Product Case Study: Product Development Lifecycle | Cohort Based Courses (Part-2)
In this series of posts about the product development journey, we are going to look at, and experience the different stages a product goes through in its lifecycle. Our objective is to try to solve users’ problems and address the pain points as we progress further.
In the first part, we understood our users through surveys and interviews and defined their pain points. We also analyzed high-level solutions and came up with potential features.
In this part, we’re going to work on the following —
- Create User Persona on basis of user research
- Prioritize key features to identify MVP
- A high-level Product Roadmap
- Develop user flows for key product components
- Come up with Wireframes for product features
- Key Product Metrics
To get the context, please go through the 1st part of this case study —
This case study is a part of ProductHood’s APM fellowship program and I’ve had the pleasure of working with an amazing team — Kopal Jaiswal, Pavan Preetham Immandi, Sambhaji Sawant, and Dheeraj Tiwari. Thanks guys! 😀🥂
User Personas 👥
Before starting the case, we had a basic understanding of the user's behavior, expectations, and frustrations. This understanding helped us establish who to reach out to and what shall we ask for.
After we conducted the survey and talked to a few users, we got to know them more. Our key personas are —
Key Product Features and MVP
On the basis of the user research, we were able to prioritize the problems we need to solve. We used the impact vs effort exercise to understand what we need to solve first and how.
To start off with cohort-based learning and to address the pain points of lack of interaction, engagement, and expert’s time, we proposed to launch the absolute lean version of ‘Co-Learn’ by using as many third-party tools as possible. We believe that this model would help us establish the quality of the courses and the community.
In terms of product, we have identified the following features to be the part of MVP -
Cohort based learning -
- Live classes with mentors — To tackle the drop-off rate, we want the content to be exclusive and engaging with live content and QnA. We’ve chosen ‘Zoom’ as the content delivery platform.
- Content Management — To manage the session notes, assignments, case studies, and articles, we have decided to choose ‘Slack’. The ability to create, host, add/manage participants through slack channels shall allow us to achieve the short-term goal of 3rd party-based content management system. The content for mentors would be curated with the help of designers, and content creators.
- Community Management — we have decided to recruit community managers who would manage participants’ subscriptions, access to slack channels, and invitations to ‘Zoom’ live sessions.
Courses Marketplace -
4. Explore courses — The ability for the users to browse through our course offerings on our website (optimized for computer and mobile)
We plan to include separate pages for each course which shall provide the following information —
- Course details
- Course structure
- Course preview
- Instructor details
(Rationale: Course marketplace is the first place learners and new instructors visit in order to know more about the courses and instructors/mentors. Therefore, we want this feature to be a part of the MVP)
Product Roadmap
The roadmap helps the teams and the stakeholders understand a high-level plan around the development and the delivery. We have designed our roadmap on the basis of prioritised features and pain points.
User Flow & Wireframes
User flows and wireframes help designers, developers and the product team establish a common understanding of what the users expect from the platform and what could the experience look like.
Our team brainstormed on the design and UX ideas to come up with high-level workflows and wireframes. The wireframes are designed in Balsamiq:
Key Product Metrics
Since we are starting with an MVP and our initial goal is to find the product-market fit, the metrics we are going to focus on are-
Retention :
- Retention Rate — Active learners/total learners. The retention rate will help us establish the quality of courses and the engagement pattern. Target Retention rate — 70%
- Bounce Rate — % of users navigating away from the website after visiting only one page. Bounce rate will help us understand the user experience on the website. Target bounce rate > 50%
Acquisition :
- Unique Visits on the website — This metric will help us understand the footfall we are attracting to the website
- Traffic mode (Paid/Organic) — As we intend to acquire customers through organic (google search results, LinkedIn, Instagram) and paid modes (Google Ads), we want to understand where our traffic is coming from.
- Cost of acquiring customers (CAC): As we intend to spend money on acquiring customers through targeted ads, it’s imperative that we track this cost. To get this cost, we’ll add up the costs associated with acquiring new customers (the amount we’ve spent on marketing and sales) and then divide that amount by the number of customers we acquired.
Activation
- % of users who register for a course/total unique visitors — This metric will help us understand users’ responses to the quality of information we have on courses pages.
- %of Users who Pay for a course/total number of course registrations
- %of Users who join a course after opting for waitlist/total number of users on waitlist
With this, we conclude this series of the product development lifecycle. If you have any feedback for me, feel free to drop comments, or find me on LinkedIn :)
