How to Build General-Audience Products by Disney Product Manager
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It's no secret that traditional TV is slowly losing its relevance in our children's lives. Cable subscriptions have been declining for the past five years, but that's not the whole story. In that time we've seen a surge in streaming apps with different business models like Subscription Video-on-Demand like Netflix, digital-only TV providers like Sling, ad supported platforms like YouTube, and a range of TV-everywhere products from cable networks. Kids today have more entertainment options than ever before. There are new formats, new platforms, new competitors, and revolutionary new interactive experiences all desperately seeking a slice of the entertainment pie. Building kid-friendly apps for the living room requires spectacular content, a relentless focus on the user, and a strong emphasis on branding.
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How to Build General-Audience Products by Disney Product Manager
- 1. How to Build General-Audience Products by Disney Product Manager www.productschool.com
- 2. FREE INVITE Join 23,000+ Product Managers on
- 3. COURSES Product Management Learn the skills you need to land a product manager job
- 4. COURSES Coding for Managers Build a website and gain the technical knowledge to lead software engineers
- 5. COURSES Data Analytics for Managers Learn the skills to understand web analytics, SQL and machine learning concepts
- 6. COURSES Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies Learn how to trade cryptocurrencies and build products using the blockchain
- 8. Building Products for Everyone Evan Schneider, Product Manager Disney-ABC TV Group
- 9. About Evan ● Love building things ● Startup founder ● Product Manager
- 15. But first, a disclaimer
- 16. Building for everyone means: 1. Understanding the most diverse pockets of your users 1. Designing so anyone can use your product without instruction 1. Building for the future
- 20. Why balance is critical
- 21. Understanding our users So we can anticipate their needs
- 22. Must Have, Nice to Have, and Won’t Have
- 23. Nice-to-Have
- 24. Won’t Have
- 27. What do our doll people do in each room?
- 29. Minimum Viable Product - The MVP
- 31. The Bedrooms
- 32. The Bathroom
- 34. What does the outside look like?
- 38. Introducing the Alexa-first Generation
- 40. Intersection of Voice and our Dollhouse
- 42. Voice and Gaming
- 44. Building for everyone means: 1. Understanding the most diverse pockets of your users 1. Designing so anyone can use your product without instruction 1. Building for the future
- 47. Part-time Product Management Courses in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Orange County, New York, Austin, Boston, Seattle, Chicago, Denver, London, Toronto www.productschool.com
Editor's Notes
- understand web analytics, learn SQL, and machine learning concepts
- Thank you, Kiley for the for the lovely introduction! Hello everyone and thank you for joining me today! My name is Evan Schneider, and I’m really excited to talk to you about building products for everyone! Before I start, I want to give a huge thank you to Product School for inviting me to speak today.
- So who am I, and how did I get here? As you’ve probably know already, every product manager has a different story of how they got into the field. Mine begins as child growing up in New Jersey. You see, as a kid, I was always interested in building and inventing new things.
- One of my favorite past times was building and racing remote controlled cars. Whenever I got my hands on a R/C car kit, I would stay up all night building it. Sure, racing the cars was pretty fun, but honestly I really loved building the cars a lot more. When I was a young teenager, I started my first online business. You see, my remote controlled cars were very fragile, and that meant a trip to the store to buy replacement parts basically every week. Even more frustrating, the local hobby stories often had to order parts from distributors, meaning I had to wait for at least a week for parts to arrive. I thought to myself, why can’t I buy this stuff online, and Zenith Hobbies was born. Now, as you might imagine, an online business run by a 13-year old didn’t work out too well. But, I learned a ton along the way.
- My next entrepreneurial venture began in 2005. You see, in 2005 everyone was fascinated by real estate because, as we all know, real estate values could only go UP! I noticed that all of my neighbors were renovating their houses, adding massive additions, and some even knocked down their entire house and replaced them with McMansions. I was convinced that our house was a huge opportunity. You see, our house was pretty old, had a decent plot of land, and was surrounded by houses worth triple as much as ours. So I set out to convince my dad that we join the party. You see, I have always been fascinated by Architecture, and I wanted to design this house myself. I showed my Dad some plans I made using CAD software, and somehow he thought this was a great idea! He let me tear down the family house.
