 Hello guys, how are you doing? Welcome one more week to one of our amazing webinars. Thank you for joining us on this webinar on Facebook, because we have a lot of people joining from everywhere. I've seen the comments and crazy we have people from the US, from Europe, from Africa. Oh man, this is getting crazy. And I understand why. We have an amazing speaker today. We have his name is Camila. Before we jump into the webinar, I want guys to give you a little bit more context of what these events are about. So as many of you know, we organize weekly events. We have webinars. We also organize a lot of Slack AMAs, which stands for Ask Me Anything. So we bring amazing product managers from the best companies in the world to talk about different aspects of the product. And we also have other type of events where all the audience asks questions and our speakers answers all of them. So that's what we do with these online events. In addition to that, we also host on-site events. We have 15 physical campuses across the world. So if you guys are located nearby any of those campuses, please take our website because we bring the best product managers in the world. And we also invite you to those campuses to give talks in person. So in addition to hosting these free events, which is a great resource for all of you that are thinking of breaking into product management, we also organize courses. So if you want to take it to the next level and you are thinking of breaking into product management and getting a job as a product manager, that's what we do. That's what we've been doing for four years now. And that's what we do. We have courses. We have five courses. The main one is about product management, and then we have four other courses that are called Coding for Managers, Data Analytics for Managers, Blockchain for Managers, and Digital Marketing for Managers. So if you guys are interested in any of these courses, please go to our website, productschool.com, and then you'll see all the dates, instructors, and so on. And in addition to that, I have a huge announcement today, which is that we recently opened our online campus. This means that after four years training people on site, we have decided to take it to the next level, and now we are offering online courses. These courses are live, so it's the same experience as you were in San Francisco, for example, but from your place, whatever you are. So as I told you, if you guys want more information, please check productschool, and then we'll see all the courses that we have, all the dates, and all the instructors. So going back to today's webinar, we are pretty excited about today's speaker, his name is Kevin. He's a senior product manager at Amazon, and he has a lot of years of experience as a product manager in companies such as Flipkart, Microsoft. So I'm going to let him introduce himself and take it from there. How are you doing, Kevin? Hi, Fernando. Thank you so much for that introduction. I'm doing good. Hi, everyone. Yeah. So a little something about myself, beyond what Fernando said, I've been a consumer PM, a consumer product manager for a little over seven years now. And as was just mentioned, I've most recently, I'm a senior product manager in Amazon in the London office in Prime Video. And before that, I spent about three, three and a half years with Flipkart. So it's been a while that I've been in e-commerce, and you see shades of e-commerce across this presentation. And today we are essentially going to be talking about open web, per se. Let me just share. By the way, guys. So the format of this webinar is going to be a 20-minute presentation led by Karen. And then we'll have 10 minutes at the end for Q&A. So if you guys want to ask anything to Karen, please leave your question in the comments. And I will make sure I read those questions at the end of the webinar. All yours, Karen. Thank you. All right. Okay, great. I think everybody should be able to see the slide now. Okay, great. So let's get straight into it. Growth and engagement is a very active topic these days, right? Because it is extremely hard to come by. And given that all of you are here in a product school webinar, means that you actively think about it as well or at least are curious about it. And today what we are going to do is we are going to talk about, and I'm going to talk about web, especially mobile web, and how it is usually underutilized as a lever, as a very strong lever for growth and engagement, and how some structured adjustments in the way we think about and analyze and build for mobile web really unlock the power of this platform for you, for your products, for your company, if you have your own product, then that as well. Let's go on. Okay. So all of us here, no matter who we are, if we are marketing managers, product managers, vendor managers or even engineers and designers, we're all responsible for engagement and growth of our products in one way or the other. Eventually all our metrics roll up to engagement and growth and eventually we're all responsible for the success of our products to either acquiring new users or making existing ones stick around longer and engage more with our products, right? And one of the top channels or platforms for growth. One of the largest and the oldest platforms is actually the web platform. And I've just added a small infographic here to show you that even till date, web has been a growing platform and it is truly democratic, it's open and the number of web pages that are served to mobile phones has been steadily increasing and will continue increasing. And when I say open web, I mean web as in the web that you access through your browsers and on desktop or mobile. But today we're going to be specifically talking about mobile because the issues are more prominent there, right? But even though web is actually a very, very potent platform and is ever increasing, it is still perceived as a platform which has relatively poorer metrics as compared to other platforms. When I say other platforms, they could be native apps, they could be desktop apps per say even desktop web sometimes and probably emergent platforms like chatbots or voice, right? So with all this advancement that is happening in the web, there is still a huge gap in how people perceive the channel, right? And this gap is mostly due to the fact that we analyze web along with all the other platforms and there is an apples to apples comparison, right? And what we're going to do today is try and dig a little deeper into that and hopefully I leave you with enough food for thought so that you see the channel and web as a channel in a different light and are able to analyze your own platforms to build better products. Now let's see how the situation is currently manifesting. The problem that I'm referring to essentially manifests in a very standard way in most of the companies, not every company but most of the companies. So if you look at number one, you basically, there is an apples to apples comparison with other platforms. And we look at the metrics, we realize that the metrics are a little poor. Then you prematurely conclude that this is probably because of the in-product experience of the mobile site or the website that you have. Then we decide to conduct a few experiments to fix that experience. Maybe it's making your form simpler or customer journey shorter, but we find in the product itself internally and we lay out experiments. And what we see is that we spend time improving the experience and we continuously see that the efforts are not measuring up and not giving the results that we need. Because of this happening over a period of time, we conclude that there is probably a ceiling to how good a mobile website can be and how good mobile web can be. And companies decide to move investment from sources to other platforms and which is why you see mobile web teams has been really smaller than the other teams around. And this moves like a flywheel because of lower investment, the experience falls further and hence you basically have a negative spiral and you keep going down. However, there are some companies who have a better way and they seem to be increasing investments in the web rather than reducing it. Now, these seem to be exceptions out of the lot, but they know something that others don't. And I want to try and open that Pandora's box for you all and leave you with certain food for thought as to what these companies know, why they are doing better than others and exactly how do you harness this power? Now, to understand the factors affecting metrics, I'm going to take an example of conversion rate. I'm an e-commerce person, so I'm going to use conversion rate as an e-commerce person, so I'm going to be using conversion rate as an example. And the definition of conversion rate is if you're selling a product or a service on your website, then it's the total number of sales or purchases that happen divided by the unique visitors who have visited the site. So let's go straight into it and the... Now, the number one factor that I want to basically introduce you to is the different kinds of visitors that visit different platforms. Now, when we're analyzing, we sometimes assume that the characteristics and the segments of users who are visiting different platforms are essentially the same. But that is usually not the case. There can be several platforms like Mobile Web, Desktop Boys, as I told you before, but here I'm going to use two platforms, the Mobile Web and Native Apps, to illustrate the point because I think all of us will be familiar with these two platforms very well. Now, Mobile Web can be considered as a public place, as an open mall where anybody can work in. However, Native Apps in comparison is like a closed club with bouncers standing outside. Now, the idea or the takeaway here is that Native Apps have a filtered set of audience and they allow only a filtered set of audience to come inside. Now, this filtered set are those kinds of people who have decided to sacrifice their time, their effort, their mobile network data, their storage on their phone to try out the app. So they already have a honed intent in some way. Now, if you allow the best of the group to only come in, then it's no surprise that that group is also going to be spending a little more. That does not mean that we should not allow everybody to come in, but that's just the structural difference between the two platforms. And the key learning here which I want to leave you with for this particular factor is that it is not the experience that has made this difference. It's a structural difference. And what it does is essentially you're allowing the best of the crowd in and best of the visitors in and hence they're going to behave in the way that their spending power allows them, which is reasonably higher. So it's not the experience, but it's just that you have a variability in the kind of visitors who actually visit. The second factor is actually super interesting and we realized this early on when we were analyzing but we required a lot of UX research and talking to customers to understand this point really well. And once it was clear, it seemed obvious to us. Let me illustrate this with a quick example. Now look at the two pictures that you see on the screen. The picture on the left is essentially assumed that to be a little busier road. Let's say it's the road that you take every day to go to work and the picture on the right. It's beautiful. However, it's the road that you take to your favorite holiday spot. Now here's a question. If you had the world's best coffee shop, which of the two roads do you think you would get the most repeat customers? If you built your coffee shop in the two rows, which one would you get the most repeat customers from? And most clearly, most of the times, I think the answer would be unanimous that it's the more busier road that we hope that most repeat customers would come from. And the reason is pretty obvious, but I'll get more into it. I am choosing repeat customers as a metric because repeat customers as a metric or retention or frequency has a very unique characteristics. And the unique characteristic about repeat customers is that all your growth and engagement metrics that you see are typically much better for repeat customers. And usually that is because they've already seen your product and that is hence the definition of repeat customers. They've already seen the product. They're already educated. It's not a surprise to them. And because of the fact that they've liked it, they have come back. So let me tell you how this compares to what we're talking about right now. In your native app or in the situation of native app as a platform, if your phone home screen, if your phone that you have in your hand, your mobile device is a highway that you cross 100, 200 and in some extreme cases, 500 times a day or maybe even more, your mobile app that is installed is like the coffee shop that you continuously see over and over again. And here is where the concept of growth and engagement comes in. Now this is a positive flywheel. And if you start from number one, you will see that the more users see your product, whether wanted or unwanted, but the more users see your product, the more they get to use your product. And the more they use your product, the more habitual they get. And the more habitual they get, the better your growth and engagement metrics. Any metrics that you see with respect to daily active users, the monthly active users or new users, conversion rate or average time spent or any other metric, you will see that all the metrics are higher for repeat customer traffic. Maybe after this webinar or some time later, you can go in and if you have access to your company's analytics, your product's analytics, create a segment for repeat users and see if that is true. And I would bet that mostly you would see better. For mobile web, on the other hand, there is a very key component that is missing. And that is number one. Users don't get reminded that your product or services there, users don't see it. If somebody is visiting your mobile website, then most of the times they have decided to open the browser and they have decided to punch in the URL or they have already done some exercise before. But it's a more proactive step rather than being reminded of it. And this is very critical because the takeaway here is that once you know that this fact, once you know the fact that this is not because of in product experience. It is essentially, again, due to structural differences between mobile apps and between mobile web. And once you know this fact, then you can very specifically target this fact to improve it. You can specifically target the fact that you have to improve visibility. You can implement addition to home screen, which is a great new feature that most of the web browsers have started to have. You can actually have presence on the home screen of the user, you can start counting users for that. You can have partnerships with browsers so that their own home screen has your product. You probably have to engage your marketing team there, but you can do that. You can have associates and affiliate traffic where your product keeps showing up. You can analyze where your users usually go and visit and then be there. So now that you know this, you can specifically target this rather than incorrectly, or people totally conclude that it's probably something to do with the experience within the product, which is probably not the case. Let's move on. The third factor, which I want to share with you, is basically channels. The different channels of traffic which bring visitors and users to your website or to your product, and the different intents that they have. Now in OpenWeb, you will see that, or rather not just in OpenWeb, in all channels, you would see that there are multiple traffic sources where your visitors come from. It can be direct traffic. It can be affiliate traffic. It can be search engines. It can be via social, which is Facebook, Twitter. It could be via dark social, which don't get tracked. For example, your shares via WhatsApp. They could be paid traffic like SEM ads. Now the key to understand here is that when you're talking about the web, this traffic is evenly distributed across, not really evenly, but distributed across all the channels that you see. However, when you look at native apps, this view is slightly different. You have traffic coming in from all the channels, but native apps have a unique quality, which is improving slowly day by day, but have a unique quality that they block most of the traffic from coming in. And this is again a structural issue with the world of native apps. They are a locked in experience. And you would see that although 80% of the traffic in OpenWeb is probably spread across these known channels, 80 to 90% of the traffic in native apps would be direct or via push notification, if you have implemented push notification. And the tricky thing here is that direct traffic and push notifications also actually have the highest conversion rates. They also convert better. They also have better engagement primarily because they have a large share of repeat traffic because of the reason that we discussed before. So again, it is not the experience within the product that made a difference or that detected users. It's just that you have high variability in your denominator. So if you look at the, if you remember the conversion rate formula, you have number of transactions based on the number of unique visitors. Your denominator is suddenly larger. And you have most of the conversion or most of the traffic concentrated on direct and push, which can work well. So it's basically comes down to a game of numbers. So this is the third factor. And here, now that you know the fact, you can then focus on it. You can focus on building more direct traffic on mobile web. You can focus on experiences that probably enable web push notifications, which is again a new thing, which is a very important channel. Not many websites and not many mobile websites have actually implemented it. And you still have a very good advantage to use that channel. So if you don't know these factors or you've not analyzed the traffic sources, then again, we can be infinitely conclude that might be the experience after users land in. Whereas in reality, the metric lowered even before the visitor actually had the chance to reach a product. The fourth factor that I want to share with you is experience but not quite in the way as we have spoken about it right now. And what I mean by that is that mobile web and I have been. I've been lucky to be part of several studies several researchers where we have come to understand that mobile web in mobile web people. They have a lower perception of reliability, security, overall experience and performance. And in reality, although that is not true. But in the world of consumer internet products, sorry, in the world of consumer internet products perception is reality. So we have to build towards how customers, how customers perceive you. And not to get too much into experience but just to give you an idea of why people perceive it that way. If you compare it again with native apps native apps have have an end to end experience edge to edge experience you don't see URL bars on mobile web to have a lot of how do I say a lot of frame of the browser. And as if it's a third party experience and on mobile that you see white pages I am before between page transitions. And I'm sure a lot of you have seen the famous chrome dinosaur when your mobile network is big. So all these things are all these things make a difference right and mobile web perception goes down. But the learning here is this to improve these things that are the technology has advanced sufficiently on mobile web that you can now have an experience which is exactly like like native apps. However, to make that happen you need a lot of JavaScript magic, but a side effect of Java of jumping straight into JavaScript and creating a great experience is that JavaScript also deteriorates absolutely deteriorates the performance. Of your web page, if not done intelligently right so there are there are certain ways where you can not sacrifice performance but usually companies don't focus on that. And they basically jump into creating that interactive. Small animation experience. And the takeaway is that other or the hidden learning here is that you need to build in in house JavaScript experience within your engineering and product teams. So that you know, so that you can improve the performance of your mobile web product without sacrificing without sacrificing performance. And in mind your performance is is actually a feature. I would I would suggest that whenever you are you're prioritizing features and functionalities and efforts for your product always keep performance as one of the number one features because decrease in performance will give you the largest decrease in your metrics and the reverse is also true. If you improve performance you will see a much better improve most of the times you would see a much better improvement than than a feature right and this is again a good open secret. Let's go to the fifth factor the fifth the fifth factor is is pretty interesting and this is about cookies and usually this is not this is not analyzed and it usually gets missed. But an important, important stat here is that about 30% of Internet users delete their cookies every month. And this number can usually go up by 40% in the first 12 countries or sorry, in developing countries such as India, China, Indonesia, sub Saharan Africa. These are the places where you would see a lot of cookie clearing happening and you can see that one of the top apps in the world for cookie clearing is clean master which has about 500 million. Now, the thing to understand here is that when you when users clear a cookie the next time they visit a website they're considered as as a brand new visitor. And analytics analytics softwares cannot differentiate between the previous visit and the and this one and they. And this increases the number of unique visitors and what happens is that if you remember the conversion rate formula again this inflates the number of users in conversion calculations. So, if you do a quick back and roll up you will realize that about 20% inflation in unique visitors will decrease your percentage by 18% your conversion rate by about 18% up somewhere in that ballpark and that this is a very critical factor. Now what you can do about this is that you can predict it, you can adjust your formula and get the real conversion rate not official. If you don't go there, then you again incorrectly conclude that something to the product is clearly not. The last factor that I want to leave you with is, is that not all traffic is human traffic. And this is again, this again shows up in data analytics, but we need to go a lot deeper to understand which what kind of traffic is and I'm definitely bought traffic like search engine crawlers, papers, pictures of spammers etc. But these visits again should not be part of your denominator, right, because they have 0% chance of converting and they're not real human no matter what you do you cannot, you cannot make a robot by some. And your denominator inflates again this again has the same effect. So imagine if you have a 20% bump in unique visitors, you will realize that your conversion rate drops by about 17, 18% which is actually really big. 18% growth in conversion rate takes years. There are several other factors as well like JavaScript errors and building for browsers which be personally use rather than what we think the users are using etc. But now that you know that, you know, analysis is probably the culprit and not product experience, you can now go ahead and find your own reasons for your own product but hopefully this should have left you with sufficient thought. This is a quick recap of what we discussed as to what are the actions that you can take for each factors in the interest of time I'll move on. But yeah, the top take-aways is deep dive and understand the why behind the numbers before jumping to conclusion, because it can be very costly for you in the long term or costly for the product. It's it always helps to educate your leadership to educate your teams and your stakeholders on the structural differences between platforms that they also understand how to what to expect out of out of metrics from each platform. You can build in-house JavaScript expertise, you've spoken about it, adjust your metric calculation based on the insights that you've got, so that you see the real conversion rates and you can see a true apples to apples comparison rather than the big gap. And ensure that whatever you learn turns into rapid hypothesis into rapid experimentation and show continuous improvement by building these into your product because only then you will be able to build trust in your company and you can use mobile web in the way that it should be used and you can get the value that you that you really that you really can approach it out of it. Thank you so much. And I hope this leaves you with good food for thought so that you can go back to your products and analyze it well. And look for these hidden secrets to improve conversion and explain to others that one needs to be done. Thank you. That was great Karen. Thank you so much for this amazing presentation. Everybody loved it. So now we still have a few minutes for a couple of questions so I'm going to be reading some of the questions from the comments. So the first one is from Michael, and he's asking, thanks Karen question, what's your sense on mobile web versus native app as a starting point for start up with small budget. Sorry, can you repeat the last part starting with. So, what's your sense on mobile web versus native app as a starting point for a startup with small budget. Right. Well, I would, what I would suggest is it depends on the industry that you're in. And in some of the industries and most of the industries where your product might not be a daily scenario, or you don't have enough reasons for for customers to keep keep your product on, you know, on your phone and your mobile. I would suggest experimenting with mobile web first, because you're a startup you're looking for product market fit, and you wouldn't want to invest your energy in trying to promote, promote something that users would immediately uninstall. On the other hand, if you're into messaging the apps and if you're into into apps that you think that users will will benefit from keeping on your phone then go ahead and build in it. So please customize your strategy for the industry that you're in and optimize for learnings. Nice. Okay, Diane is asking, would you explain what level of user experimentation do you do in house user experiments or focus groups in house user experiments or focus groups. Okay, so the user experiments are essentially of two types, what we do it's it's quantitative and it's qualitative. And with quantitative we basically have a big experimentations and we launch MVPs or products to figure out to figure out whether a particular feature is working or not. But with respect to qualitative qualitative isn't just focus groups there are several ways there are customer service if you have a customer service department and they can be a fear they can be source of qualitative feedback. You can go and reach you can go and call customers, ask them questions you have usability studies you have and then you have focus groups as well. And in office sessions where you can call them and talk to them and look at how they actually use your user product or probably wireframes or a product. There are several, several things that you do. But it depends on the time you have it depends on the criticality of the product that you launch. Sometimes the effort is low and you can just launch and launch and see how it's doing. Sometimes effort is high and you would rather be risk early on by talking to customers before long. It depends on the stage of the product development life cycle that you are in and the criticality of the future. Unfortunately, we are running out of time. So I have one last question for you. This is the question that I always ask to all of our speakers, which is, what would be your biggest piece of advice for those who are thinking of breaking into product management and get a job as a programmer here. Right. So I would. So there are the usual suspects about about customer empathy, working backwards from the customer understanding exactly what the customers need, depending on data and analysis rather than your own opinions. But a slightly different, different shaded advice that I would give, which I usually give to pms who asked me this question or firing pms is that get into the mindset of ownership. And what that means is, is that there is no job that is probably not yours right so if there is an issue with marketing product marketing then you have to take ownership of it you have to work with stakeholders. If there are issues in product you have to take ownership ownership of it right up to testing launch analytics, you have to make sure that you're in the mindset of ownership you're the mindset of leadership to make sure that no aspect, no aspect is overlooked. And I think this is critical, because usually we start thinking in terms of functions and I'm marketing person when the person, and we don't think from holistic point of view, and I would I would really suggest getting into those shoes and being comfortable with having a lot of accountability. Great. Thank you. That's a, that's an amazing advice. Thank you so much for all your insights. They were very helpful. Everybody loves it. So thank you very much for taking the time to be with us today was great. So, yeah, before we wrap up. As you guys know we organize these events on a weekly basis so stay tuned as you can go to product school.com and see what the upcoming webinars and AMS we have for the upcoming weeks because we have great speakers. So, in addition to hosting this free event, we also organize courses, all our courses are part time. And what we do here is we train people on how to become a product manager. We have five courses. The first one is about product management percent. And then we have four other courses about coding for managers, data analytics for managers, blockchain for managers and digital marketing for managers. We have 15 campuses worldwide, and we recently opened our online campus. This means that now you can learn product management wherever you are. So if you guys want more information about the onsite events, onsite courses, online courses. We have all the information on our website product school.com. So I just invite you guys to go there and check all the stuff that we have because it's pretty hot. So thank you guys for being here one more week. I hope to see you soon. Thank you guys and take care. Bye guys. Thank you. Bye bye.