How can we take advantage of an existing community to make more informed product decisions?
Roundtable is live, in-the-moment online courses with respected and passionate experts who give you a place at the table to ask questions and join a discussion. I led their product from inception through launch, where we grew from 0 to $100,000 MRR in 6 months.
1) What no-code features can we offer to improve the process of managing in-person and online courses?
Building the best product also means defining what doesn't live in the product and how that process can be best handled.
We spent a considerable amount of time interviewing program managers, content managers, and others who drive the operation.
One thing was certain: we had to prioritize building the consumer-facing product, and de-prioritize building features that would automate behind the scenes workflows. At the end of the day, the internal employees always bite the bullet before the customers.
We consolidated the feedback and presented a plan to productize the most important features and suggest no-code tooling to automate any workflows not accounted for in the product scope.
Program manager <> consumer workflow
The important thing here is: that purple box represents what we'd build into the product. Everything else had to be done manually to start.
So here's an example of making people's lives easier without having to build anything: How can we find and onboard Course Instructors without having them sign up in-app and manage an Admin account?
Inbound and outbound leads are stored in a CRM and sent styled email templates from MailChimp.
Applications are sent as a Google Form, and onboarding material is hosted online.
Approved instructors are sent a separate Google Form with requests for content to be uploaded to the app's CMS.
Automated follow-ups, conversion rates, and tooling is baked into the CRM.
The Result: Roundtable administrative operations efficiency improved. One staff commented that the tooling was more organized and efficient than his time at Amazon as a program manager.
Next Step: Determine highest pain points and biggest opportunities to integrate manual workflows into the product
2) How do we stack up to comparable products and who can provide helpful insights?
Rarely do we reinvent the wheel, so it's helpful to call on people who've tackled the same problems you're facing.
Tastemade, Head of Product
Automated/transactional emails are huge in retention, these were most important in their video-on-demand products.
Account registration confirmation
Course enrollment confirmation
24 hours before upcoming session reminder
Waited until scale before investing into an in-app video player. A hosted Zoom link in the Admin portal that kicks users-off app will suffice.
Building a custom integration here is a considerable level of effort and we agreed to table this until much further down the road.
Reconstruction, Head of Tech
Subscription UX can be incredibly intricate and should be experimented with based on business needs and product types.
We leverage some findings from their subscription UX flows and cut our level of effort by 25%
Twitter, Senior PM
Content is crucial - show diversity and quality assets to drive engagement.
Diversity is important in both the types of content (categories, topics, etc) and the content itself (imagery, language, etc).
A few good quality assets go a long way to making something look polished, and a pixelated image goes a long way in making something look cheap.
Just before launch, we did a clean sweep of all images on the CMS to make sure they were high res, uniform, and engaging. The level of effort was relatively small, but the before and after was night and day.
The Result: We saved a ton of hours and headaches by asking others to lend a hand and share their experiences.
Next Step: Continue to ask for feedback from all sources: users, partners, competitors.
3) How can we say no to feature requests? Ex: Can we add Apple Pay and Google Pay for the MVP?
"All of them, everything, all at once" isn't usually the right answer.
We leaned on 92NY's Head of Web Technology to shed light on some important data on how existing web users use their products. We weren't targeting exactly the same audience here, but it was a good baseline.
Google Analytics showed us that over 70% of their online payments came from credit/debit cards alone.
Compared to the industry standard of about 50% for the United States and UK, and down to less than 30% in countries where access to cards is less prominent, we saw that our audience tends to use traditional, western online payment methods.
But, we also know we have limited resources and have a deadline to get the product to market.
So we made the following assumptions:
As a baseline, a digital product based in the US needs to support credit/debit card transactions at checkout.
Most of our initial users will be comfortable, and in fact prefer, to use credit/debit cards.
Given our strong community and high-value content, users will be more likely to accept added friction during checkout.
Giving up digital wallet payments will free our team to focus on the user experience leading to checkout, thus driving more sales.
The Result: We launched with only credit/debit transactions at checkout. The drop-off rate for conversions was marginally worse than the industry standard.
Next Step: The data showed that the majority of historical digital wallet payments came from international customers via PayPal.
Payment method usage across various countries.
The Final Results:
I worked with Roundtable by the 92nd Street NY as product lead from November 2021 until June 2022. In that time the business grew from 0 to a million dollar business.
The product was featured in the New York Times soon after launching.
