Mobile Engagement Podcast

Steen is Head of Product Management at Atlassian. He was Google Drive's Group Product Manager, VP Product at Nitro after they acquired his startup Sensedoc. Before that he was co-founder of 5th Finger which actually got acquired (not once but) twice! by both Microsoft and Merkle. AND today we are talking All things Product Management.

In this video, I discover that our team is the only one not doing daily standups! Seriously, Richard explains the disciplines they use in a remote WFH world (Melbourne was locked down hard, hard, hard at the time of recording). So we discuss some of the challenges there. The summary is: - Airwallex form “squads” that are spear-headed with Product Manager, Designer and Lead Engineer - There is an over-arching SME strategy. - Quarterly and Annual OKRs trickle down through the organisation. opportunity decision trees (Teresa Torres, see Opportunity Solution - - Trees for Product Teams to ideate potential solutions to OKRs” - Triaging of solutions (see Don't build shiny objects) - Monday planning meetings – where broader goals for the week within sprints are agreed - Daily standups (!)

For a blog post "Customer Support is a Product Managers untapped design resource" where we discuss a missed opportunity in leveraging the direct contact with customer as a data point in product design decisions.

Google PM for Duo, Amit Jaiswal does a walkthrough of the importance of storytelling skills in Product Management: the audiences and the method.

There is right and wrong ways to roll out your OKRs. In this talk Sten covers some basics around setting the right objectives, right key results and what flows from that.

This section of a longer fireside covers: - baggage BAs bring if they become product managers - triads, tribes and durable teams - is the structure a scaleup from how a startup should organize its team? - why roadmaps suck and OKRs are a better organising principle - what is a Product Council and how it maps to company strategy

In another snippet from the interview with Matt from Bonjoro we discuss why “Jobs to be done” (JTBD) is so important to them. Bonjoro have a large inbound funnel of different triallers types – because their platform is horizontally applicable. However, they are optimizing for SaaS customers in Sales and Customer Service use-cases – they are high value and high conversion probability. He discusses the conundrum here. It seems brutal but if Bonjoro try to craft onboarding for all users they will lose their valuable SaaS customers by diluting the flow.

The founder of Bonjoro digs in with me about the company journey, the user onboarding and his thoughts on Jobs-to-be-done and Product-Led-Growth. Bonjoro lets SaaS companies boost customer engagement with perfectly timed personal videos with powerful integrations make it easy to convert your customers at the right part of the use journey - I think this is a product that will grow like crazy. If you want the video check https://pointzi.com/blog

We crammed 100+ people into a fireside on Growth and Product with Jordan Lewis from Deputy. This is the full session recording including Q&A, if you want to see the video version of this check out this blog post and follow our newsletter. https://pointzi.com/blog/2020/03/02/the-truth-about-a-b-testing/

The video and transcript are at https://pointzi.com/blog/2020/02/12/product-led-growth-to-drive-down-your-cac/ I spoke to the Deputy Growth guys (Francois Bondiguel – Head of Growth and Jordan Lewis – Director of Growth) about their experience bringing the method into a fast growing startup where different stakeholders have different opinions on how to drive leads while driving down cost of acquisition.This is one of the main promises of the book: "How to Build a Product That Sells Itself".The point is that advertising is expensive, which means your CAC (Cost-of-Acquisition) is high. The promise is that if you design your product experience, then customers will:recruit customers,refer customers orthe product automatically draws other customers inand the product is so closely aligned to a users "Job-to-be-done" that the churn rate is low and people start to talk as a substitute for advertising.

Jordan and Francois from Deputy tell a story about an earlier growth hack at Vend. The lesson here is a template for Apps to consider de-coupling growth from marketing and product teams. The cadence of roadmap iteration is one that Pointzi attempts to solve for Product Teams. But this story is a short but great example of how tasking a small team to operate independently to implement a lead generation side project turned into a huge success – that paid for itself plus-much-more. To see the video go https://pointzi.com/blog/2020/02/05/decoupling-growth-from-product-management/ To get the future full interview subscribe at https://pointzi.com/blog

The video of this will make more sense - you can view it here https://pointzi.com/blog/2020/01/22/deputys-onboarding-gamification-genius/ In the upcoming full interview with Deputy.com‘s Growth team leads (Francois Bondiguel – Head of Growth and Jordan Lewis – Director of Growth) we cover a lot of great Onboarding/Growth experiences and ideas. But I’ve clipped this onboarding gamification example for special attention – its the most genius growth hack you’re are going to see this week!

