Today we post the latest article with abstracts from the Product.Degree product management course . In it, a student of the kirillkobelev course talks about business models of applications (fluently), features (in detail), and his own experience in product management (a little bit).

Earlier in the series:
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→ Part 1 - who are product managers and a little about design.
→ Part 2 - about the stages of application development.
→ Part 3 - about monetization and management of the team.
→ Part 4 - about ASO and Data Science.

Lecture 6. Fichering, or Go there, I do not know where

Unlike the king of motivation, Mark Ten, the creator of one of the most popular organizers of personal affairs and goals of Chaos control, Dmitry Tarasov, was extremely brief:
Get, says, - things done.

Dmitry’s application has been featured on Google Play and the App Store many times (and if I don’t confuse anything, even in the Windows Phone Store). A feature is an editorial compilation of applications in a category. Both platforms strictly select candidates for the feature, and getting into the selection brings a huge wave of organic traffic.

Getting into a feature is a trick from a series of banal and at the same time difficult to implement: the parameters themselves are trivial, but to achieve a breakthrough for each of them is worth a lot of effort.

• The quality of the application. The first obvious and hellishly complex aspect. Quality in the broadest sense means lightness, absence of bugs, prompt resolution of problems, pleasant design as part of the platform’s design code, and user-friendly interface. Cool should be app, yum fingers.
  
  
• Multiplatform. A bit unexpected, but this is a plus in karma even from the point of view of the parties themselves. If you find a worthy application in the functional category, you most likely want to install it on Android, on your iPhone, on your Mac, and on your desktop PC.
  
  
• Demand And this is probably the most important point - before getting into the collection, your application should already be needed. And not five of your classmates and (if possible) not five hundred of schoolchildren purchased, but real living people who write praise and put five stars in the rating.

In addition to editorial collections, there is also such a fashionable thing as “Novelties” - by the way, they bring up to 20 thousand downloads if you are lucky. The list of new applications is updated about once a week and in fact serves to show that something changes in the applications. It is appropriate to recall once again that in order to get into the feature, you need to demonstrate active work on the product. Even the coolest functionality, abandoned by developers halfway, will not be able to conquer the cold hearts of Apple or Google employees.

By the way, the applications in the collections are really recommended by the technogiant employees, and this should be taken into account. Remember, successful communication with the outside world is one of the most important tasks of the product manager, so any opportunity to communicate with platform representatives should be used. There are specialized conferences, round tables and, God forgive me, mitapes where you can meet the right person. Carry a napkin with you, prepare an elevator speech, and everything will be fine with you.

The safe haven in the feature world is the collections : they live long, but bring relatively little, from 300 to 1,000 downloads per day. Such collections have rather low visibility, although the traffic that comes to them is super-relevant.

After all, if collections are compiled, then it is necessary for someone?

Surprisingly (in fact, no), but the sites think not only about the users, but also about themselves. On the one hand, it’s terribly convenient for us, the users, to open a collection of topics and choose the best email client in the world. On the other hand, selections help introduce new technologies - handoff, continuity, remember these words? So this is a good way to get developers to add new features to applications. Google can sometimes point directly to the development it needs. Perhaps it is time to open pickup courses for product managers: the GR appeared in the PR sphere, so why not AppStoreR?

What then is the catch?

No trick at all. The feature cannot serve as a support for the strategic development of the product, because - right, before getting into the selection your product should be needed by someone.

There are 3 simple arguments against picking a feature on the altar:

• Unpredictability. No one knows if his application will get into at least some selection, and if it does, then for how long.
• Instability. As the classic wrote, “the bad thing is that he is sometimes suddenly mortal.”
• Ambiguity. If you read an article about working with data, you probably already set up a lot of formulas and predictions, and a sharp wave of downloads will surely break you. When it subsides (and this will definitely happen), the product manager will take a long time to figure out where the result of his hard work with ASO is, and where the incoming traffic is.

Interesting fact: it is noticed that in Google Play, massive semi-organic traffic reduces the average rating.

Lecture 7. Vinaigrette

Below are a few small pieces, not tall to a separate chapter, but useful for a novice product manager.

Dmitry Tarasov (Chaos Control) about business models

Practice shows that by far the most effective earnings model for an application is a subscription. But since the cost of attracting a new user is growing, it is likely that the subscription will soon cease to pay off. In such a situation, the secret of success is to:

1. keep user as long as possible
2. offer him truly unique content, and
3. set relatively expensive in-app purchases.

A small life hacking: attracting new users and increasing profitability can be tried at the build level. The freemium application will drive the installation, and a full-fledged paid one will finish off with money.

The task of the product manager in this tack is to strike a balance between optimizing costs and creating good content. The user should see the value of the product not in the only key feature, but in the service that accompanies it.

Mark Ten (Sports.ru) about optimization

Two easy ways to optimize semantics if you are a very, very lazy person:

• Walk through the keywords in the store for your category;
• Go to App Annie and see how the top looks and, in general, the market in your category.

Perhaps all you need is a less competitive environment in which you can get up with less effort.

Some useful analytical tools:

• Sensor Tower - mobile analytics;
• Similar Web - traffic research;
• Priori Data is another mobile analytics resource;
• ASODesk / AppFollow - search engine optimization in app stores, working with semantics.

How I became a product manager

Having worked for many years as a project manager, I was convinced of the benefits of introductory training on the project: it is important that you understand a little bit what is happening and what kind of bird language we speak. During the intensive period of Product.Degree, I got into the skin of a mobile application product manager for 6 weeks, and I want to say: if we all treat our business as a product that requires attention, investment and a clear development plan, the world will definitely get a little better.