I am currently learning Product Management skills from the Institute of Product Leadership. During this learning journey, I came across the course called Digital Product Management — mostly dealing with designing Value Proposition. To check my level of understanding I took up a challenge to assess my understanding for this key skill.
Challenge was — To add one feature that would improve Netflix
This is how I started —
Research
I conducted Primary Research (Ethnographic & Online Survey) and came up with this persona.
User Interviews:
Sid — “None, I am quite happy with all the features”. Sashank — “How about the price? can it be reduced?”.
User Persona
Netflix as a product has achieved its pinnacle of business and set up the benchmark for many other products. What else might be left to improve? Well, even Lionel Messi said, “I still have a lot of room for improvement. For example, I want to shoot equally well with both feet”. There must be something to improve. Let’s find it out.
I have been using Netflix for almost 3–4 years. I want to add a list of features to improve the experience. I will divide these into two categories — major and minor — and for this post we will focus only on the major feature that can be improved.
Secondly, to measure the effectiveness I used the following metrics.
The North Star Metric
Netflix is a video streaming and production company. It can be watched over the Website, TV & Mobile App. Netflix is classified under Over-The-Top (OTT) content streaming platform. Its current revenue model falls under Subscription-based streaming services. Considering the revenue model of Netflix, I will consider the North Star Metric of Netflix as the Number of Movies and Shows Watched. Multiple metrics contribute towards the growth of the North Star, the Cost Per Install (CPI), Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV), Daily Active Users (DAU) & Monthly Active Users (MAU), Stickiness Ratio, Average Session Length, App downloads, App Reviews & Ratings, etc.
A Feature I Want to Add
Being a user of Netflix I struggled a few times to figure out if I have already watched a video (a movie or an episode of a series) — there should be a ticked mark of completion against the video. In addition to that, there should be a percentage indication of completion.
Example: You have watched 20% of the Movie or S2E2.
Hypothesis for the Additional Feature
Users spend 5 to 20 seconds watching the previously watched content. Although, an already watched video will have a progression bar below the thumbnail of the video, in most cases it is hidden. Until the cursor of the mouse is placed above the video it is not clear to the user that the video is watched or not — or if it is watched, how much has been watched.
Experiment to Run for Testing the Change
The test will be Multivariate testing. The two new features — Tick Mark & Percentage Completion — will be incorporated. The quantitative data will be observed and noted.
Quantitative data: “Time spent to Click” and “Time taken to move from a video to another” after spotting the Tick Mark & Percentage Completion.
Later these two metrics can be compared based on before and after incorporating the features.
Originally published on Medium.