Key Summary
- Productlife is an app product designed and developed from scratch by UX/UI Rookies Community, allowing product knowledge learners to find learning partners
- Served as founder and product manager, managing a 12-person team, guiding team and independently conducting user research, defining product strategy, roadmap, and specifications based on user needs, leading design and development teams to deliver the product
- Built remote collaboration and agile development processes, guided design and development documentation writing, ensuring a balance between on-time project delivery and maintainability
Background
The goal of the UX/UI Rookies Community is to help students and career changers in the UX/UI field prepare for entering the job market through various resources. The most important aspect of a community is interaction, so while continuously organizing events and producing knowledge-based content, I also started to consider the feasibility of using a product to solve problems, while hoping to provide community members with experience in participating in real product development.
Before entering the product development process, I organized C-Camp to explore various product opportunities through workshops. After several workshops, we generated the design concept for Productlife, expanding the goal of accumulating UX/UI industry knowledge to the entire product field, and reforming a fixed design and development team for ongoing collaboration. The team includes one product manager (myself), two Design Leads, four designers, one Research Lead, two researchers, one Developer Lead (also serving as backend and TPM), one backend developer, and one App frontend developer.
Vision: Enabling Everyone to Grow by Finding Growth Partners
There are already many channels for learning product knowledge, so why do we need to create another product to solve this problem?
Everyone has their own accumulated knowledge assets. We believe that when solving problems encountered in personal growth, we shouldn't overly focus on the labels of those we interact with (such as company, experience, community influence, etc.). These labels don't guarantee that answers will solve problems. However, the current situation is that when seeking answers, people often pay too much attention to labels rather than the substantial insights they can gain.
The ideal scenario we envision is something everyone has likely experienced: many problems can be clarified simply by chatting with friends or colleagues. Therefore, we believe that all experiences are worth sharing, regardless of the sharer's status. When these resources are liberated, the service and economic benefits can have tremendous growth potential.
Let's first look at the mainstream learning channels in Taiwan:
- Curated resources:
- Courses, lectures, workshops
- Fan pages, groups
- Medium, YouTube
- Mentor Programs:
- Mentor-finding platforms
- Periodic community meetups
- One-time personal coaching
The above mainstream learning methods face issues of information becoming outdated and difficult to integrate. Creating content and organizing events involve significant human and time investments, yet cannot be reused. There are now many mentor programs that focus on one-on-one or one-to-many interactions, but active mentors are hard to find, with limited human and time resources.
Therefore, how we create a scalable and sustainable service to help users find suitable learning partners, enabling mutual growth, has become the key problem we need to solve. We categorized these services based on their immediacy and the degree of knowledge structuring, positioning Productlife as a product that pursues immediacy and sharing of unstructured knowledge.
In an era with so many online learning resources, the continued existence of book clubs, workshops, and other intensive interpersonal exchange scenarios indicates that existing products or services have not met the needs in these scenarios. Productlife was born for this purpose.
In addition to consolidating our advantage in the first quadrant, as the process will generate a large amount of information content, in the long term, we can also expand into the second or third quadrants. For example, we can convert conversations into article form for reading, or allow users to freely enter others' chat rooms like Clubhouse.
Target User Profiles and Needs
During and after the workshop period, we conducted user research, summarizing 3 learning stages and 3 behavioural modes and verifying that the greatest value provided by the UI/UX Rookie Community in its operation is a sense of security.
- From novice to expert, there are three learning states: uncertainty, ups and downs, and confidence
- From passive to active, there are three possible behavioural modes: avoidance, growth, and connection creation
- Overall, we received a lot of feedback about anonymity providing a sense of security and privacy, consistent with our previous findings
Problem Exploration: Interviewing 5 Novice Learners to Understand Learning States
Uncertainty
Simply wanting to review their understanding of theoretical knowledge through practical application.
Ups and Downs
Having established their own learning goals, participating in relevant workshops, and complementing with study notes, validating their learning of related methodologies through occasional output during the process.
Confidence
Purposefully establishing their learning journey, learning strategies, and validation approaches. Producing practical projects through competitions or presentations, validating the value of past learning and project outputs not only through self-perception but also through third-party recognition.
