 Hey everyone, thanks for joining in on this webinar. Today we're gonna be talking about something I call the journalist PM framework. It's something that I've kind of put together and synthesized from, you know, various things I've read, things that I've gotten from my own experience as a PM and from talking to people. I'm not actually a journalist by trade but you're asking a lot of those same questions that you would use if you were doing kind of investigative journalism. So that's what I call it but before we get into it, you know, who am I? I am a PM currently with Microsoft named Alex Freeman and I have eight years of experience roughly in the industry. And I've done everything from being a business analyst to, you know, doing custom enterprise buildouts. I've done full product site like life cycle management with, you know, full vertical ownership, work with engineering, all the agile ceremonies and then currently in for the past three years I've been a PM with Microsoft's global EDU working on their most strategic global customers both in their product and in program management as well. So what are we gonna be going through? First, we're gonna talk about the actual framework, right? I think as a brief aside, a framework is really important in the PM world because there's a lot of people who have intuition and they're good product managers, right? They can come up with good ideas but it's not really teachable, right? And it's not systematic and it's not something that can be implemented the same way and iterated on over and over and over again. So a framework is super key to being able to do that. And to me, I think a good framework is one that you can remember even when you're not looking at your notes or looking at slides. So I call this a journalist framework and you have three W's, two H's. Three W's, two H's. We're asking why, who, what, how and how? Why, who, what, how, how? And hopefully with that you can, you know, walk away, remember it and be thinking about it. So we're asking why should we build this? Who should we build it for? What are the pain points for those users? How can we then build features that help them and address some of those pain points? And then lastly, how do we measure that? I've noticed a lot in the PM world, people jump to number four, right? How can we help? What should we build without ever validating that idea without ever validating that ask? So this is a much more structured approach that goes really high level and narrows it down into specific and you end up with hopefully some really good viable features that you can build out. Where can you use this? Hopefully, I mean anywhere, right? Anywhere that you need a systematic approach to thinking through something, but most commonly the three areas are interviews, right? So it's really helpful for outlining maybe impact that you've had projects that you've worked on. It's also helpful if you're interviewing for Big Pack right in the PM world. So Google, Facebook, Microsoft and some of the others are really fond of asking product design questions, product execution questions, metrics questions and this is a really effective way to structure those responses. They're really nebulous questions usually. So it's like, how would you improve Facebook? How would you like, what would Microsoft focus on next? So like really high level broad questions that you have to narrow down and break into more approachable numbers and features. So interviews really effective for that. Second, I think a good framework can be used in real life. So I use this and the principles apply to a lot of other kind of PM verticals. So product development where you're actually building something, I think it's really effective for that. So really a good way to build out a roadmap, whether that's even for two weeks where you're just doing a sprint or even like a fiscal year roadmap where you're highlighting the five, six, seven big features that you're gonna deliver over the next fiscal. So really helpful for that. And then thirdly, if you're on experience development as with most things, the more you do it, the more you shoot a basketball, the more you do like program, the more you cook, the better you get at it. And so when you use a framework you're able to do something in a repeatable way and you're then able to grow your experience as a PM. So it can be really effective to really work through your own kind of PM journey and PM career. As far as structure again, I'm gonna go through the framework really quick and as time allows, I know we have like a limited amount here. I want to do an example just to show kind of what it could look like in real life and I'll structure that after maybe an interview type question so that you can at least have a taste of a way you can utilize this in the interview or product development sphere. So without further ado, let's jump in. So we're asking why, why should we build it? And there really is kind of a step zero for a lot of this stuff is that you have your hypothesis saying, you know, let's say your Facebook. For example, I've never worked for Facebook. I don't have experience there. So it's a good thing for me to pull into and you saying like why should Facebook build X, right? So why should they improve Instagram? Why should they do that? Like the hypothesis is Facebook should get into the dating scene, for example. I don't know if Facebook does dating or not. I've been out of the dating scene for a long time but let's say Facebook doesn't do dating at the moment. You say, hey, should Facebook do Facebook dating? And so the first question you're asked is well, why organizationally does that even matter, right? And your goal here is to prove that anything that you're going to build any hypothesis that you have, it needs to make sense for both your business goal, your business mission. It needs to align to the current fiscal and quarterly focuses for the business and it needs to align to your division, right? If you're over in cloud and you're, someone comes and hey, can you build this thing that's totally unrelated to your division? You're like, well, maybe, but we're not the best people for it. So anything that you're working on really needs to align to the overall business vertical that you're in. Some key question examples, and these are just examples, I'm sure as I go through these key questions for each of these questions, you're going to think of ones that I don't have listed here, totally fine, right? The idea is hit the goal, questions are just there to kind of help spark stuff. So you're asking what existing advantages does the business have for your Facebook? What existing advantages? Do you have within your vertical to assist with dating, right? You do have a software that's already in place. Do you already have users? Do you already have, you know, algorithms that have give you data that you can pull from? Any of those are existing leverages that you can utilize for building something new or adding on to something that you maybe want to focus on for the next year. Important because from a green light perspective, right? You have to get budget. You have to get buy-in from all the key stakeholders from engineering, from budget, all of that stuff. And it's a lot easier to say yes to adding on to something existing than it is to build something new. That's really risky and it's really expensive to build things from scratch. And so most of the time, not always, but most of the time, you're going to want to leverage existing stuff. So, hey, what existing things does the business have? How does the line with their overall company goals, right? So if you look at, hey, our overall mission is to connect people. Our overall mission is to, you know, give people cheap rides, maybe for Uber. How does that, what you want to build a line to that? And then lastly, what will allow you to achieve now or in the future? Maybe there's some things that on paper, like maybe it doesn't make sense, Microsoft Education, for example, is free, right? We give it to teachers and schools, based functionality in office for totally free, which costs us a lot at front, but in the future, it allows, you know, greater growth and retention with the user base as they get into the workforce. So maybe there are things that don't make sense right now, but it sets you up to achieve something in the future and you're willing to pay for that. So overall goal, why should we build this? How does this align to our business goals and you need to show in a very clear structured way that it does? Second question you're going to ask is who, right? So you say, yep, it totally aligns to where we want to be, but who should we build it for? Who are our key user segments here, right? And your goal here is to outline, you know, at least two, probably up to four or five, user segments that you could potentially target by this feature set. And then from that, you want to emphasis on one or two of them, normally just one, because user segments ideally should be pretty different. So you can structure approaches for each one of them. There are times where you're just going to hit a bunch of them and that's really good, right? If you can hit a lot of user segments with one approach, do it, amazing. Most of the time, you really need to narrow down to one, maybe two of those. I typically like to start with two and then as I get into the pain points and features, then you kind of narrow it down to say, okay, let's focus on this one first and then maybe focus on some of the others later. Some questions to get to that are, who are the existing key users of this product now, right? Let's say if you're Facebook dating, again, maybe the existing users are people who use Tinder, people who use Bumble, Hinge, Coffee Meets Bagels. There's a lot of dating apps that are out there, only farmers I think is one. And so it doesn't have to be your product, but this product in general, who are the users there, right? Make a list of who are kind of like two or three of the key examples. And then second, like are there any untapped or underserved users? Maybe there's people that want to use those services but for whatever reason, it doesn't align to what they want to achieve, right? Maybe it's too expensive, maybe it's not the right culture fit, whatever reason it is, there's untapped underserved users potentially in a market and you want to be able to leverage that. You know, an example that two actually examples of underserved across tech almost always are people who have accessibility or have disabilities. They're often forgotten, which is really kind of disheartening, right? Because they're a massive user population and they also are people deserve to have great experiences in tech, also elderly, right? A lot of people who didn't grow up with the internet, not super comfortable using a computer and technology, but it can offer a lot of really good benefits. And so if you think like Uber, for example, what if you don't have a smartphone? How can you use Uber for someone who is like the elder population? So thinking in terms of those are potentially underserved because the current existing features don't work for them. And then are there multiple user size to a product? So you can build user segments based on, you know, for marketplaces, you have buyers, you have sellers, right, people are listing things on Amazon, people are buying stuff from Amazon. Uber, you have riders and you have drivers, right? And you wanna make sure you can serve both of them, maybe one or both of those don't have a feature set that is effective. So for your desired thing that you're building, like from those, what are some potential segments that you could target? And you should have no trouble getting to, you know, five, six, seven user segments here that difficulties honestly bringing it down to focus on one or two. Once you do that, you're gonna ask what hurts? So we have 3W so far, we have why, we have who and now we have what, right? So for those target user segments, what pain points do they have? And what you're trying to do here is identify just areas where the users can be frustrated or maybe they're unsatisfied with existing options, right? Or maybe they're trying to do something in a really hacky way and it's just, it's not working for them for whatever reason. So some questions you can ask are, what are they overall trying to accomplish, right? If you're on Tinder, what are the key user segments trying to do? Are they, you know, trying to build lasting relationships? Are they trying to do hookups? Are they trying to find, you know, community? Like what's the overall goal for what this user is trying to do with the product? You know, where are some potential frustration points in the product? Maybe you're that elderly person with Uber and it's really frustrating to try and schedule something if you don't have a smartphone, right? You maybe don't trust smartphones or you've never used one, like that's pretty frustrating. I wanna drive, I wanna get out but I can't drive myself or I don't want to. And like the existing thing it's super difficult if you're not in that ecosystem. So outlining bottlenecks or where people are slow or there's frustration points within the product. And then finally like feature gaps, what do they just wish they could do? But they're maybe doing workarounds to try and achieve that. I mean Dropbox exists for this reason. They realized that people wanted a central place to get their files. And so they were emailing them to themselves. And so, hey, I can access my email from anywhere and Dropbox was like, hey, here's this cloud like storage area. Now you can access from anywhere. Here's all your files. You don't have to email them to yourself anymore. So just a major feature gap. And now they built a very successful full business just from that feature gap. So there are other questions to ask but really it's like what do they wanna do? Where are they frustrated? And then what can't they do now that they wish they could? What gaps are there in your product? And then finally, we can get to how can we help, right? So many PMs and so many people, I've made this mistake where you jump right to features where you say, hey, like we're gonna build XYZ thing. We need to add the search bar. We need to add shared functionality. We need to add offline syncing, whatever it is. And you jump right to it without validating that it aligns to all these other different things and without having a plan for how you're gonna structure your target user segments. And so a lot of times you can be really expensive to plan out, work with design, work with marketing to identify all these features that ultimately for whatever reason you wanna align to the business goals or technically in fees or whatever. And you spent all this time building something that you could have found out was not going to be built early on had you just worked through the process. But not in our case, we validated everything. So now we're asking what should we build, right? So your goal here is to determine two to four potential features and really that you're trying to address those pain points, right? Facebook's design philosophy of two centers around this where you have people problems, right? Where you have say, hey, I want to do this. Now I need to do a search bar, but I wanna be able to find stuff, right? How do people talk? And then, how do you know that you, it's a real problem, right? So you have your user segments and okay, you've identified where they're underserved and then last question is how do you know you're making progress? But really you're saying like, what can we build to address those problems and address those pain? So what you're asking is something like if we were to solve it in the simplest way, is a really good starting point, you say pain point and then the simplest approach for how we would solve it is this, right? If I need to be able to find it, boom, you just magically, no matter, I don't care how it happens, they can just find what they're looking for. That's the simplest way to do it. And that often you're not gonna build the simplest thing necessarily. There's a bunch of reasons where it's not the best, but it at least works as a starting point, right? It gives you a base scaffold to build from and pivot off of. And can be really effective for getting kind of thoughts flowing for how you can start approaching this. Second, do we have any existing limitations or solutions that you can already leverage, right? So maybe there's technical reasons why you can't do something a certain way or maybe there's existing product functionality that you can utilize. So there's actually Satya, who's the CEO of Microsoft, mentioned that he worked in the Bing division and then actually worked with Azure and realized that a lot of the implementation kind of search algorithm that Bing was using, Azure could use to optimize their shared load. And so he's like, oh, we have this existing solution that's 90% done, we just have to retrofit it. And he had saved billions of dollars while he's the CEO now, not the only reason he's a great CEO, but all that to say there's existing solutions within your ecosystem that you can probably leverage. Shared libraries are a really good example of this too. And then lastly, can you solve multiple pain points with this one approach? And so a lot of times it's not possible to hit a bunch of different ones, they're different enough that you can't just one fell swoop something, but as much as you can, if you can hit multiple user segments or multiple pain points with one broad approach, it's gonna be the best impact, the biggest bang for your buck. So you wanna try and prioritize those features because they're gonna have the most drive and impact for your product. So why are we building this? Who are we building for? What hurts? How do we help? And then I would say almost as important as the features is how do you measure it, right? How do you know you're making progress? What are your key metrics that you're tying into here? And so a lot of people skip over this and it really comes back to bite you because someone comes, you say, you lost something, it's been three, four months and then someone comes to you and says, okay, how are we doing? And you're like, well, we launched it. Great, but how do you, is it effective? Is it driving towards what you were trying to achieve in the first place or people being served by it? Is there a pain point going away? Like, how do we know all this? And so you really need to have key metrics that act as your litmus test to see whether you're making progress or not. So you can, you know, inform whether you need to pivot, whether you need to keep going, you know, double invest or whatever. Some examples of that, right? How much do we expect this to increase active users? Or how much do we expect this to increase engaged time from already active users? Maybe we don't expect it to add new users, but we expect engagement with the product to go up by 20% by adding whatever feature. How do we expect this to decrease attrition or churn? Maybe if you can keep people for three months longer and a paid subscription, then that ends up generating, let's say the average length is 10 months, that 30% more revenue per user if you can just decrease churn, right? And tied into that, how much additional revenue can we expect this to generate? So if you can create maybe a separate user segment for a premium or maybe a frugal option for pricing tiers, maybe you'll get people that will stay longer or people that previously were paying for cheaper, where they'll pay a little bit more for something that costs pennies. So you can increase your monthly value per user by generating features, right? So you're rarely going to use all of these, but a lot of times you'll use some combination of the two or you'll build like a funnel where you'll start with total active users and then break it down to what your target segment is. Within metrics, it's really kind of standard to have a North Star saying this is kind of what we're basing off of. And then a couple of other things that you'll use to validate that North Star because any one metric can be gained a little bit. So like engage time, for example, if you have a critical software function that you just slow down, you're probably gonna increase the amount of engaged time but your user can be super frustrated, right? So you don't wanna just use one. You wanna have one that's your main, your North Star and then others that support that all working in conjunction to show whether you're making progress or not. Okay, that's a lot of stuff, right? We have why, who, what, how, how, why, who, what, how, how? The three Ws, two Hs, I've loved one pagers and so I put it into this template. Feel free to use this, feel free to maybe screenshot this and after the fact and utilize it and you're in interviews, utilize it with your own product development. I would just ask that you tag me maybe, maybe on LinkedIn or Twitter or something that where you can tell me that you're using it maybe things you would change. Love to hear feedback on this but a one pager can be pretty effective you can put it on a whiteboard, you can work on it on a shared screen or whatever. Love the one but why, who, what, how, how? With that said, let's jump into, let me take this last like 10 minutes and actually show it in action. I've done a little bit of prep here but I really haven't like thought this I'm trying to go into it, not having a fully fleshed out thought solution so you can kind of see what the framework would look like in action. So question is what should Spotify build next, right? I love Spotify, I'm a premium user have been for years and like I really love their service and so thinking about like what could they do next? And if we have our framework to build from obviously there's nothing here and so let's think through it. The first thing like I said, level zero is what should Spotify do next? Not super, super helpful. You have to come up with some sort of hypothesis and so where I would typically start is think through, all right, what existing market are they already in? What's their mission statement? And their mission statement I think I looked up earlier is to drive human creativity and give artists the ability to live off their art and give fans the ability to enjoy it, right? So we have driving creativity, we have artists who wanna live off their art creators, and then we have people who want to enjoy that in a way that's accessible, maybe affordability or maybe ease of use. So we're trying to do something that aligns with that ecosystem. Second, maybe they had the streaming service, obviously they already have a platform for streaming audio and it's totally non-visual at the moment. So what are they already in? They have albums, they have podcasts, but I was thinking about this, I was like, do they do audio books? I love listening to audio books, but I don't know Spotify ties into that. If they do, I'm not aware of it. So I'm operating to the assumption that they don't have this. And so the question instead of what should Spotify do next, I'll work and change this too, should Spotify add audio book streaming? Right, that's the hypothesis that I'm working from, audio book streaming. Okay, so first off, we're gonna ask those same questions. I've just pulled up on a separate screen, these questions were asking, what existing advantages do they have? Well, they already have the existing platform, right? So there's a ton of existing infrastructure that's already in place for streaming audio, right? They have existing platform and I'll include with that, that's users, infrastructure, servers, licensing deals, all of the above, everything that you need to basically build those deals, right? You have in place with their current application. So totally thinking a lot of their existing platform. Second question, how does it align to their goals? I would say, I don't know what Spotify's goals are, but I think generate money is one of them. So does this allow them to generate more money? I think it does, you could probably leverage audio books as a different vertical for revenue generation. So generate money and probably to keep engaged users, right? So or to grow user base. And so I think you could totally grow users here. Maybe there's people that don't love music but love reading that you could totally capture that you're not capturing right now. So we're gonna do generate money and then grow user base. Last question was, will Solato achieve now or in the future? I think it allows the bridging between verticals. Right now they're really music heavy but a lot of people who do audio books are especially the authors, authors and readers and neither of those are musical. So if they wanna pivot over into a total non music industry, this could be a pretty like nice bridge in order to do that, right? This works out, but I'm not gonna use that. So we have our three right here of why. Next, we're going to who like, okay if we build an audio book streaming service who are the potential users here? One that immediately comes to mind for me is book buffs. So people who love to read and just like maybe there are people like power users of Audible for example they're burning through five, six, seven, eight credits in a month. Audible obviously is the to me the most well-known audio book service. So I'm gonna use that as kind of the competitor and competitor example. So people who read a lot, maybe you have people who travel a lot, listen to a lot of podcatcher on the road a bunch, maybe you're in planes or you're going from A to B, you have a lot of that dead time where you can't do stuff with your hands but you can listen. So people who travel a lot, you have authors I think are a key user segment, right? I don't know how easy it is for people to publish audio books on Audible. I think there's a lot of production sizes, a lot of licensing deals that have to happen. So maybe not A-list authors, but especially people maybe the people who are doing e-books on Kindle what Kindle allowed for self-publishing maybe this could allow for self-publishing of audio books. So I'm gonna say maybe B and C-list authors they don't have that same support network that you have from like the Stephen Kings of the world, right? Fourth, I think as I'm looking through this where we have people who do books people who travel and then maybe people who like if I'm asking are there any underserved people maybe current existing systems are just too expensive, right? Like they wanna listen to books but they're not gonna pay $13 a credit or whatever for that. So instead maybe if there's like frugal or price conscious I'll just call it frugal readers. People who they would pay but it's a little too pricey right now and I don't know how many of those there are but I think that's a key user segment. And so from that I'm gonna dive in and say, all right who of this do I think are the most key segments based on what we wanna do? And the two that come to mind are book buffs, right? I'm gonna highlight that and B and C-list authors, right? So you have the publishing and you have the people who are maybe power users because I think this will generate potentially a lot of revenue and I think this could also do the same before those agreements because it gives them access to a millions and millions of potential users if done correctly. So both of those seem pretty effective. So let's jump in really quick some potential pain points for these. I'm gonna say for book buffs, pain point one is probably it's expensive, right? It's expensive to listen to a bunch of books because you get a Bible, right? They'll listen to it but same thing with albums, right? Why Spotify existed in the first place is that people were buying albums, I love music and you're paying 10 bucks a pop, 15 bucks a pop like audiobooks are the same way. So it's expensive to listen to a bunch of books, right? User pain point two, maybe B for the authors it's hard to reach an audience, right? So maybe have the people who know about it people that know about you it's hard to reach that audience. So there's discoverability that you can leverage. And then user pain point three from both of these I think I'm gonna go with the authors I think and say it's hard to publish audiobooks, right? So for whatever reason, I think it's probably pretty like you've written your book but now you wanna get it written or you wanna get spoken, right? And out to people, it's kind of probably in-depth process to do you have to find voice actors you have to have people that do it so maybe there's something we can do there. So finally, let's jump into how can we help, right? So for both of these potentially, it's expensive to listen to a bunch of books. So I think a great feature you could add is an audiobook streaming tier, right? So maybe you combine it with the existing say the existing ones 10 bucks a month maybe audiobooks is 20 bucks a month. So you get streaming and audiobooks available for 20 or 25, right? So if they're spending, let's say a book buff we will qualify as someone doing six books or more a month, that's like 60 bucks, right? Easy that they're spending. So the odds that they would be willing to spend 20 for even like 60% of the feature set probably pretty high. So one potential feature that we could do is an audiobook streaming amount, not streaming amount audiobook streaming tier, right? Another potential feature and just looking at time I know we're almost up let's just do one more potential feature for book buffs as well. Something that comes to mind is sort of maybe it's hard to sort your library, right? So you have all the stuff that you can upload you wanna have your library in that so we'll do library book organization, right? There's two potential options. As we say, hey, we think this matters obviously you would take a little bit longer to work through this in real life and come up with user stories essentially around that but let's show and jump to key metrics of how we see it successful, right? Audiobook streaming tier, let's say of our existing users say we have a hundred million monthly active users we think that 5% of those are audiobook buffs so we would expect, we would say expect at least three million upgrades to premium tier, right? That's kind of what we wanna see people going we think at least 3 million, 60% of those audiobook buffs would come from our existing user base and maybe key metric two on that they would listen to at least four books a month, right? So if they're buying six right now they really wanna show the value proposition so they have four, we use those two maybe as our key metrics, no key metric three and you can start to see how we started with what should Spotify do next and now we've worked out to audiobooks we have the users that we can target we have how it aligns to the goal and we have some things that we can use to build and things that we can use to measure that so just one example of how you can use this framework in a real life scenario or an interview so that's all I have, the journalist framework like I said, I'll leave it on this slide so if you wanna grab a screenshot feel free to do that but thanks so much for coming, I appreciate it.