Figma ships product

• Claire's Offsite Toolkit

• How to Run your Distributed Staff Meetings like Zapier

• Career Development Doc
  

Conclusion

We looked at two unique lessons that Shishir shared in his talk.

Many more exciting topics were discussed in his talk. I highly recommend you go check out the full webinar by following the link below:

Note

This post was originally published on the TPF blog by me as a guest author.Share

Intro

If you are looking to apply for a PM interview, chances are you'll be asked to solve an Estimation type of question.

For example:

• Calculate the number of queries answered by Google per second?
• How many dentists are there in New York?
• Estimate the number of passengers arriving in SF airport everyday.
• Estimate the number of WhatsApp chats occurring in India.

Here's a broad framework on how to solve such questions:

1. Clarify the scope of the question
2. Create the main equation
3. Break down the unknowns in the equation into simpler equations
4. Calculate the numbers
5. Do a sanity check
6. Submit.

Let's take a look at one such problem and try to solve it.

Problem Statement

How many people are currently online in Europe?

Base Assumptions

First, I would like to state my assumptions below:

1. When we say currently online, the data will vary depending on what time of the day/week. However, we’ll assume the answer will give us an average number of people online at any given standard time of the day.
2. Also by online, I am assuming they are actively surfing & using some device (Mobile, Laptop, Streaming a movie, etc.).
3. The Population of Europe in 2020: ~750 Million (Source)

Further assumptions will be stated as we solve the problem.

Clarification

I would also like to clarify that this question can be approached in several ways: the number of users who have an email account in Europe, the number of smart devices owned per person, the number of users who have a Facebook account in Europe, etc.

However, we’ll keep the approach more straightforward and approach it via the population of Europe. The reason is it’ll have fewer chances of making a wrong assumption.

Central Equation

Next, I would like to create the central equation:

People Online in Europe
= (Euros having net X Ratio of being Online) +
 (Non-Euros having net X Ratio of being Online)

The above equation breaks down the people currently online in Europe into two categories. First is the European population who lives in Europe. Second, are those people who are traveling to Europe for various reasons: Tourists, Businessmen, Govt officials, etc.

We’ll treat the two parts on RHS as Equation 1 and Equation 2, respectively.

People Online in Europe
= (Equation 1) + (Equation 2)

Equation 1

Let’s breakdown the Equation 1 first:

We’ll create a new formula to calculate,

Europeans having internet access
= Population of Europe in 2020 *
 Percentage of People having Internet

As we have already established above, the population of Europe in 2020 is roughly 750M.

Regarding internet penetration, I believe Europe has a very high internet penetration compared to a country like India. It would be safe to assume that the penetration would be as high as 90-95%. For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume 90%. As there will be remote villages, poor countries where internet penetration would be poor. Hence,

Europeans having internet access
= 750M X 0.90
= 675M

Now, Let’s look at the other part of the Equation 1 i.e.

Ratio of being online
= (Avg. time spent online) / (24hrs in a day)

Since the ratio of time spent online would vary depending on the age group, we’ll need to further break this down via age group:

The above population age ratio is based on the fact that the median age of Europe is 42.5.

Explanation of Avg. time spent assumptions:

• 0-12yrs: Since this age group is heavily monitored by their parents, my assumption is they would have less exposure to online screen time, hence 2hrs on average.
• 13-20yrs: Teenagers are almost always on. They have the highest usage on social media, binge-watching shows on Netflix, etc. On average, they can spend anywhere between 2-8hrs a day. It’s safe to assume they are spending 5hrs every day.
• 21-39yrs: This age group is the working class. Since they are using laptops to get their work done, they are likely to be connected almost all the time while working and later surfing movies. Hence 6hrs a day on average is a safe assumption.
• 40-50yrs: This age group will also be part of the working group but likely to be working in traditional sectors; hence their avg time spent online would be less than above, hence 4hrs a day is a safe assumption.
• 50+ yrs: This age group is likely to be spending time on tools like WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. but not heavy on binge-watching. Also, they are less adaptive to new tech, new apps, etc. hence consumption would be less. Hence 3hrs per day.
  

Based on the above, we can calculate the ratio of being online:

Ratio of being online
= [ (Percentage of 0 to 12yrs * Avg. time spent in a day)
+ (Percentage of 13 to 20yrs * Avg. time spent in a day)
+ (Percentage of 21 to 39yrs * Avg. time spent in a day)
+ (Percentage of 40 to 50yrs * Avg. time spent in a day)
+ (Percentage of 50+yrs * Avg. time spent in a day) ]
/ (24hrs in a day)

Ratio of being online
= [ (0.15 * 2) + (0.25 * 5) + (0.20 * 6) + (0.30 * 4) + (0.30 * 3) ] / 24

Ratio of being online
= 4.85 / 24
= 0.20

Equation 1 Calculation

Now that we have all the values for the first equation, let’s roll it back up.

Equation 1
= Population of Europe X Percentage of People having Internet X Ratio of being Online
= 750M X 0.90 X 0.20
= 135M

Equation 2

Now let’s take a look at Equation 2:

Equation 2
= Non Euros having internet X Ratio of being online

Non-Europeans having internet access:

We can break down the Non-Europeans having internet access as:

Non Europeans having internet access
= (Leisure Tourists X Ratio of internet access) + (Work Tourists X Ratio of Internet Access) + (Misc. Tourists X Ratio of internet access)

Based on this tourism statistics, 139 million inbound arrivals to destinations within the EU are from outside of European countries.

Out of this, 60% of these visitors were for travel, 15% for businesses, 25% for other misc reasons.  Almost all of them are likely to have internet access. Hence we’ll assume 95%, 98%, and 90% ratio of internet access.

Hence:

Non Europeans having internet access
= (Leisure Tourists X 0.95) + (Work Tourists X 0.98) + (Misc. Tourists X 0.90)
= ((139M X 0.60) X 0.95) + ((139M X 0.15) X 0.98) + ((139M X 0.25) X 0.90)
= 130M

However, these stats are for a year and not at any given point in time.

It would be safe to assume roughly 10% of these stats are in Europe at any given time (For simplicity sake, I am not considering the impact of COVID-19).

Hence 13M Non-resident Europeans are in Europe that have internet access.

Since this number is tiny compared to the overall population, we can assume their online ratio is roughly the same as that of Europeans, i.e., 20%.

Equation 2 Calculation:

Hence Equation 2:

Equation 2
= Non Euros having internet access X Ratio of being online
= 13M X 0.20
= ~3M

Final Calculation:

People currently online
= Equation 1 + Equation 2
= 135M + 3M
= 138M

Sanity Check:

Let’s do a sanity check to see if this number makes sense.

