Quick MVP using the Job to be done framework: Improving the ATRESplayer amazon firestick app experience
Hello everyone!
Today I am going to talk about the ATRESplayer amazon app. For those that might don’t know, Atresmedia is a very big media company here in Spain. They created lots of shows, they own TV channels, and so on. In 2017 they launched their TV app called ATRESplayer to watch all the shows that they have been launching in the past years.
Whether you have been reading my posts or not, as a Product Manager, I like working on mini-projects, hypotheses, and MVPs. And that is what we are going to talk about today, about one problem discovery, a hypothesis, its assumptions, risks, and a quick MVP.
Background
That said, like everybody else, I am sure that during your day, you found products or services where you spotted something that you may say: “okay, this thing works, but if I could afford/find/buy something better, I will change it for this that I am using”.
That is what happened to me when I found the ATRESplayer amazon app. Long story short, I wanted to watch a show that “apparently” was only on this platform, but at the moment I put my hands on this app, I discovered that at least in this platform (amazon firestick) some things could be improved.
Therefore, once more, I decided to put my PM hat to work on this:
I am going to expose a problem, investigate the user’s motivations, picture the problem, set a hypothesis, prioritize, design a quick MVP and finally select the metrics that we should take care of.
That said, I want to highlight that the ATRESplayer app exists for other kinds of TV platforms like Samsung TV, LG TV, and so on. Today, I am just going to talk about the Firestick version.
Bottom line! Throughout this post, I am going to use a lot of the concept of jobs to be done by Anthony W. Ulwick. Thus, check this out in case you have no idea about the jbtd framework.
Comprehending the situation
Company’s vision
At the moment to craft an idea, we need to be sure that we understand the company’s vision, style, and future goals. So, before starting picturing any solution, I needed to comprehend the company’s scenario.
As soon as I started to investigate the company, I could see that they are one of the top leaders in digital entertainment and communication in Spain. They were one of the tops when the TV was analogic, and now that the users consume entertainment online, they decided to do a strong investment in their digital platform by broadcasting their shows through different platforms as SmartTVs, Online, Youtube, etc.
ATRESplayer grey by 61% vs January 2020 and now they have around 3.8M of users.
Therefore, it is clear that they intend to continue being leaders online by showing valuable news and content to everybody in an innovative way. This last part, the innovation value that is inside their current “vision and mission” is an important cornerstone that I have to respect as a PM.
Thus, based on what I could investigate about them, I am going to imagine for this project that their hypothetical goal is to improve the app to continue attracting new users to their platform.
Users
We have the same approach here but with the users, we cannot craft any idea without knowing in advance who are the stakeholders, and what are the jobs to be done. Since I am doing a quick MVP, I decided to use the interviews that I did to craft my user personas based on the jobs to be done that they were trying to get solved. Next, I sorted them by how they use the app.
- The Geek:
Wants to watch every trending show and share his/her opinions using Twitter.
- The impatient:
She only has few minutes a day to watch whatever is relevant so needs an intuitive way to start the show as fast as she can.
- The retired:
Now that she has time she likes to check every show that matches her preferences. She doesn’t use any social media to comment on what she is watching. Instead, she prefers to chat with her friends while having a coffee.
- The observer:
It doesn’t matter what is on the TV, he only wants something informative on broadcast just to be updated.
Common Traits:
The goal here is to know what are the jobs to be done (motivations) that users are looking for at the moment to use the ATRESplayer app. As soon as we have an idea about their common traits, we have to select the user persona that we are going to target. Remember, even if there are a lot of companies that love building tools for everybody, to assure our success we must target one type of customer.
Based on our hypothetical business goal, to be the streaming app with most users in Spain, I decided to target the Geek user for the following reason. The better NPS or net promoter score, the more people I will have recommending my app to other users. Because my objective is to increase the number of users, I consider that the Geek is who shows most engage with other people online. And that usually drives trends, and more people are interested in what is going on in the app.
Next, let’s check our app performance vs competitors' apps.
Product competitor analysis
This is a quick MVP so I just picked the direct competitors where I analyzed aspects as price, core features, delighted features, and so on. By doing that, I could visualize the performance of my product vs competitor’s products. In other words, the jobs to be done that my competitors were solving. Sometimes, you can spot some features or opportunities that maybe you weren’t aware, but are giving your competitors a competitive advantage.