- Here are some photos from the demolition. As strange as it may sound, watching our family home get ripped to shreds by a backhoe was one of the most incredible experiences of my life.
- Thankfully, our house was built and sold in right before the housing crisis. As a side note, you might be in the midst of a housing bubble when a 15 year old knocks down their family home to build a new house and flip it for a huge profit. But it was the mid-2000s, and we had no clue what was coming!
- Then I went on to college to become a proud Ramblin Wreck from Georgia Tech, and a hulleva engineer! At Georgia Tech, I studied Industrial Engineering, or Imaginary Engineering as it’s affectionately called. When I graduated, honestly I didn’t even know that Product Management was a thing. I knew there were engineers, marketers, and executives, but that was basically all I knew about working in the technology field. But what I did know is that I had a passion for finance. I loved playing the stock market my whole life. My first job out of college was for a Financial company called BlackRock. And while working at BlackRock, I found myself playing with penny stocks outside of work. You see, I had a theory about cannabis. It was clear that the national opinion on cannabis was shifting, and I figured why not bet on the green! A few months went by without much action on the cannabis penny stock front. But one day, I opened up my online account and completely panicked. You see, unknown to me, congress had done something nearly unheard of these days – they agreed on something. They passed the 2014 FARM bill – a funding plan for America’s farms. But the 2014 version of the FARM bill was unique in that it greenlit industrial hemp research for states that were interested in doing so. For those of you who are not familiar, HEMP is form form of cannabis that is extremely low in THC, the chemical compound that gets you “high”. Hemp has so little THC that it’s basically just rope. You’d have to smoke a rocket ship full hemp to get “high”, to put hemp into perspective. This news sent my cannabis penny stocks skyrocketing. They increased thousands of percent, and my account now contained a few extra zeros. I never thought I’d say this,, but CONGRESS changed the course of my career. I decided to quit my Finance job at BlackRock and start my very own startup using the seed money I’d just earned in the stock market. My startup taught me a ton of important lessons. There’s nothing quite like starting a business in Silicon Valley when you have no experience, no connections, and you didn’t even go to Stanford. Working on my startup was like learning two hundred life lessons in a week - followed to two weeks of calm before the next storm. After my startup, I joined a company called Weedmaps as their iOS and Android Product Manager. Has anyone here heard of Weedmaps? You might have seen their billboards around the city. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Weedmaps is an incredibly innovative cannabis technology company focused on a solving a wide array of problems in the historically-shady cannabis industry. Thanks to amazing leadership, and my incredible team of designers, engineers, and QA leads, Weedmaps became the #1 Medical App in the App Store and was nominated for Best App of 2017 by Techcrunch. Sadly, we lost Best App to Pokemon Go, but who’s counting? As you may have figured from the details of this event, my career moved in a very different direction. After Weedmaps, I joined Disney ABC Television Group as a Product Manager covering Android and Amazon platforms. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be at The Walt Disney Company because the Television industry is changing so quickly and Product Management means predicting those changes, understanding potential outcomes, and building for the next generation of TV. So, my crazy path led me to Product Management, and today I’m here to share some of my experience with all of you.
- Before I begin, I would like take a quick moment to make sure everyone understands that this presentation is a culmination of my professional experience based on what I’ve learned in my career as an entrepreneur and a Product Manager across small startups and up to large well-established companies. My statements, opinions, and product development methods do not reflect the strategy or views of The Walt Disney Company, Disney-ABC Television Group, or any of my past employers.