Total number of people in Europe
= 750M (Europeans) + 13M (Non Europeans)

Ratio of being online right now in Europe
= 138M / (750M + 13M)
= 0.18
= Roughly 20% people are online right now

20% sounds reasonable. With everyone having access to an internet-connected device, 1/5th of the people currently online is a fair number.

Conclusion

Hope you enjoyed reading this blog post on estimation. To learn more about how to do estimation, I recommend this website Product Management Exercises where you can learn and practice such (and other types of) problems.Share

Intro

Any company, especially startups facing issues in controlling their churn rate, is a good problem to be solved. It means you have enough traction, but something is not right somewhere along the user's journey.

What is Churn?

It is the percentage of users who stopped using your product/service during a particular time frame.

Customer Churn
= (Number of deactivated users in a time frame) / (Number of total users in a time frame)

So if you had 1000 users at the start of the quarter and end with 800, your churn rate is

(1000 - 800) / 1000
= 20%

I've been reading a lot about reducing churn rate and chalked a framework out of it. Let’s dive in!

Reduce Churn: Core Strategies

There are broadly three core strategies:

• A) Capture User Data (Short Term)
• B) Implement New Processes (Mid Term)
• C) Cultural Changes (Long Term)

Short term strategy - Capture User Data

Capture User Data can be further broken down into three broad areas:

Segment your users

Start by creating a set of buckets in which you can categorize your users. The idea is to understand them more in-depth. A user who just started using your product will have very different sets of issues versus someone who has been using it from day one. You would want to treat them differently.

A couple of examples would be:

• By user lifetime (less than 1 day, 1 month, 1 yr, etc)
• By age group (Below 18, 28-24, etc)
• By NPS score (Promoters, Passives, Detractors)
• By plan (Free, Plan 1, Plan 2, Custom Plan)
• By gender (Male, Female, Trans, etc)

This will help you categorize and understand their feedback into buckets. Don’t make the mistake of treating each feedback equally. Above will help you prioritize the feedback later.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) Surveys

NPS surveys will help you breakdown your users into Promoters/Passives/Detractors. For those who don’t know what an NPS is, here’s a quick summary:

Each category of customers play a role in improving your churn rate:

• Promoters: They love your product so much that they would love to recommend your product to others. Request them for user testimonials to increase trust. Also, create case studies of how they use your product and publish them on your website.
• Passives: They are not excited about your product but also not very dissatisfied with your product. Request to conduct interviews with them to understand how you can delight them.
• Detractors: This set of customers are unhappy with the product. There are many possibilities. If the fit is missing, thank them for trying out the product. However, if the product/customer fit is there, but some other issue is causing dissatisfaction, note it down.

Once you have segmented the customers, segment NPS answers into the following three buckets:

1. Immediately Actionable: Any feedback that can be fixed quickly. For example, customers need longer trials, some bug causes them to abandon the product, etc.
2. Not Actionable: Any feedback that does not fit the product vision or current roadmap, just put them aside. For example, if your product is an email app and users want to send newsletters within the app. If it doesn’t fit the direction, you can put it aside for now.
3. Requires Product/Service Change: These are feedback & requests that require time/resources/effort to add it to the product. It could be a valid feature request that you would like to add but requires design/engineering effort. Put it as part of the backlog to consider when planning the next roadmap.

Once you have consolidated all the feedback, share the report internally within the company. It'll help everyone be on the same page and cultivate empathy for your users within the company.

Capture data indirectly

App Analytics

Firstly, if you haven’t done this already, start capturing various app usage analytics. Here’s a friendly tweet on app analytics usage.\

‍If you are looking to set up analytics for a consumer mobile app, you can take a look at this post by Vindhya.

User Behaviour & Heatmap

Second, start capturing user behavior & heatmap data. It’ll give you insights into how the users are using your product in the wild, and the UX issues they are facing before they give up. Take a look at the Hotjar tool if you are new to this.

Midterm strategy - Implement New Processes

This can be further broken down into three broad areas:

Improve the UX of Dashboard

User Onboarding

If you haven’t put the time to create user onboarding yet, this is the time to do so. Most users abandon very early into the funnel as they haven’t invested enough time on your product. They may not see the value the way you do.

Don't just let the user start using the app right away. Welcome them, explain your value proposition quickly, understand their preferences, etc. For example, mindspace is a meditation app. Everyone understands the value of meditating but feels they don’t have the time to do so. Mindspace captures that USP of solving that beautifully in their onboarding screen by showing their avatar meditating in various places using the app.

Here’s a great guide to know more by userpilot.

Plans

If you are only showing monthly plans, add annual plans & make that as the pricing page's default option. Users are less likely to churn away if they have already bought the yearly plan and give your app more chance.

Downgrading Screen

Before your user can downgrade, create a bit of FOMO showing what they’ll be missing out if they downgrade. If they still want to continue doing it, ask them why they want to do it. Give them a set of reasons to choose from. Here’s an excellent example of how Pipedrive does it:

PS: 🎩tip: Amol Umbark shared that Pipedrive uses the Brightback app to create such dynamic forms.

But, do not make it crazy hard for them to cancel! Don’t do things like email us to cancel your account, call us, etc. Here’s a good example of how not to do this!

Email Automation

Trigger-based Email

In this busy life, it is easy for your users to forget about your beloved product. Life happens. You can set up trigger-based email automations (via tools like Mailchimp, etc.) to remind your app users. They can be busy and need a simple nudge to come back.

Some examples of triggers can be:

• Signed up but never returned
• Started with X activity but abandoned it
• Previous email not opened
• Purchase any (or specific) product

Periodic Product Updates

As time goes by, new features will be added to your product. Send out periodic emails to update your users of the latest features available. Make sure you do explain why that feature is useful in their context. It will trigger some abandoned users to come back & try it again.

Periodic Case Studies/Pro Tips

Share case studies & pro-tips from your power users on how your app can be used in various other ways that they may not be aware of. You can get case studies from promoters that you identified during the NPS categorization step earlier.

Supercharge Support

FAQs

Create internal FAQs to enable the support team to answer the obvious questions quickly. The time invested in this step will pay back 10x. Also, publish a subset of those FAQs on your website/app. It’ll help you slowly self serve the customers with their queries.

CSAT Support Rating

Allow your customers to rate their customer support experience with your agents. This will help you measure how many of your customers converted from Upset > Satisfied > Delighted! After all, a happy customer is less likely to churn away. Here’s a screenshot of how helpshift in-app chat CSAT rating feature does this:

To Bot or Not to Bot

Some companies have gone the fully automated support route. While it’s great for the company, the experience sucks. It can sometimes be worse than having no support at all.

