Main Takeaways: -Define the goal and product principles to enable decision making -Partner with design early to solve product challenges -Redesigning an application is different than adding a new feature

1. Redesigning an Existing Product
by Uber Product Leader
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5. Gaining Customer Insights
Through The Competition
William K. Lee

6. Speaker
William K. Lee

7. About me
Current: Principal Product Manager @ Lime
Past: PM @ Strava and OpenGov, Engineer at Fandom and others
Outside of work: long distance running and trivia (“7 and 7”)

8. Agenda
1. Why you should care about the competition
2. When to gain customer insights through the competition
3. How to learn about your customers through the
competition

9. Obsess over customers, not competition ... right?

10. Worrying about competition + having the wrong
goal = failure

11. Leverage competition to learn about your customers
quickly
● You have competitors that are ahead of you
● Save time in customer development by leveraging
them

12. Three scenarios for using competition to gain customer
insights
1. Entering an established market
2. Lean user research team
3. Difficult to talk to your own customers

13. Three ways to gain customer insights through the
competition
1. Use the competitor product yourself
2. Interview customers of the competitor product
3. Read reviews on the Internet: app stores, Reddit,
YouTube

14. Example: Taking Lime Juicer app from zero to one
● My first product at Lime: app for
independent contractors to charge scooters
(Lime Juicers)
● Another company had two-month head start
● I took all three steps to learn about their
product
○ Signed up to be a charger in the other app
○ Talked to other customers
○ Read internet posts

15. ● Documented user journey with visuals
Step 1: Created teardown of competitor user experience

16. ● Synthesized my own experiences and other customers’
Step 2: Analyzed strengths and weaknesses
“Find” map was
hard to parse
“Releasing” was time consuming due to poor UX, GPS drift + low tolerance for
error

17. ● Acknowledged other app’s
successes and replicate them in
Juicer app
● Identified major pain points and
turned them into delightful moments
for Juicers
● Results:
○ Gained tens of thousands of Lime Juicers
within two months of launch
○ Neutralized the other company’s head start
Step 3: Replicated strengths and capitalized on
weaknesses
Used QR code to
speed up core
task
Earning money and getting payouts
were magic moments

18. Example: Mining app store reviews
● Use script to pull reviews of other apps in all
languages
● Scan data to find trends
● This practice complements lean user research team

19. Reviews from new market for Lime generated
actionable insight
● Another company launched scooters in UK months before Lime
● UK authorities require scanning driver license before first ride
● App store reviews uncovered insight into local user behavior: they leave
driver license at home
● Other app only asks for DL while starting first ride

20. Turned competitor pain point into delightful moment
● Lime app makes it easy to scan DL
while at home

21. Summary
1. Leveraging your competition speeds up the customer development cycle
2. Do this when you’re entering an established market, you have a lean user
research team or it’s difficult to talk to your own customers
3. Gain customer insights by using the competitor product yourself, talking to
other customers and reading Internet reviews

22. Thank you!
linkedin.com/in/billklee
Twitter: @buzzsaw

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