Clarifying Scenarios: Re-interviewing 10+ Novice Learners to Define Customer Behaviors
Connection: Sharing What's Close to Heart
- Happy just to interact and spend time with people in similar fields
- Willing to spend time or energy to provide resources to more people because they know how hard-earned their own knowledge is
- Because talking to people can potentially lead to new information, and collaboration can expand new abilities
Growth: Excluding Interactions with Entry-Level Learners
- Primarily focused on absorbing knowledge, may have a growth goal, will evaluate whether interacting with someone can achieve that goal before deciding to engage
- Growth is usually linked to interacting with people of similar or higher experience levels
- Those with relatively more experience: Feel they don't want to interact with less experienced people for now
- Those with relatively less experience: Fear they won't be able to contribute
Avoidance: Comfortable in the Comfort Zone
- Believe there might not be a need for side projects or interactions with others
- Might take action, but won't stray too far from the comfort zone
- Side projects might be topics that one isn't necessarily interested in or passionate about investing much in, but are convenient to do
- Socializing might be left to chance, it's good if there's resonance, if not, it's okay, there might be opportunities to meet again in the future
Validating User Value: Anonymity Brings Privacy + Eliminates Stranger Development
- Not only are names and profile pictures private, but job titles or companies might be as well
- Matching, compared to random encounters, can reduce the psychological barrier of stranger development. The meeting is fate, allowing both parties to start conversations because of this fate
- This makes people who originally had communication needs more willing to take action
Summary: Ideal Early User Selection
Based on behaviours and states, we can draw a quadrant to display user personas and select seed users from it. We've circled A, B, and C as our three main target groups. Subsequent user acquisition or operations can be developed based on this.
Design Goal: Drive "Connection" to Help Users Grow to be "Confident"
In the long term, we need to guide user behaviour towards connection. We expect to segment users based on retention and interaction after product launch, then conduct more user research, design ideation, and testing for refined customer groups.
Design Strategy: Create a Learning Experience Prioritizing Social Interaction
Based on our insights, while organization, search, and content remain important, we focus on how to match users with the right people, and achieve a personalized learning loop through interactions with matched partners and the entire community.
In essence, our product is a knowledge-learning product, but we start with social interaction, creating a learning experience based on community and friendship.
User Acquisition Priority
People with "connection" behaviour will actively create connections, are more likely to enjoy our product, and may even promote it. Once we have a certain number of users, it becomes easier to find people with similar growth goals and experiences, so those with "growth" behaviour will be the second wave of target users.
From a state perspective, both confident and fluctuating users already have output habits, so B and C are more important than A, and users who create "connections" within B and C are even more crucial.
Product Design
Our product has three main interconnected features:
- Connection: New connection opportunities are available daily on this platform
- Posting: By updating one's status or thoughts, each person's profile becomes more personalized and relatable
- Chat: Everyone can chat with their connections, and only through conversation can both parties add each other as friends, enabling access to more information about each other
/w=3840,quality=90,fit=scale-down)
This product design reflects our three long-term product goals:
- Create a social-first learning experience
- Help people discover new knowledge previously unexplored
- Create a positive dialogue and problem-solving experience
Product Metrics
As the overall product strategy will revolve around user research insights and core data, I defined Productlife's North Star metric and customer lifetime value measurement as follows:
- North Star metric: Number of successful matches; a match is considered successful when a user sends a matching message on the matching page
- Customer Lifetime Value: CLTV = Daily active successful matches * Weekly matching frequency
I believe this metric can reflect whether our value proposition is successfully perceived and accepted by users, and this metric should also reflect retention performance.
Product Strategy
In July 2021, Productlife delivered the full design of the first version as shown above, entering the development acceleration phase. At the same time, we also began to consider what our next stage of product strategy would be.