On the other hand, only manual support makes it hard to scale. You’ll be overwhelmed very soon with the number of support requests.

Take the middle path. Use bots to self serve your customers for simple issues. For complex issues, capture information upfront via bots. Once an agent comes online, he/she has all the context to solve the problem in a matter of a few minutes. Thus delight your customer with a fast response.

Here’s a helpful article on this topic by Vinayak Mookherjee from Helpshift.

Long term strategy - Cultural Changes

This can be further broken down into two broad areas:

Success Team

NPS Accountability

Assign each customer's NPS score accountability to the respective success representative in your company. Also, set up monthly check-ins with them, share feedback received within the team. It’ll help everyone in the company know how their work is improving the lives of their customer.

Prepay

Encourage your customers to prepay for quarterly/annual plans. Offer them discounts if need be. Prepayment makes a customer likely to spend more time on your product before they give up.

Company-Wide cultural changes

Dogfooding

(If possible) Enable every employee to use your product daily. Using the product themselves (i.e., dogfooding) will help them be in the user's shoes when debating what to build next.

NPS <-> Company Annual Bonus

This is debatable, but you could tie the 20% annual bonus of every employee with the mean NPS score. This means everyone is aligned with improving the NPS score, not just the success team.

Conclusion

Improving Churn rate can be a severe problem to solve, especially when you have limited resources. But don’t be afraid to take on this problem head-on. Do it one step at a time and convert your passive and detractor customers into promoters!

PS: Thanks to Ashima Gupta for taking out the time to share her knowledge on this topic.

Intro

If you have been interviewing for a Product Manager role (or have done that in the past), you must have come across product improvement questions.

Today I’d like to share a case study of how I would improve WhatsApp (Assuming I am one of the PMs there). Idea is to present how I would think about the problem and come up with a set of possible improvements along the way. Let’s get started!

WhatsApp Intro

Before I dive deep into WhatsApp, I’d like to share my understanding of the WhatsApp app briefly:

WhatsApp is a well known messaging app owned by Facebook. Currently, there are more than 2 billion WhatsApp users, making it the default messaging app around the globe. WhatsApp is available in more than 180 countries and 60 different languages.

Here are some popular features of WhatsApp:

1. Simple, reliable text and voice messaging.
2. One to One private messaging.
3. One to many groups messaging.
4. Broadcasting messages via broadcast groups and the status feature.
5. Sharing various document types (Image, Document, Location, Contact, etc.).
6. Private and Group Video calling.

WhatsApp SWOT

Strengths of WhatsApp

• Most Popular: WhatsApp is still the most popular mobile messenger app globally.‍
• Setup: The setup process is very intuitive, only requires your phone number and OTP. No need to remember username/password, which makes it a straightforward onboarding process, especially for the older generation.‍
• Encryption: End-to-End, encrypted by default, making it secure and safe for all kinds of messaging.‍
• Platform Availability: WhatsApp is available on all kinds of platforms: Android, iPhone, Mac, Windows, Web, which makes WhatsApp easy to use on whatever device users have.‍
• Group Video Calling: You can do group video calling to max eight people.‍
• Whatsapp for Business: Ability to create simple bots for businesses to cater to the needs of their B2B users.‍
• Owned by Facebook: Finally, being part of the FB/Instagram family allows it to leverage each other in various ways.

Weaknesses of WhatsApp

• Lacking Innovation: Other platforms like Telegram (Example Broadcasting channels), Hike (Example Hike Land), Snapchat (Self-destructing messages, Lenses, etc.) are innovating at a much faster pace.
• Leaks private info: Phone numbers of users are leaked via Group member lists

• In-App Browser: Lacks In-App Browser to view the content within the app.
• Group Member Limit: You can only have 256 members in a WhatsApp group (vs. telegram of 200K).
• Gen Z Features: Lack of self-destructed messaging, cool Snapchat like filters, Poll/Quiz creation, animated stickers like Snapchat, and Telegram, which is attractive to Generation Z (While animated stickers have launched on WhatsApp, they are no match to telegram stickers IMHO).
• Document Size: You can only attach documents of maximum 100MB size (vs. 2GB in telegram)

Threats for WhatsApp

• Better apps for the group discussion: Telegram, Slack, and Discord are much more superior in group discussion capabilities. While some people currently prefer WhatsApp due to its distribution, eventually, any larger groups move out of WhatsApp due to its lack of admin capabilities, size limitation, ability to automate, etc.
• Professional Video Calling: Google Meet & Zoom have captured this market even though WhatsApp could cater to this segment.
• Open API: Other platforms have open API, making it easy to build and host bots that automate businesses. While WhatsApp has an API, it is behind closed doors, unlike telegram APIs.

Opportunity for WhatsApp

• Richer interaction: Like a message, Short reply to a message, the ability to create Polls, Quizzes, Games, Watching videos together, etc can be added to increase engagement.
• Richer Status: Voice Status, Polls, Quizzes.
• Always on voice-only group chats: Think Clubhouse meets WhatsApp.
• Newsfeed: Build a news feed inside the app, making it easier to share verified news (Think Google News, which sources all the information from various news platforms).

My Assumptions

• While WhatsApp Pay tech is ready, it is still not launched globally yet (Except for Brazil). Since it depends primarily on financial bodies’ approval, I will ignore it as part of my consideration.
• Self-destructing messages are coming to WhatsApp, so I’ll not consider it further.

Possible Goals

Now that we have listed the WhatsApp SWOT analysis and have a brief idea of what it can do let’s look at what all it might want to do.

• Increasing the number of active users.
• Increasing the number of new users on the platform.
• Increasing user engagement with the product.
• Increasing user retention.

Before we narrow down on goals, let’s also look at the age and gender split (below is for India, but we can extrapolate from this):

Considering that the majority of the users of WhatsApp are 13-34 yrs old, and we have competing apps like Snapchat, Telegram catering to the same set of users, we’ll keep the following as our base criteria:

Base Criteria:

1. Age group 13-34yrs.
2. Increasing user engagement of the product.
3. Improving the current UX.
4. UX should remain simple to use.

Reason for above is:

• If the platform does not adapt to the newer generation soon, it threatens to lose its market dominance eventually.
• There is still a lot of room to improve the current UX. Hence we’ll focus on that which will help us, in return, increase user engagement.

Possible Pain Points

Here are some of the pain points faced by our selected user group:

1. Too many short messages in a group causing a flood of notifications (Example, single emojis, thank you, awesome, etc.).
2. No ability to gather feedback from your friends, family members, etc.
3. No simple inbuilt games to play with your friends and family.
4. Many users want to share their voice (songs they sang, share a quick update on status, etc.). But currently, users cannot share only voice status update.
5. Clicking on a link takes you outside the app, adding extra steps.
6. Video file size sharing is limited to only 16MB!