- So now that we have that dirty legal business out of the way, I want to give a quick overview of what we’re going to talk about today. First, we’re going to talk about how building for everyone means understanding your users. Next, we’re going to learn how to make sure anyone can use your product without instruction Finally, we’re going to talk about Product Management for emerging platforms, and how building for everyone means building for the future. So I know you THOUGHT you’re were here to learn about how to build streaming video apps for everyone, but what we’re ACTUALLY going to talk about today is how to build and sell a kick ass dollhouse.
- When I was growing up my sister had a beautiful hand-built dollhouse. It was decorated with white paint and pink trim, it had a wooden roof, and had a grand front porch. I didn’t really get to play with it much, but something about that dollhouse always interested me.
- So I’m going to make up for that, right here. 20+ years later. Tonight, we are going to build and play with a dollhouse so that I can prove to you that building great products for everyone is no harder than building a dollhouse! Not only that, but our dollhouse is going to be so incredible that we’re going to find a buyer by the end of the night! [Move doll house onto table]
- So when we’re building anything, digital or physical, we need to find a balance. What do our customers want? What can we build? What will they pay for?
- Without balance, you can end up with a product that does a ton of things poorly, like this remote, or a product that bankrupts your company because it doesn’t make any money. If you don’t balance what you can build with what your customers need, you’ll end up with a low quality product that no one wants. How many of you remember these TV remotes? These are a perfect example of a product that tries to do so much that it confuses users.
- The first step in the great balancing act, is understanding our users. When building for everyone, that means understanding the most diverse pockets of your user base. We need to understand their Needs, their Wants, their Motivations, their Priorities, and their Abilities. So when we build this dollhouse, we first have think about who we’re building for. Is house going to be for a doll family of four with the dog and cat? Or are we building for a newlywed couple? For roommates? We need to know our customers inside and out so that we can anticipate their needs.
- As Product Managers of this dollhouse, we have to start off with a ton of research - competitive research, user research, and pricing comparisons. This is where we find our need for balance! See, once we have the laundry list of features, it’s our job as product managers to pare that list down. I like to organize potential features is into categories. What is a MUST have in our dollhouse, what is a NICE-TO-HAVE, and what WON’T it have? So we’ve spent time researching dollhouses, talking to countless doll people, and we think we know what doll people want.
- When figuring out if something is a need vs. a want, I like to understand what percentage of our users find this product valuable. Some of our nice-to-haves are valuable to everyone, while other nice-to-haves are only applicable to a subset of buyers. So for our dollhouse example, our research also showed us that doll people want lots of storage, high-end finishes, a balcony, an enclosed backyard, and a walkable neighborhood. As Product Managers building products for everyone, we need to understand what segments of our customers want these features, and we need to prioritize them accordingly.
- We also need to understand what our house won’t have. It’s critical to keep track of what our customers want, even if there’s only one user asking for it. Sometimes our users don’t actually know what they want, and you may find out that a feature requested by one user might be loved by all. So, our dollhouse won’t have an indoor pool, it won’t have a sauna, and it won’t have a tennis court. We’ve thought about these amenities carefully, and we think only small set of doll people want these amenities.
- In traditional dollhouse construction, everything is waterfall. How many of you are familiar with the concept of Waterfall? In waterfall, first we buy the land. Then we hire an architect to design the doll house. Next, a civil engineer figures out how to make it stand. Once we know exactly what we want to build, we apply for permits and hopefully get approval from the city. Only then do we start building! When working in a waterfall environment, even small changes during construction can be catastrophic. Changes can cause huge delays if we have to get approval from the city. Small changes can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we might find out at the end that we didn’t build the right thing. Without continuous learning, it’s easy to misunderstand our audience, miscalculated our business constraints, or build something that is completely unaffordable. But in software, we don’t need to do this! We can build our products using an iterative approach called AGILE. How many of you are familiar with AGILE? In AGILE development, we built our products piece by piece. We talk to users all along the way and get continuous feedback on our progress. We take the feedback and adapt our product strategy as we go, allowing us to build the best product in the most efficient way. Today we’re going to build this dollhouse using Agile development techniques. So, I had to pre-assemble the outside of this dollhouse before I came here today, so I’m gonna ask that we all go out on a limb and pretend that the outside of this house isn’t fully assembled yet.
