“It all begins with an idea”.
APERTURE -Capture, Create, Connect, and Experience
Relieving your memories one day at a time…
Introduction to Aperture
Overview:
Aperture is a photo-sharing application with a clear mission to foster connections among individuals through images. By embracing the art of visual storytelling, Aperture empowers users to share their unique narratives, experiences, and emotions with others. Through the platform, individuals can unleash their creativity, while simultaneously preserving cherished memories. Aperture's dedication to facilitating meaningful interactions through images makes it a vibrant community for both amateur and professional visual storytellers alike.
While Aperture’s photo-sharing app is free to use, the company brings in revenue or monetizes the app by selling advertising space.
The Scope:
Context: Aperture is a project I managed in depth from the start of principles to product launch planning as a PM student in Career Foundry, to demonstrate my mastery of the product development lifecycle.
Role: Product Manager
Project scale: December 2023- March 2024
Primary stakeholder: Careerfoundry Product Management Course.
Tools used: Paper and pen, Figma, Miro, Trello, Google Suite, slack, quick player.
The Challenge
The number of active users of Aperture has declined as users interact with the app less and less. Some have stopped using it altogether. The less users interact with the app, the fewer adverts they will see and click on. This ultimately means less advertising revenue for Aperture and is starting to affect the company’s profit or bottom line.
The objective for me as a product manager was to increase user interaction and engagement for Aperture, revitalize interest, and maintain and/or increase user base and revenue.
How did I manage to balance stakeholders' expectations and user needs to align with business strategy? Let's look at the different product phases as I led the team from discovery, through development, to launch.
PHASE 1 - Understand the Product, Align the Team
Stakeholder analysis:
After understanding the company vision and business strategy, I carried out a stakeholder analysis. For my stakeholder analysis, I identified each team member's interest and impact on the product. Understanding each stakeholder’s position is a vital step in future communication during the product development process
Understand your product- Product Principles:
After understanding and analyzing my stakeholders and my product. My next step was to create Apertures product principles. I collaborated with cross-functional teams on a brainstorming and a dot voting session. We came up with the following product principles:
Innovative Features, Filters, and Editing Excellence
Security and Privacy Assurance
Adaptability, Accessibility, and Seamless Connectivity
Simplicity and User-Friendliness
Engaging Collaboration and Creativity Hub
Continuous Improvement
PHASE 2 - Defining the Problem
I started the product discovery phase with a Value-Damage Quadrant Mapping exercise based on current assumptions, which were based on known user pain points and metrics.
What was the objective? I led this exercise to help us prioritize features. The mapping revealed that we assumed that:
Users aged 18 to 24 are switching to competitor apps, Competitor apps have more features that appeal to younger audiences.
Young people are our target user group (aged 18 to 24).
Ad labeling is causing users not to click on ads.
Competitor apps have more features that appeal to younger audiences.
I then came came up with the problem statement:
Problem statement: The level of user interaction with Aperture has noticeably decreased, resulting in a decline in the overall number of active users. Users highly appreciate and are dedicated to utilizing Aperture's editing tools for posting, editing, enhancing photos, and sharing them with their social circles, a trend that historically boosts user engagement. Resolving this issue is crucial not only for maintaining user satisfaction but also for the long-term success of the business.
Moving forward my hypothesis based on research shows that users who browse and download filters demonstrate greater app engagement compared to those who do not. This implies that photo editing functionalities play a vital role in user engagement, and consequently, user retention. Therefore, we believe in enhancing the accessibility, engagement, and user-friendliness of filters, in alignment with our company vision, product principles, and business goals, we can revitalize interest in the app and increase user engagement.
NEXT STEPS...
I needed to validate our hypothesis, but how?
PHASE 3 - User Research
The next crucial step is to carry out our research and understand the data we collect from our user research. Before allocating limited resources to building a solution for our users I needed to be sure that the hypothesis I were working with was valid.
HOW?
I conducted user research alongside the product marketing manager to gather insights and identify key user engagement requirements. We did this through market research, competitor analysis, internal aperture interaction user data, user interviews, user surveys, and analytics. After user research was complete, I analyzed correlations, commonalities, and differences to create a value proposition canvas highlighting user pain points.
Competitor analysis
During our Competitor analysis, we closely examined three prominent competitors alongside Aperture. Competitor A, known for its good filter selection, intuitive interface, reliable and good customer support, and privacy and sharing permissions offers users simplicity and seamless user experience to share their photos on the app. Competitor B, on the other hand, distinguished itself with its extensive music snippet feature, and easy upload features, catering to both amateur users, creatives, and professionals seeking to hone their craft. Meanwhile, Competitor C stood out for its new video feature. By studying these competitors, we gained valuable insights into industry trends and user preferences, informing our strategy for enhancing Aperture's platform and delivering a superior experience to users.