A Possible Set of Features

Based on the above-listed pain points and our goal to improve user engagement and current UX, let’s list down a list of possible features to resolve them. With each feature, we’ll also calculate a score based on formula explained below (adapted from RICE for simplicity)

‍

Where:

• Reach: 1 to 10
• Impact: 1 to 10
• Complexity: 1 to 10
• Score: 0.1 to 100

Top Five Priority Features

Based on the above scores, here are our top 5 priorities:

• Feature #1 (Score 40): Ability to react to a message
• Feature #2 (Score 24): Ability to write a short inline reply
• Feature #6(Score 20): Increased Document Size from 100MB to 1 GB
• Feature #7 (Score 16): Voice Status
• Feature #8 (Score 12): Ability to view a link within WhatsApp

Looking back at the base criteria we have set, they all fulfill the following:

• Age group 13-34yrs.
• Increasing user engagement of the product.
• Improving the current UX.
• UX should remain simple to use.

Feature 1 & 2: Ability to react to messages (emojis + short inline replies)

Problem

Every WhatsApp group is plagued with most messages containing an emoji or a short message as a reply to another message. These messages are typically: 😂, 👍, ❤️ etc. or a brief response like “Awesome”, “Amazing”, “Thank you”, etc.

Real-world example:

Solution

We could allow users to react to a message inline either via a single emoji or a short message (less than 12 characters). The idea is to collate all these reactions next to the original message. And also to reduce the number of notifications received by all the group members.

Notifications for reactions will only be sent to the original message sender, reducing the number of notifications in a group. This feature will increase the signal to noise ratio, thus making the WhatsApp groups much more useful.

Users can view a detailed breakdown of reactions by clicking on the ... button

Here’s a demo UI of the feature:

Please do note: Above is not a final mockup, but to convey the usability of the feature. An actual mockup will be defined once this feature has been approved to be part of the roadmap.

Open-ended questions to resolve

1. Since WhatsApp groups, videos, and photos instead of showing them one by one, can users react to each image/video or all of them together?
2. Can users edit/delete their reactions or only delete them within a defined time limit like other messages?
3. Can users react with any emoji or a limited set of emojis?
4. Is 12 a justified character limit? What should be the limit for non-Latin languages like Arabic, Mandarin, etc.?

Feature 6: Increased Document Size from 16MB to 1 GB

Problem

Currently, WhatsApp only allows attaching a video of a maximum of 16MB size. With the advancement in internet speeds and our phone cameras’ capabilities, this is increasingly becoming an issue with users wanting to upload longer, higher quality videos.

Current workarounds

• Users upload it to Youtube and share the link on WhatsApp. But this is a cumbersome approach as a lot of people don’t know how to upload, youtube automatically switches streaming quality and no ability to download it first.
• Users compress the video via 3rd party app. Again this is not an ideal workaround as it requires 3rd party apps, and sometimes you want to share videos without affecting their quality.
• Sharing it via other messaging platforms like Telegram (which allows file-sharing of 2GB!)

Solution

Increasing the file size limit to 1GB will enhance the UX of sharing high-quality videos/images. This limitation is likely an old decision made by the WhatsApp team that now requires revision. Since Telegram went ahead and did it, it is less of a technical issue and more of a decision to be made by the product team.

Open-ended questions to resolve

1. What is the ideal file size limit? Is 1 GB the right limit?
2. How will this impact users living in low bandwidth areas?
3. What is the average length/file size of videos shared on Facebook? We could perhaps use some metrics from Facebook and extrapolate it to take a decision.

Feature 7: Voice Status

Problem

Currently, users cannot share voice updates on status. It can only be text, video, or image. If a user wants to share a song, or quickly share a voice update with their contacts via status; they can’t do so. They’ll have to create it as a video.

Current workarounds

They can do it by creating a plain video with a base image with their voice over it. While this can work, it’s pretty cumbersome.

Solution

Allow users to create a voice-only status option. This will be a new option available under the status UI. Following is a sample demo UI to better understand how the feature might look.

Open-ended questions to resolve

1. How will the 30-second status limit be enforced on voice status?
2. If users can record longer than 30 seconds, will it be broken automatically into multiple statuses?
3. Can users upload an mp3 file instead of recording it?
4. Can users pause the recording (or like videos, there is no possibility to pause)?
5. Can users respond to voice status via voice as well or only text?
6. Can users add headings to their voice status?

Feature 8: Ability to view a link within WhatsApp

Problem

When you click on a link, it opens another app to load the link. While youtube videos play inside the app nowadays, other links like medium, news app links, etc. load outside the app. This causes users to switch context.

Current workarounds

No workarounds are available.

Solution

An instant view button can be implemented that loads the content within the app directly. Here’s an excellent example from the telegram app on how it can be achieved:

Open-ended questions to resolve

1. How exactly will WhatsApp interpret the page automatically? We can take inspirations from how telegram & open source tools like boilerpipe do it.
2. What happens if a page cannot be instantly viewed? Should we not show the button?
3. Can we use AMP preview of the pages to load the AMP version of pages like news articles, etc.?
4. How does this interact with the reaction feature?
5. Can website owners submit changes to the way preview is generated for their website (submitting new templates for specific pages on their website)?

Conclusion

While the above features were designed keeping the younger generation in mind, we also made sure that the selected set of features doesn’t affect other age groups. The idea is to improve and delight users across all the generations around the globe. These features were purposely not fully designed as we’ll need to resolve some of the open-ended questions I have listed which will require us to conduct UX research, work with the designers, along with the tech team to understand the technical challenges that they might bring.

Working together with various teams, I hope to improve WhatsApp that makes interacting with your friends and family an even more joyful experience.

Inbox Crazy

Once I came back from a week-long holiday. I opened my Gmail — 500+ new emails sitting in my inbox. “Inbox zero” status — Gone! I set aside half a day to triage them. 80% of them are newsletters, company updates, marketing emails. 15% are transactional emails like invoices, bank notification, order confirmation, etc., while a handful of them require me to reply to them (CA asking me for some document, someone reached out to me, etc.).

The above incident has happened to me too many times until a few weeks ago. I have been on the Inbox Zero wagon since I started working professionally. I don’t remember who taught me this philosophy, but it got ingrained in me. Both my professional and personal emails were clean, organized, labeled, etc. But no matter how many rules, workflows, learning keyboard shortcuts I tried, it never really worked. Inbox Zero was a game that I would always lose if I ignored my emails for a while.

I even tried RSS readers to move all my subscription emails outside my email to achieve inbox zero. I thought I had solved this problem in theory, but quickly I realized now I have two problems instead of one. Now there were two inboxes, and neither achieved the Inbox Zero status.

Eventually, I gave up all RSS readers, and I found this nifty little tool: Blogtrottr. It basically allows you to subscribe to any website and sends it to you via email. I have even subscribed to sites that don’t have a newsletter functionality yet, using this app. It works great. So now I was back to having one problem — Inbox Crazy.

My hacks to reach inbox sanity? — Kinda

Over time I realized that it’s impossible to have Inbox Zero all the time, and I defined a new workflow for myself:

Setup

• Changed the setting of the inbox to “Unread first.”

• Enable keyboard shortcuts to improve efficiency in triaging emails.
• Update delete email shortcut from “#” to “d” (as it’s easy to press).

New email workflow hack

Email is a Todo List out of our control? 🤔

While above solved my problem to an extent, I still felt something was wrong. Then I read this quote:

And I realized the problem is that it’s partly because I have no control over what comes inside my inbox, and what people send to me is immutable. I can’t add notes, I cant’ merge them, can’t change their stupid subjects, etc.

Enter Hey — Email 2.0

On 15th June 2020, Hey went live!

In short, Hey is a new, fresh approach to how we use Emails.

“It’s a redo, a rethink, a simplified, potent reintroduction of email. A fresh start, the way it should be.” — Jason Fried, Co-founder of Hey

I was super excited to give Hey a try. I’ve been using it for almost 2 weeks now. Instead of talking about its features, I’ll talk about various problems I faced with emails, how I solved it previously, and how Hey has changed that!

Problem/Previous Hack/Hey Workflow

Problem #1: Useless Subjects

Problem Example:

“Transaction alert for your ICICI Bank debit card” — Umm not very helpful!

My Previous Hack:

None. Above is notoriously bad when I have to remember what tx this amount is looking at vague email subject/body.

My Hey Workflow:

Just rename the subject to something appropriate! It’s so amazing, I have tears in my eyes every time I do this. I have wasted so much time looking at a particular email, trying to remember what this transaction was really about!

Problem #2: Email 1 and Email 2 are about the same thing!

Problem Example:

• Thread 1: PM Interview at XYZ Company
• Thread 2: Please share your CV

The above emails should have been part of the same thread!

My Previous Hack:

Use my excellent memory to remember the threads which were about the same thing or use advanced search filters to find the two threads. Not very convenient, but kinda works.

My Hey Workflow:

Merge those threads into one a single thread with an updated subject! It’s convenient. Here’s an example of 3 part-transactions of a single order (and renamed the subject).

Problem #3: Add some private context to an email

Problem Example:

The email receiver called me instead of replying. I need to note down key points from our conversation privately somewhere for future reference.

My Previous Hack:

Use Notion/Evernote to remember the context (Yeah, not really a solution but meh).

My Hey Workflow:

Just add it to the email using a private note feature! I recently used this to add context to an email for which I replied via Gmail (as I didn’t want to interrupt that thread with new email context)

Problem #4: What was the Order ID again?

Problem Example:

Referencing the tracking number mentioned in an email to track my courier on an external website.

My Previous Hack:

Add it to my clipboard search history or snippets app. Works well.

My Hey Workflow:

Even though they have a clipping feature inbuilt, I haven’t used it yet. I still rely on the above workflow but would try it out soon. Here’s a license key that I have clipped from an email for future reference.

Problem #5: Unknown Senders destroying my Inbox Zen peace

Problem Example:

“Oh, nice! Samuel just emailed me! Wait, Samuel who?”

My Previous Hack:

Promotional Email:

• Easy to unsubscribe: Unsubscribe!
• Hard to unsubscribe: Mark them as spam.

Genuine Email:

• Not urgent: Read it and then unread it to reply back later.
• Urgent (Very rare): Reply instantly

My Hey Workflow:

Just screen them out! It saves so much time as I don’t have to bother about unsubscribing them, telling them why I don’t care about it, sometimes you have to log in just to unsubscribe. Uh! No more: Screen -> Out -> Done!

Some people have asked me if this is a time-consuming process. The answer is Nope 🙅‍♂️! This is so much better! Also, since this is a one time process per email sender, it’s hardly any work. Plus, you can do this whenever you have time. None of these emails land up in your inbox (or IMbox in Hey terminology).

Problem #6: I’m drowning in useless notifications!

Problem Example:

• “Which Nifty Index Fund has the lowest tracking error?” — Don’t care
• “Love poetry? We have something special for you!” — Umm Nope, I don’t!
• “Mayank, Are you looking for ways to keep kids engaged?” — What? I don’t even have kids!

My Previous Hack:

First, I tried to turn off email notifications completely.

But it led to another problem: I missed relevant notifications. Example: When I am applying to a company and they are asking for my availability. Now I have to regularly check emails to make sure I don’t miss anything important.

While it works, this solution is horrible for productivity. I keep getting sucked into triaging new emails but better than getting notifications for every email (or is it?).

My Hey Workflow:

By default, Hey is silent. You can individually enable notifications for a particular sender/thread. This is really useful as I will be prompted only when I want it to.

Problem #7: Need to get back to this later

Problem Example:

An email from a friend who reached out to me via email.

My Previous Hack:

Earlier I used to simply mark them as unread. In my head, I would remember whether I want to reply or just read it in detail later. While it worked, it would get mixed with all the new emails that are incoming in my inbox. I have tried marking such emails in a new label but since it’s kinda hidden, which I didn’t like, I restored back to unread as a workflow.

My Hey Workflow:

Hey has two spaces defined just for this:

• Reply Later: Just move any email, I need to reply to later in this space as soon as I see it.
• Set Aside: Any email I need to read in detail belongs to this space (A paid newsletter, for example). Once I am done reading, I would move it out.

You might say well how is that different from labeling in Gmail?
Because it constantly shows me these email spaces in a fan-like view so that I never forget them when required.

Problem #8: Do I need to read (or pretend to read) every email?

Problem Example:

Every email you get, you have to read it. Well, at least pretend to read it. Be it a blog update, company newsletter, transaction receipts, order update, etc. It can be a really time-consuming activity at times.

My Previous Hack:

I actually never thought of this as a problem, to be honest until I used Hey. I mean, every email is intended to be marked as read, right?

My Hey Workflow:

Hey’s philosophy is different. There are broadly four spaces where any email can land:

• Screener: New sender sending you an email for the first time. You can either say “No, thank you” or choose from one of the following space where they belong.
• Feed: Treat all your emails in this space like you treat your social media updates. You read them when you have free time. If you miss it, who cares. All emails are marked as read. So they don’t count towards your inbox count. You get to see a preview of each email and if you wish, you can expand it to read the full email. Trust me, it’s beautiful!
• Paper Trail: Feed for transaction emails that you’d like to keep it handy for future reference. Think Order Confirmations, Bank Transaction Updates, License Keys, etc. Here also, there is no concept of read/unread.
• Imbox: Finally, any email that you either need to act on or want to mark as read, should land here. Think real conversations, paid newsletters (that I don’t want to miss), support requests, etc.