Onboarding is usually considered to be the first 5 minutes of the user’s experience in the App. But successful Apps always have FEATURE #2. This needs onboarding too! Scott Middleton challenged this perspective in our recent Onboarding Best Practices webinar. Scott has his own “Aha” moment about why onboarding is really “Continuous Onboarding”. To see the full video and summary blog post, checkout https://pointzi.com/blog/2019/11/07/what-is-continuous-onboarding/

Steen is Head of Product Management at Atlassian. He was Google Drive's Group Product Manager, VP Product at Nitro after they acquired his startup Sensedoc. Before that he was co-founder of 5th Finger which actually got acquired (not once but) twice! by both Microsoft and Merkle. AND today we are talking All things Product Management.

When are Chatbots a better solution than Apps? What are the technical pros and cons for using bots? Ayush and Pravin from Mindbowser address these and other questions - their team does both Apps and Chatbots. Sorry about the clicking on my voice track - it proved to difficult to remove and any way the Mindbowser guys have all the interesting stuff to listen to. Get more details at http://streethawk.com/category/podcast

In this episode, SC who is the best selling author of "Mobilized" shares some design wins and fails based on 3 rules of fullfilling the needs of Body, Heart and Mind. Here are 3 rules: 1. The best mobile products are physically and functionally beautiful. (Body) 2. The best mobile products focus on what matters to us. (Heart) 3. The best mobile products learn as we use them. (Mind) To get the transcript and learn more, check out http://www.streethawk.com/blog/2016/07/sc-moatti-shares-3-rules-mobile-app-design/

Tobias covers the new features in Flurry - its had some huge improvements in the last few months and its awesome that its fighting back. Tobias also talks about some of his wins & fails at startups prior to joining Flurry. StreetHawk support automation for push notifications, geofences and emails using Flurry data - so we love that things are being updated there! For the transcript and more details see http://streethawk.com/blog/

Phenom is an iOS App for Athletes to to show off their gear and game. Brian talks about building community and their approach to "influencer marketing" - its a cool story about how authenticity makes for effective user acquisition. To get more podcasts and the transcription, check out our blog

Profilic Interactive works with brands and funded startups. Their specialty is experiential design and Dina covers how they gather user requirements and adding gaming elements into their customers apps to increase value and retention.

Nick Crocker from MyFitnessPal talks about the journey to 165Million App users. Inflection points in user activation, retention and most importantly utility came from focussing on the user's goals. For a transcript check out http://streethawk.com/blog

Most Apps don't really know how their users experience the App UI. Kishan had an idea to get better feedback to developers and product managers. He tells how this improves onboarding and retention.

Not an interview, this is a long presentation on ASO tips and techniques around keywords, dealing with competitors and the Mobile Action platform. Even though its an advertisement for the product its also got got nuggets of wisdom - see http://streethawk.com/blog for pictures of some slides.

ASO, Games, Bursting downloads, planning for launch. Why the App is just 30-40% of the full picture in App success.

Mobile Commerce is serious business now and I talk to my old friends at ThreatMetrix (a company I founded and CEOed in the early days) about the use-cases for Mobile Apps to increase trust decisions and protect against fraudulent transactions. Some pretty interesting use-cases with major e-Commerce players like Stubhub. To get the full transcript of this and other podcasts check out our blog at http://streethawk.com/blog.

Tim Bull is CTO of MixBit, the latest startup of Youtube founder Chad Hurley. Mixbit are on the new wave of Apps that are doing collaborative video - a capability is only possible at the nexus of good mobile networks and great capture/display phones (like iPhone 6, Nexus 6 etc). Tim shares some valuable lessons about their journey toward Product Market fit and the need to focus on your best market and form-factor to get the job done! You can get the full transcript and other info at http://www.streethawk.com/blog/2015/05/app-product-market-fit-needs-brutal-focus/

Stuart Hall built an App with no domain knowledge. He tells his story of what worked and what didn't to grow a user base of 2.3M users without a single cent spend on marketing. There is some valuable lessons in here for any App developer or startup, so you can find the full transcript at: http://www.streethawk.com/blog/2015/05/the-secret-to-getting-2-3-million-app-users-with-zero-marketing-spend/

Logan Merrick, CEO of App development company Buzinga tells some stories of success and fail from customers. One main lesson is that if you don't plan marketing to acquire users early, you don't get enough feedback or usage to know how to improve the app. You can get the full transcript and details at http://www.streethawk.com/blog/2015/04/acquire-enough-users-to-learn-your-apps-weaknesses/

In this episode of the Mobile Engagement Podcast Dain Hedgpeth talks about the launch of Skater App - this App has these accolades: Nominee Best Mobile Game - 2015 IGN Black Beta Select Awards Nominee Best Sports Game - 2015 Pocket Gamer Awards "Skater's innovative, creative controls are a diamond." - 148Apps "Skater’s controls feel like they’re built from the ground up for touch, and are gratifyingly elegant." - IGN Dain talks about all the effort that went into getting the App launched, the massive press, getting featured by Apple and the even more massive fail! You can get the full transcript at http://streethawk.com/blog/2015/04/1-big-thing-went-wrong-when-launching-our-app-dain-hedgpeth-of-skater/

ChrisJones from Codengo talks about the benefits of reaching broader audiences for your App. Also interesting alternative revenue models that are appearing in asia that can help western developers still monetize. The full transcript and more can be found at http://streethawk.com/blog/2015/04/increase-user-acquisition-with-multiple-appstores/

You know the situation, you click on a video on your phone and just watch a spinning dial...you lose interest and hit the back button. That video today and David McKeague from Incoming Media talks about how solving this problem will make video pervasive on mobile devices over mobile networks. You can find the full transcript at http://streethawk.com/blog

Today's podcast might be construed to be "just for developers" but its actually valuable for Product Managers and Marketers as well to hear the benefits of cross-platform development. Its a little geeky but with solid tips! Its an interview with James Montemagno of Xamarin a great cross platform development company. He covers the potential for reducing code time, maintenance time and importantly bug-fixing effort!

GoCatch is a taxi booking and payment Mobile App. Ned Moorfield is the CEO and Co-Founder of GoCatch and he's got some valuable insights in how to bootstrap a 2-sided market and how gamification was "game-changer" for their own growth and retention. For full-details and transcript, checkout http://streethawk.com/blog

Steve Purdham shares 2 stories. His App we7 was sold to Tesco after building an audience of 3 million customers. They started at the same time as Spotify and he shares some of the key learnings from dealing with incumbent stakeholders and the massive money required. His current App "3 Rings" and it links aged parents with their family via the "Internet of things". Its genius and simple - a great example of how the future is here. You can find the full transcript at http://streethawk.com/blog/2015/04/if-your-app-disrupts-existing-markets-you-need-funds-to-shake-the-incumbents/

Brandon Cowan had his first Top 100 hit when he was 16 years old and has built an App company on top of that success with 4 Apps appearing in the Top 100, the best at #3. Brandon shares his specific tips about App promotion and hustling without spending advertising money. You can find the summary and transcript at http://streethawk.com/blog

In this podcast series we ask experienced Appreneurs for one success story and one fail. In this episode of the Mobile Engagement Podcast: Roger Killen is CEO of VitalPac, as App that is saving lives in hospitals. I'm always interested to interview B2B apps because I truly believe that its the second and more valuable wave in mobile App evolution. Vitalpac is an example of this value: not just purely on a monetary level but value to the community. For the scoring and full transcript go to the StreetHawk blog: http://streethawk.com/blog/