Discovering the problem
For this project, I used two things as a cornerstone for my problem discovery process: the interviews, and my personal experience as a customer.
Both experiences helped me at the moment to state the jobs to be done that customers were trying to obtain by using our product. Next, I did a list of the jobs to be done that I found and then prioritized which problem would be the best one to solve/reinforce based on if we were solving the job to be done or not.
The list of jobs to be done, desired outcomes, and job mapping
Here you have the list of the job statements that I found while I was doing my interview process. The main objective of doing this is to obtain the user’s motivation. Observing the following chart, we can observe the job statements (motivations), main problems that I found during my interviews, and desired outcomes.
As I said in the previous point, my goal is to increase the number of users using the app, and to do that, I selected the user target who most engage, the Geek. The main motivation behind this user is to watch popular shows while commenting on them online and to better understand the process it takes him/her to fulfill this job, I created a job map.
Observing the following map, it takes 3 stages to watch a show. Those are planning, preparation, enjoy the show. For each stage, we have a number of steps that we do to continue the process. Finally, we have in blue the desired outcomes that customers desire for each step.
In other words, what is important for them at the moment to complete the step of the process more efficiently or quickly, etc.
Now that we know the desired outcomes by step, we can start to picture the solution.
Picturing the solution
Okay, so in a perfect world, we would have to prioritize which one to solve first and then continue with the next one and so on. However, we are doing a quick MVP and I don’t work for ATRESplayer so I am just going to pick one option based on a formula that also belongs to the Job to be done Framework, the opportunity algorithm.
- Opportunity score= outcome importance + max ( outcome importance- outcome satisfaction). If the score is 10 or over it means that the outcome is underserved.
Based on the surveys that I did and the analysis of the job map, we have 3 desired outcomes we must improve to increase the user experience and as a result, the NPS. Those are:
- Reduce the number of ads while I am watching the show. Score 12
- Minimize the effort it takes to recognize what shows are free. Score 11.2
- Increase the efficiency it takes to resume a show that I was previously watching. 10.8
That means that the first one, reduce the number of ads while I am watching the show is the most underserved outcome. Now I have to picture some ideas based on this problem.
The hypothesis and ideas
Thus, my hypothesis is:
I believe that the free-users have a problem at the moment of watching show because of the big number of ads that they have to watch.
If we build an efficient way to show the ads that we are showing, the NPS will increase and the number of dropouts while watching something will decrease.
After all the work I have done, I set my could hypothesis around it. Now it is time to picture some solutions.
At this moment I came up with a list of solutions that I filtered using the ROI matrix.
That said, I selected the option that is showing all the ads at the beginning of the show so we eliminate the interruptions while we are watching the episode. However, this is the idea now I need to know if this is a feasible option so I created one A/B testing with the following option.
Wireframing & Metrics
For this step, I used Figma as I did in my last project, it is relatively easy to use and I can sketch whatever comes to my mind. My solution looks like this:
Intending to create a feature that could allow the user to select how to watch the inevitable ads, I decided to add a tiny step before starting the show where the user could select between two options.
Now when it comes to metrics, our objective is to increase the NPS so we could get more customers using our app. While non-premium users must watch at least some ads to continue watching the episode. My hypothesis set that by allowing them to chose the “how”, customer satisfaction will increase.
Because we are giving them two options, with time we will know which option is the most liked by customers so eventually, we could eliminate the one that is not being selected. I would recommend that at least 75% of the users select one option over the other.
Conclusions
For this project, I only could gather qualitative data rather than quantitative data. With more data (number of people), I could obtain a larger number of unserved desired outcomes and maybe some more important. Even that, my objective was to try the Job to be Done framework in a real scenario so even with few people, I consider that we discovered an important pain point for the users using the framework.
At the beginning of the project, I had an idea of what kind of feature I wanted to develop based on my 30 hours of experience using the app. Nonetheless, after using the framework I could discover other kinds of pain points, and most importantly, with more relevance than the idea that I had at the beginning.
That is why I am very happy that even after my guess was wrong, I could prove that the framework works. Regarding the outcomes, there are a lot of factors that influence the growth of a streaming app like innovative content, aesthetics, and so on.
Nevertheless, with this project, we can see that usability is an important factor for the user.
Contact
In case you are starting as a PM and are interested in knowing more about how I developed each part of the project, please contact me to:
