- Deeply understanding your customer's needs is critical to designing a compelling product - The best products aren't designed and built in labs, they are constantly iterated on as customer needs are better understood - Darrell will talk through strategies to engage with customers, sharing practical examples from the Uber driver app re-design's global Beta and his experience working with community leaders as the Product Manager for Citizen's core app

1. www.productschool.com
Building Products with Customers
by fmr Uber Product Manager

2. Join 40,000+
Product Managers on
Free Resources
Discover great job
opportunities
Job Portal
prdct.school/PSJobPortalprdct.school/events-slack

3. CERTIFICATES
Your Product Management Certificate Path
Product Leadership
Certificate™
Full Stack Product
Management Certificate™
Product Management
Certificate™
20 HOURS40 HOURS40 HOURS

4. Corporate
Training
Level up your team’s Product
Management skills

5. Darrell Stone
T O N I G H T ’ S S P E A K E R
Citizen

6. Product Manager for
Citizen Core App.
Interests include photography,
running, podcasts, cooking,
parenting.
Hi, I’m Darrell Stone.
@darrells_stone

7. Apple
2013-2014
Employee #: 100,000+
Global Supply Manager for
NAND Flash memory
Scaled supplier base 2x for first
16 / 64 / 128GB iPhone Launch
My Journey
Uber
2014-2019
Employee #: ~1,800
First Ops on uberPOOL,
scaled to 30+ cities
Lead PM on driver app redesign
Citizen
2019-Present
Employee #: ~60
First PM hire for first Head of Product
Lead PM for homescreen redesign

8. Mission: Protect the World
Live in NYC, SF, LA,
Philadelphia, Baltimore,
Phoenix (and scaling)
1M+ MAU (and growing)
About Citizen App

9. We send users alerts when there
are in progress safety incidents
happening nearby.
We source these safety
incidents from 911 dispatches,
which we pick up from radio
scanners using special
software.
About Citizen App

10. We’ve rescued missing
persons/dogs and helped
people escape fires.
We’re one of the few apps that
has a non-zero chance to save
your life.
About Citizen App

11. Include:
- young citydwellers
- older suburbanites
- concerned parents
- first responders
- police scanner aficionados
- violence interrupters
Citizen’s Customers

12. Violence interrupters are
particularly awesome. They use
the Citizen app the way Uber
drivers use the uber app.
Citizen alerts dispatch them to
the scene of violent crimes so
they can intervene to prevent
retaliatory street violence.

13. Why Build with Customers?
customers = product
You don’t have a product without users.
product = iteration
Its best to rapidly iterate on products.
iteration = understanding customer problems
Iterating rapidly and effectively wins the game.

14. Do I want to spend
years of my life
working on this
customer problem?
Am I mission driven or
just moving pixels?

15. Really Bad Product Advice

16. Understand your customer needs and fuse them
into your product development lifecycle.
Design
Understand
customer needs
Build
Iterate with
early adopters
Launch
Continually improve
with user feedback

17. Design
Design
Understand
customer needs

18. Fails to solve an acute
market need.
Before you build,
understand the needs of the
people you are trying to
serve.
D
Top Reason Startups Fail

19. 1. Talk to them
2. Twitter DM’s
3. Read every support
ticket
D
How to understand Market Needs?
Understand Users

20. D
Talking to users
Don’t have a user
researcher? Channel your
inner talk show host.
Tim Ferris and Ellen are
great at getting their guests
to feel comfortable and open
up.

21. D
Talking to users
Avoid leading questions.
Remain a conscious skeptic of ideas you are trying to
validate.
Be genuine and interested.

22. D
Talking to users
Get uncomfortably specific.
“When would you use this?”
“Do you know someone who
would use this?”

23. Twitter is a platform
designed for consumer
gripes.
Become a master of Twitter
search and don’t be shy
about DM’ing customers.
D
[Secret Weapon] Twitter DM’s

24. Self explanatory, just do it.
Customer pain points are the
currency good PM’s trade in.
D
Read Every Support Ticket &
App Store Review

25. Uber works for me.
Synthesize these needs into a higher purpose for
what you’re building.
D
Moving from crime news to safety utility.

26. Map zoom and red dot
clustering make it feel like
I’m surrounded by danger
Zoomed in on me to show
what’s happening right
here, right now.
D

27. Help me _____ when I _____.
What job are users hiring you for?
[Framework] Job to Be Done
D

28. Build
Build
Iterate with
Early Adopters

29. 1) Employees can use this feature to complete a task (loose
core flows + minimal polish).
1) Friends and family can use this feature to complete a
task, error states handled (tight core flows + more
polish).
1) Real customers can use this feature (ready for launch).
Set your project milestones using user
centric language.
B

30. B
Before you’re ready to test
with non-employees, get
creative to make it real for
developers, designers,
product people.
This surfaces bugs faster
and improves the quality
of what you’re shipping.
To make it real, we took Dara driving
before we released the Driver App
publicly.