Independent Game developer Nathan Harper is the author of Formula Legend an F1 strategy game that is making a decent income for him on iOS and Android. Nathan chose to make it free to play and then inApp purchase - so that is no advertising! Hear his journey and wins/fails along the way. For the scoring and full transcript go to the StreetHawk blog: http://streethawk.com/blog/2015/02/game-developer-learnings-mobile-user-acquisition/

Independent App developer Graham Dawson has been releasing Apps since 2009 and makes a living entirely from paid App revenue. Hear his lessons about inApp purchases, price setting, how he got featured by Apple multiple times and how he defends against competition. A great set of lessons for small developers. Graham's Apps include: Oz Weather, Sun Seeker, Moon Seeker, See Breeze, Climate Eye and Solace & Courage and astrology App: Astro Gold. The full post and transcript are at: http://streethawk.com/blog/2015/02/getting-inapp-purchases-right-and-wrong/

In this podcast series we ask experienced Appreneurs for one success story and one fail. In this episode of the Mobile Engagement Podcast: Stephen O'Young is extremely humble but I think what the Tinybeans team has achieved is great. With high MAUs (monthly active user rates we explore how this happens and why the Tinybeans App has consistently high user ratings in the Appstore and Google Play.

Glen Coates is the CEO of Handshake.com who is driving mobile salesforce automation. He shares how their App onboards users "bottom-up" allowing instant experience of the power of the platform in stark contrast to what a Salesforce deployment may look like. Glen also has some great tips for anyone writing B2B Apps - there is much to learn about acquiring new customers here. The full transcript and Mobile Engagement scores are at http://streethawk.com/blog/2015/02/2-user-acquisition-tips-for-b2b-mobile/

In this episode of Mobile Engagement Podcast: Ed Dowling, Co-Founder of App.io (was Kickfolio). App.io is a platform for App Developers to stream instances of their App in the cloud. Ed talks about how they "went-wide" initially and attracted thousands of App Developer customers to their platform but evolved to a product that delivered better revenues and provided greater value for their customers. The transcript for the podcast is in the StreetHawk post: http://streethawk.com/blog/2015/02/app-ios-journey-to-a-valuable-customer-segment-after-dropping-10000-apps/

In this episode of Mobile Engagement Podcast: Jindou Lee, CEO of B2B App company Happy Inspector. Their App handles inspections and compliance in Real Estate, Hospitality and Government. Jindou talks about acquisition fanout in B2B and also getting the user an "instant gratification" experience early - so their "ah-ha" moment encourages continued use. Jindou's experience in gaming and user centered design has informed this approach and the company's success in a sector that is a long way from games! The transcript for the podcast is in the StreetHawk post: "How our App naturally acquired users" at http://streethawk.com/blog/2015/01/podcast-game-design-skillset-drives-b2b-app-engagement/

In this Mobile Engagement Podcast episode, Stuart Argue. Stuart comes from Walmart and was a driver in several mobile applications including "Savings Catcher" - Walmart's breakout success application. Walmart also partnered with American Express to provide double-rewards for shoppers using Savings Catcher. In this podcast, Stuart covers the history, user experience and the challenges of massive scale. A transcript of the podcast is at http://streethawk.com/blog/2015/01/podcast-app-engagement-to-millions-users-walmart-savings-catcher/

Mobile UX expert Henry Cho shares experiences about managing all the stakeholders in a mobile retail application. Henry also gives shares a great fail in user onboarding. This is Episode 2, there was so much good stuff in here that I've split it into two podcasts. The transcript for both are on the StreetHawk blog at http://streethawk.com/blog

Mobile UX expert Henry Cho shares experiences about when user experience is critical and how sometimes the UX patterns prescribed by Google or Apple are a complete fail. Henry also gives us some insight into the current best practice in banking apps globally. This is Episode 1, there was so much good stuff in here that I've split it into two podcasts. The transcript for both are on the StreetHawk blog at http://streethawk.com/blog/category/podcast/

Head of Product from Tapmint and the Native Tongue apps talks about hacks in user acquisition. The transcript for the podcast is in the StreetHawk post: "How our App naturally acquired users" at http://streethawk.com/blog/2014/12/podcast-how-our-app-naturally-acquired-new-users/