- When we’re building products for everyone, it’s important to organize our features in a way that makes sense. In our dollhouse, that organization comes in the form of different ”rooms”. Each room serves a unique purpose and solves a specific user problem. Digital products need the same level of organization. We have to group our features together in a way that makes sense to everyone. We need to start off by figuring out what the different rooms are. I like to think about each of the areas of my products as a room our collective house. Let’s take instagram for example. Instagram has a room for the feed of all your friends’ photos. There’s a room for search, a room where we post photos, a room for our notifications, and room for our profile.
- As Product Managers, though, we have to build more than just than just the walls; we need furniture, TV’s , we need beds, showers, sinks. One of the most challenge parts of Product Management is finding the balance between filling the room with everything a user might need and keeping the room useable. So as a Product Managers, we have to ask, “Why are our doll people going to this room?” What do they want to do in this room? As a doll person living in this dollhouse, I’d be pretty confused if there was a dishwasher was in my bedroom, or if my bathroom had a fireplace instead of a sink. When building products for everyone, we need to make sure that our product features are organized in a way that makes sense to our users. We don’t want to make our users move from room to room needlessly, because it distracts from our ultimate goal: doing a few things exceptionally well.
- Now that we know we need distinct rooms in our dollhouse, and we have an understanding of what our doll people are going to be doing in those rooms, we as Product Managers have to think about how our doll people will get between each room. In our dollhouse, our doll people are going to need doors, hallways, and stairs to move between the rooms. [PLACE STAIRS IN DOLLHOUSE] Digitally speaking, we need our products to be organized with clear and intuitive navigation. This means that we have to understand the journey a user takes when they are using our product. Building for everyone means making sure our users don’t have to jump through any hoops to get get between rooms, and that our rooms are laid out in a way that accurately reflects how the user flows through our product.
- Now, as Product Managers of this dollhouse, we have strong opinions on which rooms are the most important. We know our customer needs well, and we think the living room and the kitchen are the first rooms that we should build. After all, a studio apartment is no more than one big living room and kitchen, right? In digital product terms, we think the living room and kitchen are the Minimum Viable Product, or MVP. Minimum Viable Product is a term you’ve probably heard a ton of times before. What we’re really saying with our MVP, is that we think this minimum set of features is something we can build well that will sell for the price we’re looking for. So we build the living room [PLACE FURNITURE IN LIVING ROOM] And we build the Kitchen. [POORLY PLACE FURNITURE IN KITCHEN] Since we’re building this product iteratively, we ask some doll people come in for a visit to get their feedback. [WALK DOLL PEOPLE THROUGH LIVING ROOM AND KITCHEN] We find out that the kitchen we built was a dealbreaker. It has uneven floors, pipes are sticking out everywhere, the kitchen is missing a dishwasher. Now, a Product Managers, we’ve failed to balance what we can build well with what doll people want and what doll people will pay for.
- Just because we’re building a product for everyone doesn’t mean that we have to build every piece. Product Managers have to understand their team’s weaknesses so that we can turn them into strengths. Sometimes, it’s simply better to hire someone else to do a part of the work. After hearing user feedback we’re convinced that we should hire a sub-contractor to redo our kitchen. When building digital products, this “BUY vs. BUILD” decision is even more important. Product Management isn’t about reinventing the wheel - in fact, it’s about reusing wheels that are already built and have proven their reliability over time. So we fork over a little bit of money to our Kitchen subcontractor, and it turns out GORGEOUS! [BUILD KITCHEN CORRECTLY] We call our realtor and have another open house. This time the kitchen is everyone’s favorite room. We’ve even added a few “Nice-to-haves” like high-end appliances. Doll people are so excited for this kitchen because, according to them, the kitchen is the center of the house. A few days later, we hear back from our realtor that no one wants to make an offer. In this neighborhood, doll people have kids, and they need at least two bedrooms. It turns out, we misunderstood our customers needs. Even though they wanted a high-end kitchen, what they need are bedrooms. What we thought was our Minimum Viable product turned out to be completely off base.
- So learn from our mistakes and build a couple of bedrooms! [PLACE FURNITURE IN BEDROOM 1] [PLACE FURNITURE IN BEDROOM 2] Now we have a two bedroom house with a kitchen and a living room. Surely this is good enough! We call our real estate agent and put the dollhouse back on the market. We get a ton of interest, and FINALLY, a few offers. But the offers are way below asking price. We try to negotiate upward, but all of our doll people say that without indoor plumbing, our dollhouse will need significant construction to make it a 21st-Century home. As Product Managers, we have to make a choice. Do we continue to add features to our dollhouse, or accept a lower than anticipated sales price?
- We know that we can easily add a bathroom, and find out that the return on investment for expanding the featureset is huge. We do some research, talked to doll people, and find that houses in our price range have a shower, a sink, a toilet, and a bathtub, so we add all of these features to our doll house in order to keep up with the competition. [PLACE FURNITURE IN BATHROOM] Now that we understand our neighborhood, and our customers, we have truly found our Minimum Viable Product. Doll people are rushing in with offers, as if it were 2006 all over again! We have multiple offers around our asking price, but we learn something interesting during the bidding process. Our doll-bidders would pay a lot more for few simple features, or a few extra “Nice-to-haves”. As product managers, we once again have to make a decision - do we sell our house as is, or do we add a few additional features that will pay for themselves 10 times over?
- You see, this small set of features separates our MVP dollhouse from a MLP dollhouse. MLP means Minimum Loveable Product. As Product Managers, we can’t simply want to meet expectations, we want to exceed expectations wherever we can. It turns out, doll-buyer will pay a ton extra if we 1) build them a balcony and 2) spruce up the outside a little bit. [ATTACH BALCONY TO MASTER BEDROOM]
- So let’s talk about the outside of our dollhouse. After all, it’s all about the curb appeal! When building digital products for everyone, you have to make sure that the outside is just as inviting as the inside. Exceptional Product Marketing is is critical to appealing to everyone. Marketing isn’t a one-size-fits-all operation, it has to be personalized for your audience while staying true to your brand. My sister’s dollhouse was white and pink, but maybe our dollhouse brand is more of a log cabin woodsy-feel. Maybe it ultra-modern, or perhaps our brand is creepy luxury, like this house on the right.
- The beautiful thing about a dollhouse is that anyone who walks up to it can instantly recognize what it is, what the different rooms are, and how to play with it. I don’t need to read a training manual on how to use a dollhouse. I don’t get lost while playing with a dollhouse. Everything is laid out in a way that makes sense, in a way that’s relatable to my real life. When building products for everyone, it’s critical to emphasize ease of use. When someone opens our app or website for the first time, they should be able to easily identify the different “rooms”, navigate through our product, and they should have a good idea of what is going to be in each room before they even go in. Simplicity and transparency are key to ensure that anyone can use our product without an instruction manual.
- So now that we understand our users, and we’ve designed a product that anyone can use without instruction, we need to talk about building for the future. Our dollhouse isn’t a finished product once we sell it to our lovely doll family. [HOLD UP DOLL PEOPLE] Doll people could easily be living here for the next HUNDRED years! The needs of our doll people are constantly changing, and we need make sure that we’re building for the future so that our product doesn’t become obsolete a week after it’s built.
- Interfaces have been constantly evolving throughout time. My parents are the last of the Analog generation. They grew up without computers, they watched broadcast television, and they played outside. They had a very different childhood than children of my generation. You see, I’m a member of the Desktop-First generation. I grew up during a time when the internet was just emerging as a new platform. We had these crazy huge boxes called “Desktop Computers” that couldn’t be easily moved. But after about a few years, a revolutionary new platform entered the market. You see, mobile phones had been around for years, but smartphones morphed dumbphones into mini-computers. Smartphones allowed us to browse the internet, check our email, take photos, and yes, make phone calls. The kids who grew up with mobile phones are the mobile-first generation. But in the last few years, technology has brought us a new generation of children.