PHASE 3 - User Research (Competitor analysis)
I investigated further and came up with some research outputs. This helped me validate the hypothesis, hence creating a value proposition canvas.
PHASE 3 - User Research (Value Proposition canvas)
I validated the hypothesis. Next, I needed to figure out what the personas and user stories were to ideate solutions to the problem.
PHASE 3 - User Research (User Persona 1)
The results of the user survey helped to identify needs and goals. On this basis, the development of a user persona was fun and easy to manage. I have come up with different personas.
PHASE 3 - User Research (User Persona 2)
PHASE 3 - User Research (User Stories)
As a content creator, I want a seamless, intuitive, and feature-rich photo-sharing app, So that I can express myself, showcase my work, connect with my audience, effortlessly manage my portfolio, and explore creative collaborations.
As a professional photographer, I want to discover new trends, techniques, filters, and inspiration from other photographers within the photo-sharing app community.
As a dedicated user of aperture, I want to have a seamless upload without any performance issues, so that I can enjoy a smooth and reliable experience while using the application to share my cherished moments with my loved ones.
PHASE 4 - Ideation
Brainstorming Session
Using the research findings | led the team in a brainstorming session. We first wrote "how might we..." questions and then we identified product solutions. We ideated on how we might Introduce filter recommendations and an interactive filter creation tool.
Idea Prioritization
I led the team in an IMPACT VS EFFORT MATRIX SESSION followed by SCOREBOARDING, which I like due to its analytical approach. The key determinants that helped us decide which idea to move forward with were:
Impact
Implementation effort
Alignment with business goals.
IDEA: Introduce filter recommendations and an interactive filter creation. Introducing this feature to the app will increase user engagement, interaction, and retention which will ultimately increase the revenue and bottom line for the business because the more users engage with the app, the more they see and click on ads which generates revenue for the business
PHASE 5 - Lo-Fi Wireframing and Prototyping
During the development phase, we used agile prototyping to make quick iterations and gather early user feedback.
Hypothesis guiding prototyping: Create a feature that allows admin users to engage with filter featured collection and an advanced editing feature.
Prototyping Approach:
Create various lo-fi prototypes that address the identified pain points by experimenting with the placement of the "load more" button.
Do in-person user testing of the various prototypes to gather quantitative and qualitative data.
Analyze gathered data from user testing to iterate and improve/refine the prototype.
Prototype A before iterating
PHASE 6 - User Testing, Iteration and MVP
User feedback gathered via sequential A/B testing highlighted the challenging design of the Lightroom feature and didn’t know they were to use the load more button. The challenge here after using the preset filters, users didn’t know what to do when it took them to the Lightroom editing page.
Testing before iteration
Prototype B after iterating
PHASE 6 - User Testing, Iteration and MVP
Changes Made in "B" Prototype:
Improved Preview Feature
Optimized Customised Filters
Enhanced Accessibility
Once we improved our design we were able to validate our hypothesis. I then used MoSCoW to prioritize key features to include in our MVP given the budget and time constraints. Once we finalized the product requirements we got ready for development.
PHASE 7 - Launch and Tracking Metrics
Planning
I crafted a thorough launch plan that included: key stakeholders, launch objectives, logistics and operations, budget, marketing strategy, tools, collaborations, product monitoring, and risk mitigation strategy.
I chose a soft launch to gather user feedback from our core target market. The rationale behind the soft launch was our limited marketing funds. A soft launch is a good way of gauging the impact on user engagement and satisfaction and dealing with any issues before committing to a full-scale release.
Risk Mitigation
Metrics
CONCLUSION - Retrospectives and Continuous Improvement
Post-launch monitoring and analysis are key in analyzing if the launch objectives are being met. Here I look at MY RETROSPECTIVE following the hypothetical soft launch.
WHAT WENT WELL?
Working with the given data to extract the most user insights and ideate solutions. I got positive feedback from my mentor about how I prioritized the backlog and the gathered product requirements.
WHAT WAS CHALLENGING?
It was challenging to develop a specific risk mitigation strategy given the limited scope of the project brief. It would have been less challenging if l had been given more details on previous technical challenges the product faced.
WHAT DID I LEARN?
The importance of shared spaces and the PRD, which I returned to again and again to align the team and ensure that we are all moving towards our product goal.