Facebook should hire ‘ME'
By: Biswajeet Das
Tags: Product Strategy, User Experience, User Experience Design, Product Management, User Research

How thinking like a Product Manager can help an Entry Level UX Designer Grow in the Industry

We will start with a few questions:

A. As a creative person have you ever wished that Facebook should have some new features(some too imaginary but some possible to build) added to the app which you can use to fulfill your new desires?

For example: Being able to add songs to your stories from your phone storage too and not just from the list of what Facebook provides or maybe being able to add a video cover pic.

B. If your answer is yes, you must have also thought that other people using Facebook would love it too and if gets implemented these new product features with proper marketing strategy would increase user engagement, attract new users, and even have chances of bringing back old users to the app who once upon a time used the app but not been using it anymore because they find Instagram more interesting.

C. You also must have thought that people who are just like you and are having similar motivations, goals, behaviors, and attitudes towards using the app would definitely love these new features. And you start thinking that there’s a new Niche that Facebook should tap on to enhance their experience by fulfilling their requests.

C. Also have you ever thought that there should be an improvement in the interface of Facebook, the user flows and the way you do things inside the app to enhance the experience and make the app more desirable ?

And

D. Maybe in the hopes of landing a creative job there you might have also some times thought of sending them emails suggesting some new product feature ideas and other suggestions to improve the overall experience of using a already existing feature or the entire app.

You may also have thought that maybe Facebook should hire you and broadly these are the reasons why —

a. You think that can imagine new product features that will increase user satisfaction by increasing the product's brand value.

b. You absolutely love solving problems and you think you can add to growth — user acquisition, user activation and user engagement.

Hurray! You’re on the right track. You’re a very creative person.

But every company has its priorities. Maybe they’ll add the features you thought of very soon.

The features you have imagined which you thought will be great if ever implemented must have come to your mind from —

a. Your experiences of using similar apps or you saw someone using an app that has features that you think can be also added to Facebook.

b. Experience of working as an Entry Level UX Designer who has been mostly involved in only the production areas of the Design. You know Design Thinking, building prototypes, user journeys, personas, and archetype building. You have the knowledge of building an app or a website.

Most of us from the creative field is naturally in the SCAMPER mode most of the time. That is another reason why we have that innovation mindset and we easily start to think about new features and even start thinking about its use cases. Ideas come to our mind very naturally.

SCAMPER is actually an acronym and each letter stands for one thinking technique: Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to another use, Eliminate, and Reverse. We use one of these or combinations of more than one to find solutions to our problems.

You can check out this link to understand SCAMPER Method in detail —

https://www.cleverism.com/idea-generation-problem-solving-using-scamper-technique/

It’s very natural for us to get onto the creative mode as we are very used to thinking creatively and that’s why we are called Designers. We Design Products, Services, Experiences, and Business. But since being Designers we don’t usually take the decisions regarding prioritizing product features or capabilities we usually lack that mindset of a Product Manager or a Product Owner to see the bigger picture.

Check this link below to understand how Product Managers work —

https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/business/product-management-main-stages-and-product-manager-role/

If you are into the research you would know how product strategies are built or how teams prioritize work to be done or products or features to be built. That is the reason why many big companies these days try and run Design Sprints or have Working Sessions where everyone or one or two member from each team joins the sessions.

But Product Managers cannot just release new product features based on creative ideas of dream product features. They already have so many opportunities competing for scarce resources and hence it’s not so easy to decide which features will best fit the product. It needs lots of strategizing. They cannot blindly add any feature just because someone told him that this feature should be added to the product or this capability can be added to the feature.

Some of the things which they try to avoid are:

a. Prioritizing product features and capabilities based on what the competitors are doing. But they use both User and Market Research insights to prioritize product features and adding capabilities to them.

b. Prioritizing product features based on requests by the sales team. When the sales team interacts directly with the end-users or the buyers of the product they do get requests for new features or capabilities by users. Listening to those without any hard evidence is something they try and avoid. That’s why if you suggest a new feature to Facebook it won’t be that’s easy to add it.

Things which they do:

They work with a plan — they have roadmaps and prioritization frameworks which they have to employ. They work together with the Product, Design, Marketing, User Research, Customer Experience, Engineering, and also the sales team. Research gives direction to the product.

Some strategies and prioritization framework which the product team apply to decide features for their product are:

a. Value versus complexity quadrant — It’s a prioritization framework that allows a product team to evaluate each initiative according to how much value the initiative will bring, and how difficult or complex it will be to implement.

b. Weighted Scoring — It's a prioritization framework designed to help us to prioritize features and other initiatives on our product roadmap. With this framework, initiatives are scored according to some common criteria based on how much benefit it would bring and finally ranked by their final scores.

c. Kano Model — It’s a theory for product development and customer satisfaction. It can help teams determine which features will satisfy and even delight customers.

d. Buy A Feature — it’s an approach to prioritizing the development of a product by making a group of customers or stakeholders tell which feature would they buy or value the most. It’s a little similar to the Desirability Test which we perform during User Research.

e. Opportunity Scoring — It’s a way to prioritize feature development by identifying the features that customers consider important but underdeveloped. Here it’s about finding a scope for development and enhance user experience.

f. Affinity grouping — It’s a brainstorming method in which participants organize their ideas and identify common themes.

g. Story Mapping

It’s a method of arranging user stories to create a more holistic view of how they fit into the overall user experience.

You can read and understand these strategies and prioritization frameworks in detail by just clicking on this link below —

https://www.productplan.com/strategies-prioritize-product-features/

Product prioritization also depends on the brand value, the mission, and the vision of the company.

Facebook's mission as a company, is to make the world more open and connected, and when deciding what features to add to the product or what capability to add to the features they first look at their users and what percentage of the users that feature or the capability will benefit in the long run. They look at how much value they will be adding even if it can be done by making small changes to a product.

Conclusion

An idea that is not backed up by User and Market Research has very less value. So whenever our instincts tell us that this new feature should be added or this capability should be allowed in a feature we must back it up with good research and evidence and also try and think from the Product Managers or Product owners point of view. Employ product strategies but before that do some ground research on the users and the market. Learn about the business model. After all that if you feel that your your research is good enough and you’ve targeted the right sample — research would help you to iterate your own idea and work on improving it till you think it has significantly improved. If possible show the stages of iterations and how you’ve done Design Thinking to solve a user problem and how it will enhance experience keeping in mind of the companies values, missions and visions. If you do this homework before you pitch any idea to anyone even if it is to Facebook. There are high chances that you may end up landing a job there. Best of Luck.

If you want to understand more about how User Research aligns all the departments in a company together and gives direction to Product or Design and also make strategies to hook the users I would love it if you could go through this article where I’ve shown a User Research that I’ve done for an E-Commerce Startup. Here is the link:

https://link.medium.com/3x5xnMSxCcb

Finally, some more links to read to know more about how product features are prioritized:

https://thepathforward.io/how-know-what-product-feature-you-should-build-next/

https://sproutsocial-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/sproutsocial.com/insights/facebook-features/?amp_js_v=a6&_gsa=1&&usqp=mq331AQHKAFQArABIA%3D%3D#aoh=16096703424905&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fsproutsocial.com%2Finsights%2Ffacebook-features%2F

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/engineering-systems-division/esd-260j-logistics-systems-fall-2006/lecture-notes/lect5.pdf

https://thepathforward.io/how-know-what-product-feature-you-should-build-next/

https://pm.stackexchange.com/questions/11923/who-decides-to-add-new-feature-in-any-project-or-not-and-what-factors-are-taken