- The Alexa-first Generation. Children these days are growing up in a world where voice is their main avenue of communication with technology. Many children will have access to Alexa, Siri, or the Google Assistant way before they ever get their first mobile phone. So, if we want to build for everyone, we now have to build for this cutting-edge interface.
- Voice technology is exploding. comScore believes that by 2020, 50% of all searches will be conducted through Voice. Last year, 13% of all households in the United States owned a smart speaker. That number is predicted to skyrocket to 55% of households by 2022. Google claims that an astonishing 72% of people who use voice assistants say that their devices are used as part of their daily routines. Voice an interface is incredibly sticky, and it isn’t going away anytime soon. Voice is where the growth is - and if we don’t build for voice we aren’t building for everyone. ---------- Source: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2018/04/10/voice-search-statistics-2018
- ComScore says that today, more than half of people who use voice assistants use their device to ask general questions, check the weather, and stream music, followed closely by managing alarms, a to-do list, and their calendar. So for our dollhouse, this means the interaction between our doll people and their dollhouses will gradually transition from physical to voice over time. That might mean that our doll people control the lights with Alexa instead of a lights switch. They might get their news from Alexa instead of their mobile phones. And they might control every aspect of their lives inside the dollhouse using their voice. Alexa, turn on the shower. Alexa, bake my pie for 30 minutes at 350 degrees. Alexa, who’s at the front door?
- Voice is also an incredibly powerful force in the entertainment industry. Companies like Amazon and Google are making a huge push into the living room with voice for entertainment. Voice may even mean the death of the remote control. Users can already control playback via voice by saying commands like “Alexa, watch Stranger Things”, “Alexa, Pause”, “Alexa, Fast Forward”, and “Alexa, Next Episode”.
- Voice also has the potential to radically change the way we play games! How many of you have played Jeopardy using Alexa? I’ve only played once, but I know that my parents are obsessed with it! Jeopardy on Alexa is like a real-time game show that allows users answer a few questions about pop culture, world history, sports, and other categories each day. Users get points for correct answers, and Alexa will tell you how well you answer questions compared to everyone else. Others voice-driven games play out like a Choose-your-own-Adventure, where every response given by a user leads the story in a different direction. This is just the beginning of voice-based gaming.
- Voice is the natural progression for communication with our technology. Voice is hands-free, efficient, and more human in nature than other forms of user interfaces. Speech is the fundamental means of human communication. All cultures, inform, persuade, and build build relationships primarily through speech. Take this presentation as an example. I’m not typing this presentation up for you to read on this screen, we’re here having a conversation. Building for everyone means building for the future.
- So before we move on to Q&A, I wanted recap what we’ve learned today. Building for everyone means understanding the needs of the most diverse pockets of our users. It means balancing what our users want, with what we can build well, and what our customers will pay for. It means that anyone should be able to walk up to our product and immediately understand how it’s organized, where different features live, and how to use it without any instruction. And finally we learned about how building for everyone means building for the platforms of the future. Now that I’ve shown you that building products for everyone is just like building this amazing dollhouse, it’s time sell our finished product. So who in this room wants to buy our dollhouse? I’ll start off the bidding at a totally reasonable $200! [CRICKETS] No takers?! Well that’s alright, see I promised you at the beginning of this presentation that we’d build such an amazing dollhouse that we’d be able to sell this thing when we were done. And since none of you seem to want to buy this thing from me, I’d like to announce that I’ll be donating our Dollhouse to Children’s Hospital of LA, where it will get much more use than it would sitting in my living room!
- Thanks so much for listing to me today, and now I’d like to open up the floor to questions!