How to Manage the Product? Learnings from a PM Intern.
Hello Reader! I recently started my journey as a Product Management Intern at Fintech based out of Singapore. As a summer report, I’ll be sharing two of my learnings as a PM intern here. I’ve divided them into Product and Growth, as my work was divided during the period of my internship.
Learning 1: User Story Maps > Traditional Note-Taking
Never before in history have we had such incredible access to the world’s best product-related content. And it became a task for me to answer this question for myself: how am I going to remember all this stuff? It’s easy in the product I use in my day-to-day. Like, highlighting passages in the Kindle app, or using Notion’s web clipper is a great next step to start building a “second brain” of knowledge. But rarely do traditional note-taking methods help you synthesize interrelated concepts.
Let’s consider these three content examples:
- Elena Verna talking about B2B SaaS growth frameworks on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast
- A Reforge course on product management foundations
- Sean Ellis’s book about growth-hacking
All three of these ideas overlap and interact with each other. More importantly, they play different roles sequentially in the actual process of building a great product.
So, when your notes exist in a big list (no matter how sorted), they resemble a product backlog — features and tasks pulled out of their broader context. Smart thinkers like Jeff Patton realized there needed to be a way to view the backlog items in context; thus, user story maps were born.
In the same way, user story maps can help a budding product manager like myself zoom out to see the whole picture of a product. These user story maps can help you pull back to see how all your notes fit together. They can help you build out your own framework for product development that grows and matures as you continue to add new information. Tools like Miro (that I used actively during my internship period) make this extremely easy and allowed me to go as high-level (or granular) as I needed.
Learning 2: The AAARRR Growth Funnel
What is AAARRR? It’s a framework that helps cut a company down into pieces. It shows you where to focus your attention, and helps to increase important metrics: active users and revenue. AAA stands for Awareness, acquisition, and activation, while RRR stands for Retention, Revenue and Referral.
How did it help me? It opened up numerous avenues for the growth aspect of my company. It also showed me how our users behave with our product. Let’s quickly do a breakup of Splitwise, an offline fintech product based on the A2R3 funnel model:
Splitwise is a free app allowing users to quickly and easily calculate and pay each other back for informal debts like bills, shared meals, and travel without the embarrassment of asking people multiple times to pay you back.
1. Acquisition — The Acquisition of customers for Splitwise usually happens very organically in a group by word of mouth where 1 person who is acquired by the marketing team will bring other users as well because the whole use case of the app depends on splitting the money with other people and tracking expenses in a group.
2. Activation — Activation is loosely described as when the user does what is intended for them to do according to the major use case of the product. For. Splitwise, it is adding people to a group and starting to update your expenses within the group.
3. Retention — For Splitwise, Retention is not an issue since the user comes back each time the group spends together. The top retention hook is on point for the app — Clean, straightforward UX which is quick and easy to use.
4. Referral — Splitwise by virtue of its use case is a group-centric app and referral plays a strong role in user acquisition but the great thing about referral here is that it happens at zero cost, thereby reducing the CAC (Cost of Customer Acquisition) for the company. This could be a good sign if conversion is improved since CAC can be drastically less than LTV (Lifetime Value).
5. Revenue — From a revenue point of view, retention is not translating into revenue from its paid model for Splitwise at least in India. Ad revenue is the major source of revenue right now but I don’t remember seeing any ad on the app ever since I joined.
Currently, a very small percentage is converted into paid subscribers as the users don’t see the value proposition of a paid subscription. One key reason for that is that it is a utility app and there is no hinder in utility at all if you are a regular user.
This is good for retention but not that great for revenue for the company. It has to go beyond providing existing add-ons as part of paid feature since these feature doesn’t align if only 1 member activates a pro-subscription. Also, a group-based subscription rather than an individual-based subscription makes more sense.
Summing up my experience, I would say that it was learning heavy, and required me to do a lot of hands-on work related to the industry. I’m excited about the opportunities coming my way in the next coming months!