I’ve been testing my new workflow with Hey for more than 2 weeks now. On average, I get 20–30 emails per day. Earlier I would be drowning in email. Now email feels amazing again!

Hey has a lot more to offer….

There are many more amazing features that I haven’t even talked about yet. You can check out all the amazing features here.

Questions/Doubts

I’ve heard several doubts from people around me/on twitter. Here’s my take on them:

Doubt #1: Is it worth the money?

Short Answer: Yes.

Long Answer:

• You get a really cool domain — @hey.com is a pretty unique domain. I would prefer this over having my own domain @firesofmay.com — Because you immediately be part of this unique set of people who own this address. Since it’s a paid app, it’s unlikely that everyone around you owns a @hey address (I do hope, though).
• Your data is yours — Your data belongs to you. Since you are paying for this, they will never sell your data to make some money.
• No Ads, ever — I didn’t know Gmail shows ads until I saw this tweet:

• Real Humans, Real Support — Their support team is just amazing. Just like any other product launching in the market, there are bugs and features missing. What makes it acceptable is that real humans are listening to your complaints/issues. Every time I raised a query, I got a realtime response, which is a fresh of breath air in SAAS email.

• Privacy Protection — Every email that you receive, tracks analytics about you, your device, your open rates, etc. This is a privacy invasion. Some clients deal with it by hiding images. Hey, on the other hand, has fixed this properly. You can read more about it here.

Doubt #2: What if I don’t pay for it the second time?

Even if you have paid for Hey services once, that email id is yours — F O R E V E R.

That’s right, you own it. While you can’t send emails from it, you can simply set up a forwarding email address and continue getting emails to your Hey address even if you don’t continue the subscription.

If you don’t believe me, here’s a tweet to prove it (37signals is the original name of the company behind Hey — Basecamp)

Doubt #3: It’ll be copied by others, so why bother?

There was a tweet recently mentioning he’s going to build a plugin that will replicate Hey — Like screener, reply later, set aside, etc. Some folks in my network are waiting to see how that turns out.

Here’s what I think:

1. Platform Limitation: You can only copy and build on some other platform to an extent. There will be limitations that will be hard to bypass.
2. Copying Beyond V1: You can only copy until V1. Once you match it pixel to pixel, you’ll be pulled in various different directions — Customer Feedback, Vision, Platform Limitations, Team capabilities, Product Team, Design Considerations, Price, Privacy as a feature, etc. These new signals will drift them from whatever they have copied so far. While they might start off as exactly the same, they’ll end up being something totally different.
3. You can’t copy the future nor the past: And this is the most important aspect — I didn’t pay for what Hey is today. I paid for it to own what Hey will be in the future. I paid for the roots from where Hey has come from. Their development philosophy is unlike others. They have written a book on it as well — Shape Up. I highly recommend it if you are into tech. You can also read more about how Hey evolved overtime here.

Doubt #4: I can’t import my emails from my previous email account? How does that even work?

Yes, you can’t import emails into Hey (You can import your contacts btw). Initially, I had a strong objection towards this idea (Even DHH did internally). However, as I kept using it, I realized, Bankruptcy is a feature of the app.

When you build something new — you need to let go of your old ways, old ideas, and start fresh. There are some aspects of Hey, that just wouldn’t work if they allowed you to import your (decade?) old emails.

Once I continued using it, I rarely ended up looking at my previous emails. Email is a river. It flows really fast! After a week or two, you don’t care about previous emails. You move on. I can’t stress enough how liberating it is.

Hey gave me a new perspective on Bankruptcy being a feature, not just for products but also for life (maybe I’ll write on this perspective some other day).

Conclusion

Hey managed to capture people’s attention with a fresh take on email. While it is a fresh take, it’s also a strongly opinionated email that may not be for everyone. I suggest you give it a genuine try for 2 weeks. Setup email forwarding and just go with their philosophy. See if it fits your way of working with emails. You just might be surprised, like I was.

Intro

Recently one of the underdog Bollywood celebrities - Sushant Singh Rajput committed suicide. Why he did it still being speculated, another heated debate that was doing the rounds was how nepotism in the film industry doesn’t promote any new talent - Like Sushant. It is difficult for newcomers like him to defend themselves. At the same time, sons and daughters of known actors have it easy due to their filmy background.

While I don’t disagree with it, some people might think it is the fault of the audience. If I tell my parents we are going for a movie, the first question they ask is who is acting in it? If I say “Arjun Kapoor” - they say “Boney Kapoor’s son?, Acha hi hoga, Chalo! (Must be nice, let’s go!)” For quite some time, I felt it is the fault of the audience as it is us who wants to see sons and daughters of a familiar actor. But the more I think about it, the more I realize it has to be more than that.

After his death, I was discussing Sushant’s journey with my wife. I actually knew him personally way before he became famous. We were part of Shiamak Dance classes in Delhi. At that time, he was a struggling model, a very humble guy, and a pretty good dancer even back then. We weren’t friends but more like batch mates. Still, I vividly remember how I was awestruck when I saw him on Jhalak Dikhalaja - A dance reality show for stars. After many years I saw him on TV and realized how far he has come. Over the years, he gave some outstanding movies like MS Dhoni, Chichhore, etc.

‍Medium is the message

As I continued discussing with my wife about him, she mentioned he was a TV star for Pavitra Rishta before he transitioned into movies. I quickly asked her if she knew of any Nepotism in the TV industry. She thought for a while and said “none I’m aware of”. And I suddenly remembered this quote from Marshall McLuhan - “The Medium Is The Message”. In a nutshell, it means that the medium defines the dynamics of the content to be shown and not the content itself. For which platform the content is created says a lot about the content itself.

The Gaming Industry

Let me give you an example from the gaming industry.

Arcade Era (~ 1970-1990)

In the early days, we had games designed for Arcades. These massive machines where you had to put in coins to play games.

Because of the nature of such machines, games had to be designed in a certain way:

• Each game starts by putting in a coin.
• You can continue where you lost by putting in more coins. This was important for the businesses as that’s how they made money.
• The game had to be optimized in a way that users put in the maximum amount of coins without feeling cheated.
• Easy to learn but hard to master. This allowed players to come back again and again.
• Every gameplay has to have a “Game-Over” based on some consequences (You ran out of time, lives, health, etc.).

Once you realize this, you’ll notice it limits the kind of content that can be created. Arcade, as a medium, defined the limits of games that can be created. Some of the famous games from arcade times are:

• Tetris - Limited lives, Possibly infinite gameplay, scores to compete with others.
• Donkey Kong - Limited lives, save the girl, repeatable gameplay, scores to compete with others.
• Space Invaders - Limited lives, fight the alien invasion, powerups, repeatable gameplay, scores to compete with others.
• Pac-Man - Limited lives, classic chase gameplay, powerup to change the rules (you can eat them), repeatable gameplay, and scores to compete with others.

Although all four games above are different and yet at the heart of it, they have the same game design rules with minor changes. This is because the medium defines the rules and not the game itself.

Home Console Era (~ 1980 - Present)

In the next generation, we had home-based console games like Atari 2600, Nintendo NES Classic, etc. This allowed games to go beyond arcade style of games. While it continued to have games with lives as the industry and gamers got used to it, it could create games that were much longer like Prince of Persia, Mario, etc. Also, since the investment is made upfront by the user once to buy the cartridge/machine, there was no need to make the game centered around points to compete alone. It could expand on creating games with a broader universe as Mario did. Game designers could have games designed to last for hours simply because of the shift in medium from shared machines to personal home gaming machines.

Computer Games Era (~ 1990s - Present)

With advances in computer technology, it was now possible to have immersive games that went beyond the traditional gameplay. Computers allowed gameplay that was unheard of. A recent example of such games would be “The Braid” - Where the player cannot die (as you can simply turn back time). Such games broke the traditional game design where you had a limited number of lives as part of the game design. In Braid, you can die as many times as you want. Because of advances in technology and a new medium one could make games where you can rewind times until the start of the level. Once you can break this rule, new kinds of game mechanics are possible. This would not have been possible in the Arcade or early home console era simply because of the limitations of the medium.

Freemium Mobile Games Era (2009 - Present)

Finally, with the advent of mobile phones, games took a different turn. Since games can now be played anywhere & anytime, gaming became much more casual. It went beyond the niche hardcore gaming audience and allowed a wide generation of audiences to play. Because of this, it had to break the shackles of traditional “Pay first then play model”. This new crop of gamers was growing up around free services like Facebook and Gmail. They weren’t ready to pay. Thus freemium as a model was invented. This model again dictated what kind of games can be made.

Following are some of the game designs used by freemium games:

• The gameplay has to feel like an endless treadmill (Remember the Subway Surfer frenzy?). Why? So that the player never gets bored of the game & the maker can keep minting money.
• Interrupt the player’s life as often as possible. Every maker knows there are other competing games looking to grab your attention.
• Give them a few fake currencies to spend on something that looks valuable to them. And slowly push them into a situation where they run out of this fake currency when they need it the most - Buy XYZ power up that will make you win against next boss! Slowly they become slaves of this cycle.
• Use your users to bring more people into the game as the best advocate for any app is the users themselves. Give them some fake currency to incentivize them.
• Make them wait before X happens. Give them an option to bypass this if they spend that fake currency. Eventually, they’ll run out of fake currency, forcing them to spend real money.
• Give a reward, threaten to take it away if they don’t do X action.

While not all games do this, most have some or all of the above principles baked into any game. This is because we are not charging the user upfront. Because of this inherent limitation of the medium (freemium model), we have to design the game around the above principles. You’ll notice a drastic difference between games designed for mobile-first vs. console first.

Theater as a Medium

But is this limited to the gaming industry? Let’s take a look at the cinema industry.

Single Hall Cinema Era

In the initial days, we had a single hall cinema. Each hall occupied 300-500 people. Every theater owner had to maximize the occupancy of each show run. Which meant that the movie had to be accessible for the masses. Any film that would appeal to a niche audience would mean that the seats would go empty and thus won’t justify the cost of running a show in a single theater hall.

Multiplexes Era (1997 - Present)

In 1997, PVR launched the first multiplex in Saket, Delhi. A simple change in the cinema halls changed the game. With multiple halls of varying capacity, the medium changed. It allowed producers to create content for the niches, which would not appeal to all kinds of masses. It allowed English movies to be shown, which still didn’t have enough audience for a single theater. Again, enough audience to run on a smaller sized theater along with Bollywood movies for the masses. It’s not that the creators didn’t have creativity. It’s the medium that defined the limits of creativity as every movie had to appeal to the masses. With this small change, there was some room for creativity, but not a lot.

Why? Because the essence of every movie was still the same:

1. Every movie had one major cliffhanger, right before the interval. So that people grab something to eat and continue watching it.
2. You had to pay first and then watch. Which meant marketing played a huge role.
3. Every movie had to have influential hooks to pull people to come and watch the movie.

These hooks were fundamental to movie making. In the early days, it was popular songs, familiar faces, item number, cheesy dialogues & familiar story lines with minor twists. Nobody really cared much about the story. There is a reason why actors were typecasted - Amitabh is the Hero, Prem Chopra is the villain, Helen is the item girl, etc. Why? Because it created emotional safety. People came to get entertained not to stimulate their brains. They didn’t want any kind of surprises that would upset them. The hero always wins in the end.

Every producer wanted to make sure they got their money back. So point number 3 i.e., hooks, had to be baked in. “Pay first watch later” as a medium defined this. And this precise reason is why movie in a theater results in nepotism.

While the new generation wants to see new actors, the masses still need that safety net. They always want to pay and watch a movie to get entertained. While some creators have tried to break out of these principles, which worked due to multiplexes since it is still a “pay first, watch later” model, you still need those hooks. Sons and Daughters of a known name is a tried and tested hook that has always worked. This is the precise reason why it continues to dominate the movie industry.

OTT Era (~ 2015 - Present)

However, times are changing. With the “pay once watch as much as you want” as the new medium defined by platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, etc. it has inherently changed the medium and thus creating new principles that were unheard of before:

1. You pay once (Sometimes not at all) and watch as much as you want. This means they need to create a lot of new content to give consumers bang for their buck.
2. The marketing of content is driven by your past preferences on the platform. If you liked a particular movie, your dashboard would be tuned accordingly. The creator is not worried about creating content for the masses. Just create it for the right audience even if its a niche audience.
3. Since the creator is not concerned about pulling the viewer with familiar faces. They are competing with a lot of other content. It has to have other hooks like great content, a fantastic story line, brilliant acting, good for chilling, etc. You can work with an unfamiliar audience as long as you can hook them early on.
4. Creators don’t have to worry about people discontinuing it. As long as its a hit with the right audience.
5. Watch anytime, anywhere.

Above is a game-changer because creators can create varying content - casual, thought-provoking, biography, hard-hitting, emotional ride, etc. and yet works for different audiences. It breaks away from traditional hooks as you have already paid for all the content once.

Movies are being released on the OTT platforms nowadays. However, they are still being created for theaters as they get launched in theaters first. This is why traditional hooks are still in place - familiar faces, great songs, item numbers, safe story lines, etc.

My prediction is that OTT platforms will give unknown faces like Sushant a chance to become famous stars. Actors like Álvaro Morte became a worldwide cult with his character in a Spanish show - Money Heist.

And the reason is simple - “Pay once watch as much as you want” gives people a chance to take a chance with the unknown - unfamiliar actor, director, genre, etc. If they like it, they’ll tell their friends, and it goes viral just like Money Heist did. A simple change in the medium will level the playing field and give a chance to the newcomers.

“The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.” - Anton Ego (From the Movie - Ratatouille)

Future of OTT

There are new experimental platforms like https://mubi.com which has a different take on the OTT platform: “Watch truly great cinema. With no ads. Ever. Cult, classic, and independent films. A new film every day. 30 hand-picked movies to pick from.”

I have another prediction. There will be some kind of mashup between TikTok and Netflix - A different type of platform where a chance to create new content will be given to unknown faces based on their skills. This will be like Tiktok++. This new kind of platform will go one step further in leveling the field against nepotism.

Social Media as a medium

As a Product Manager, you can extend this thinking to every product. You’ll find similar patterns of constraints and the message being created:

Medium defines what kind of content can be put in it. And thus creator has to retrofit it according to the rules of the medium. Next time you see a problem with the kind of content you are seeing, take a step back and ask if you are looking at the right medium?

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage

https://ncase.me/trust/

Book: The Medium is the Massage - 1st Edition

Above painting is by the renowned Leonardo da Vinci. Recently It was last sold for US33,705₹ ($450)M. Obviously, such exorbitantly priced paintings are out of reach for most investors. Only a select few of the ultra-wealthy would be able to own such a high priced painting. Such paintings are very illiquid, not because you can’t trade them but it is costly to trade them as there are only handful of people who can be part of this market.

If anyone wants to buy, they have to buy the whole painting. There is also an issue of trust, buyers need reliable assurance that the painting is authentic. Auction houses charge a hefty fee for the auctions that are conducted, which can amount to 20–30% of the sale price. Raising capital against such paintings is also very tricky as you’ll need to hand over physical possession of the painting, which puts it at risk of damage or theft. Another question that arises is how do you price such paintings? You need independent expert advice to accurately identify the value, which again comes with a hefty fee.

Can we tokenise such paintings? What benefits would it bring to the table?

• Instead of buying a whole painting, investors can each buy a small fraction of this painting.

• Trading of the painting shares becomes very easy with other interested participants brought together in a common market.

• Price discovery becomes easy and accurately reflects market sentiment, as the price of each painting share represents the overall market interest of the painting in real time.

• Ownership (and its provenance, or history) is easy to verify as that information is recorded on the blockchain and cannot be altered by a rogue 3rd party.

• A traditionally illiquid item now becomes liquid as anyone globally can participate in the trade, thus bringing the market price of that painting to a fair price (Removing illiquid discount).

This is a great example of Tokenising an Asset. Here we took a valuable painting and converted its rights to an asset into digital tokens on a blockchain.

This is not a hypothetical example. Maecenas is working on doing exactly that. Here’s a diagram showing how it will work:

Let’s define two important keywords — Asset and Tokenisation:

What is an asset?According to Investopedia“An asset is a resource with economic value that an individual, corporation or country owns or controls with the expectation that it will provide future benefit.”

What is tokenisation?According to Addison Cameron-Huff“Tokenisation is the process of converting rights to an asset into a digital token on a blockchain.”

So what are the types of assets that can be tokenised?

As depicted in the diagram above, there are 4 broad categories of assets: Intangible/Tangible vs Fungible/Non-Fungible. Intangible assets are the ones that do not exist in a physical form, while Fungible assets are those that can be replaced by another identical item. In general Intangible and Fungible items are easier to tokenise as there is less concern about its safety, storage, delivery, theft etc. Also, Fungible items are easy to break down into smaller units. E.g. a token can stand for a group of objects like Every DGX = 1 gram of gold. And each token is backed by that amount of gold in reserve.

Transferring of tokens can mean:

Transfer of Ownership

• When you transfer a token you are transferring ownership of that asset to another person.

• For example, transferring DGX, you are transferring the actual ownership of that 1 gram of gold to the other person.

Transfer of Limited Rights

• This could be giving rights to listen to a song or a collectible item. That person is not the original owner but via the tokens they have certain rights on that asset. And those rights may be transferred to another person keeping the original owner as it is.

So what are the benefits of tokenising an asset?

• Near-immediate trade settlement.

• Ownership is highly divisible.

• Value transfers are programmable.

• Shared ownership models become feasible.

• Possibility of markets that never close.

• Increased liquidity.

• Access to international investors.

Here are some examples of projects tokenising various assets:

What are the various challenges associated with tokenisation?

Governance

One question that arises is on the issue of governance. Imagine there is a building and it has a single owner. Naturally, it is the responsibility of the owner to maintain that building. But now let’s say we tokenise that building into say, 1000 tokens. Now, there are potentially 1000 owners, each owning an equal share. Who is supposed to govern that building? Who is responsible for its maintenance, upkeep, and repairs? Also, to what extent will the governance happen on-chain and off-chain? What happens if not enough token holders vote? If investors aren’t given sufficient incentive to manage their asset, what will become of it?

There can be several approaches to this:

• Voting mechanism where each token is entitled to one vote for a proposal.

• Only major shareholders play the role of governance i.e.minority shareholders proxy their voting rights to someone they trust (like a mutual fund manager).

• The original owner remains the majority holder of tokens and they govern the asset in the best interest of all shareholders.

Regulatory

As we all know, technology is always ahead of the regulations. It will take years (or decades) for laws to adapt this rapid change.

Centralisation

For traditional assets there will always be either one or a few owners of that asset. The challenge will be how to introduce decentralisation and mitigate the risk of single-point failure in such cases? It is still uncharted territory, but it will undoubtedly require a combination of technology, economics, auditing, contracts and multi-party guarantees.

Legal

‍Once you tokenise such assets, how do you legally execute your right to the underlying asset? Also, who will issue the tokens and under what legal framework? In case of a conflict how do you resolve the conflict? These are still open questions which will need to be resolved.

Conclusion

As we can see from above, tokenisation of assets is a breakthrough that is still being developed. It will require not only technological changes, but also for jurisdictional legal frameworks to evolve with the times for it to truly revolutionise global markets and achieve effective ownership of real world assets.