The core delivery in the first phase was mainly a communication and networking tool, including 1) a one-on-one anonymous communication mechanism for quickly initiating chat rooms and conversations, and 2) the opportunity to expand one's social circle through pure interest matching. The challenges that this type of product would face are listed as follows:
- Lack of a moat
- No corresponding high-frequency demand
- Lack of good incentive mechanisms to enhance user loyalty and growth
These challenges could potentially have a significant impact on user retention. Therefore, the main product goal for the next phase is to launch features that improve retention. To this end, we have set the following main product strategies for the next phase:
- Deepen existing interactions
- Make high-quality content more easily accessible
- Enhance the sense of immediate growth, from internal satisfaction to external vanity
Key Learnings in Product Team Management
- Achieve a balance between "flexible execution" and "precise specifications"
- Abandon all "can do" requirements, concentrate resources on doing the "most" impactful things
- Understand team members' growth goals, and view growth as a team mission
- Empower the team, enabling members to go from being responsible to exceeding expectations
For detailed content, please see the following Medium article:
中文版：Productlife - 找到你的產品職涯學伴
- Productlife 為 UX/UI 新手村從 0 到 1 設計與開發的 App 產品，讓產品知識學習者能在此找到共同學習的夥伴
- 擔任創辦人與產品經理，管理 12 人團隊，引導團隊與獨立進行用研，從用戶需求出發定義產品策略、路線、規格，領導設計與開發團隊落地產品
- 搭建遠端協作與敏捷開發流程，引導設計與開發文件撰寫，確保項目準時交付與可維護性的平衡
背景
UX/UI 新手村社群的目標是協助 UX/UI 領域的學生、轉職族群能夠透過各式資源做好邁入職場的準備。一個社群最重要的就是要有交流，因此在不斷舉辦活動與產出知識型內容的過程中，我也開始思考使用產品解決問題的可行性，同時也希望能藉此提供社群成員累積參與真實產品開發的經驗。
在進入產品開發流程之前，我舉辦了 C-Camp，透過工作坊來探索各種產品機會。在數次的工作坊後，我們產生了 Productlife 的設計概念，將累積 UX/UI 產業知識的目標拓展到整個產品領域，並重新組成固定的設計與開發團隊持續協作，團隊包含一名產品經理（我），兩位 Design Lead，四位設計師，一位 Research Lead，兩位研究員，一位 Developer Lead（兼任後端與 TPM），一位後端，一位 App 前端。
願景：讓每個人都能因找到成長夥伴而成長
現在已經有非常多的產品知識學習管道了，為什麼我們還要做一個產品來解決這樣的問題？
每個人都有各自累積的知識資產，我們認為當在解決個人成長過程中所遇到的問題時，不應該太過於在乎互相交流者身上的標籤（如公司、資歷、社群聲量等等），這些標籤並不保證回答可以解決問題，然而現在的狀況是，大家在尋求解答時，往往過於注重標籤而非實質能獲得的啟發。
我們看見的理想情境大家也應該都經歷過，其實很多問題，只要跟身邊的朋友或同事聊聊，就能夠豁然開朗。所以我們認為，只要是經驗都應值得被分享出來，無論分享者的身份高低。當這些資源被解放，那麼這個服務與經濟效益就有非常大的增長空間。
先看看台灣目前的主流學習管道：
- 整理資源：
- 課程、講座、工作坊
- 粉絲專頁、社團
- Medium、YouTube
- Mentor Program：
- 找 Mentor 平台
- 週期性社群聚會
- 個人單次 Coaching
上述主流學習方式，面臨資訊會老化、難以被整合的問題，且產製內容、舉辦活動都伴隨大量人力與時間成本投入，卻又無法重複利用。現在也有很多重視一對一或一對多交流的 Mentor Program，但活躍的 Mentor 卻難以尋找，人力與時間資源受到限制。
因此，我們如何打造一個可規模化的永續服務，來幫助使用者找到合適的學習夥伴，讓彼此都能成長，就成了我們要解決的關鍵問題。我們將上述這些服務以即時性與知識的結構化程度做劃分，並將 Productlife 定位為追求即時與分享非結構化知識的產品。
在已有那麼多線上學習資源的時代，讀書會、工作坊等密集與人交流的場景持續存在，代表著這些場景中的需求尚未被既有產品或服務所滿足，而 Productlife 就是為此而生。
除了鞏固第一象限的優勢，由於過程會產生大量資訊內容，長期而言我們也能往第二或第三象限進攻，例如可以將對話轉換成文章形式供人閱讀，或是可以像 Clubhouse 任意進入別人聊天室。
目標用戶樣貌與需求
我們於工作坊期間與之後分別進行了一波用戶調研，總結出 3 個學習階段，與 3 個行為模式，並且驗證在運營社群時新手村提供的最大價值：安心感
- 從菜鳥到老鳥，有三個學習狀態：不確定感、時好時壞、信心十足
- 從消極到積極辨別可能的三種行為模式：趨避、成長、創連
- 總體而言收到很多匿名帶來安全感、隱私感的回饋，與先前的發現一致
探索問題階段：訪談 5 位新手學習者了解學習狀態
不確定感
純粹想從實作中檢視自己對理論知識的學習成效
時好時壞
已經建立出自己的學習目標，參與相關的工作坊，並搭配學習筆記，透過過程中偶爾的輸出驗證自己學習相關方法論的成效
信心十足
有目的性的建立自己的學習歷程、學習策略與驗收方向。透過競賽或發表會產出實作專案，除了自己的感受，也透過第三方的肯定驗證過往學習與專案產出的價值
明確情境階段：再度訪談 10+ 位新手學習者，定義顧客行為
連結：分享心之所向
- 只要與相近領域的人交流、相處就會開心
- 因為知道自己所得的得來不易之處，所以願意花時間或精力讓更多人有相關資源
- 因為只要與人對談就有可能獲得新資訊，與人合作就能拓展新能力
成長：能力以下勿入
- 以吸收知識為主，可能有一個成長目標，會透過評估與人交流有沒有辦法達成那個目標而決定是否與之交流
- 通常成長會連結到的就是要與自己經驗差不多，或是更高的人交流才能達成
- 相對有經驗的人：覺得暫時沒有想跟較少經驗的人交流
- 相對少經驗的人：覺得怕沒有貢獻
趨避：安逸於舒適圈
- 認為不一定有需要做 side project 或與人交流
- 可能會行動，但不會脫離舒適圈太多
- side project 可能是做一個自己其實不一定有興趣和熱忱投入很多，但方便做的題目
- 交友可能隨緣，有共鳴的話很好，當下沒 fu 也沒關係，之後有機會說不定會再遇見
驗證用戶價值：匿名帶來隱私感＋免去陌生開發
- 不只是姓名與頭貼是隱私，工作職稱或公司可能也是
- 配對相較隨機遇見，可以減少陌生開發的心理障礙，相遇就是緣分，讓彼此因緣分開啟對話
- 這讓原本就有交流需求的人更願意產生行動
總結：種子用戶圈選
依據行為與狀態，我們可以畫出一個象限來展示用戶畫像並從中圈選種子用戶。我們圈出了 A、B、C 三大塊作為我們的三個主要目標群體。後續的用戶獲取或運營，皆可以此作為展開。
設計目標：透過驅動【連結】，讓用戶成長為【信心十足】
長期而言需讓用戶行為邁向連結，預期產品上線後依據留存與互動將用戶分群，再進行細化客群的更多用戶研究、設計發想和測試。
設計策略：打造以社交為優先的學習體驗
依據我們的洞察，雖然整理、搜尋與內容仍然很重要，但我們專注在如何讓使用者配對到對的人，並透過與配對對象以及整個社群交流，達到個人化的學習閉環
簡言之，我們的產品本質是一個知識學習產品，但我們從社交出發，打造基於社群和交友的學習體驗。
用戶獲取優先序
擁有「連結」行為的這群人會主動創造連結，更有可能會喜愛上我們的產品，甚至推廣我們的產品。而在有了一定的用戶數之後，就更容易尋找相似成長目標與經驗的人，故擁有「成長」行為的會是第二波的目標用戶。
而從狀態維度來看，信心十足與時好時壞皆已有輸出的習慣，因此 B 和 C 相較 A 更為重要，而 B 和 C 中會創造「連結」的用戶則更加重要。
產品設計
我們的產品主要有三個串連在一起的功能：
- 連結：在這個平台上每日都會有新的連結對象
- 發文：透過更新自己的狀態或所思所想，讓每個人的 Profile 更個人化與容易引起共鳴
- 聊天：每個人都能與連結到的對象聊天，而唯有透過對話之後，雙方才能互加為好友，進而查看更多有關對方的訊息
這樣的產品設計反映出了我們三個長期的產品目標：
- 打造社交優先的學習體驗
- 讓大家挖掘以往探索不到的新知
- 創造良好的對話與問題解決體驗
產品指標
由於整體的產品策略將圍繞用研洞察與核心數據開展，我定義了 Productlife 的北極星指標與顧客終生價值的衡量方式：
- 北極星指標：配對成功數；當使用者在配對頁面送出配對訊息，即為配對成功
- 顧客終生價值：CLTV = 每日主動配對成功數*每週配對頻率
我認為這個指標能夠反映我們的價值主張是否成功被用戶所感知與認同，而這個指標也應能夠反映留存表現。
產品策略
在 2021 年 7 月，Productlife 交付了如上展示的第一個版本的全部設計，進入開發提速階段，同時我們也開始思考下一階段的產品策略是什麼。
在第一階段的核心交付，主要是交流與人脈拓展工具，包含 1) 一對一的匿名交流機制，快速開啟聊天室與對話，以及 2) 透過純粹的興趣配對，實現拓展交友圈的機會。而這樣的產品型態會遇到的挑戰如下所列：
- 缺乏護城河
- 沒有對應高頻的需求
- 缺乏良好的激勵機制以提升用戶忠誠與增長
這些挑戰將有可能大幅度的影響用戶的留存，因此下一階段的主要產品目標就是推出提升留存的功能。為此，我們訂定了下一階段主要的產品策略：
- 深化現有互動
- 讓高品質內容更容易取得
- 提升立即成長感，從內在滿足到外在虛榮
產品團隊管理關鍵學習
- 取得「彈性發揮」與「精準規格」的平衡
- 放棄所有「可以做」的需求，集中資源做好「最」有影響力的事情
- 了解成員成長目標，將成長也視為團隊任務
- 賦權團隊，讓成員從負責到超出期望