31. B
When you’re ready to introduce your product
to non-employees, consider a Beta moment.

32. 7
cities
470
drivers & couriers
Uber Driver Beta
sponsored by SoftBank

37. 250 friends and family launched via email.
Citizen Homescreen Beta
not sponsored by SoftBank
B

38. We still received some really helpful
feedback from early users.
“Less scary, more useful.”
Citizen Homescreen Beta
not sponsored by SoftBank
B

39. Collecting Feedback - have a channel strategy
B
Bug Reporter Surveys WhatsApp / SMS

40. [Spotlight] Bug Reporter
B
Screen Shot Submit

41. Synthesize feedback to inform fixes
B
Lists work great.

43. At Uber, we even
hacked Google+ (RIP)
so our user research
team had a place to
scalably share
feedback and insights.
B
Synthesize feedback to inform fixes

44. B
During the Beta, get on the ground to really
understand your user experience.

45. We took a small team
to Sao Paulo to
research the new
Driver App on lower
end Android devices.
We did a combination
of field testing and
user research.
B

46. B

47. B

49. Our user research was
eye opening.
We showed drivers
how they felt about the
pixels we moved
around...
B

50. “They’re great, but
what are you doing
about our safety?”
B

51. I left thinking a mobile
safety product was a
billion user opportunity.
Five months later I
discovered Citizen.
B

52. Launch
Continually improve
with user feedback
Launch

53. L
When you’ve cleared designing and beta,
there’s an opportunity for a launch moment.

56. L
Post launch,
you’re rarely
done.
Change aversion
is real, and users
will have strong
opinions about
what they find
Citizen Redesign weekend
App Store Ratings

57. Even though our early tests
showed slight positive
increase to core metrics—
we knew there would be
some complaints from
users.
We changed a lot at once.
L

58. Multiple incidents colors (rather
than just red) to show recency
and severity.
L
Less scary, more useful
A safety radius (to amplify
what’s nearby and recent) and
a feed sorted by distance from
you.
Illuminated streets to show you
where other citizen users were
nearby on a live safety map.

59. “It reduces a lot of the noise that made Citizen hard
to understand, and frankly, made it feel incredibly
alarmist.”
“I like how the new homescreen pinpoints my
surrounding area and right away I know if there's a
problem.”
“One can visualize if the environment in close
proximity is safe.”
“Reduces the fear mongering & makes me feel
safer.”
“I can easily see what’s going on in my borough not
the whole city.”
“You might like hearing that even though it's
different it was instantly readable so it was
inoffensive. I wish Google understood that
whenever they update Gmail.”
It wasn’t all grim,
many surveyed users
told us they liked the
change and that they
would be more likely
to share the app with
friends.
L

60. After some tuning, we thought
sorting our safety feed by
distance from users for
reports within the last 24
hours would be least alarmist
and most helpful.
L
One Area We Missed - The Safety Feed

61. Distance sort was the wrong call.
“Why on earth would you eliminate the ability to scroll
through incidents on a time-ordered basis, especially in
the larger metro area? In one move this app has gone from
"go-to" to "rarely use"."
L
One Area We Missed - The Safety Feed

62. L
But, the best part about
software is you get a new
swing at the plate each week.
We diagnosed the problem
quickly and moved to respond,
introducing a “Happening
Now” view that showed users
everything reported in their
city, sorted by most recent.

63. L
“Happening Now” was
released 9/18 and
immediately well
received.
(from previous angry tweeter)

64. L
This week, we went even further, making a few quick changes to
help people more connected to their safety in the here and the
now.
Sort feed by nearest X
incidents, then reverse
chron
Change feed timestamp
presentation
Adjust map zoom to be
slightly more zoomed out
Before
After

65. L
“I have friends that live
in multiple boroughs in
NYC and when I want to
go to their
neighborhoods it's a bit
tedious.”
Our next feature is map
search. Google maps
owns a static map of
POI’s, we’ll own an
active safety map to

66. Understand your customer needs and fuse them
into your product development lifecycle.
Design
Understand
Customer Needs
Build
Iterate with
Early Adopters
Launch
Continually improve
with user feedback

67. - Mobile Engineers
- Backend Engineers
- User Research (3+ years experience)
- Product Managers (3+ years
experience)
[Shameless Plug] We’re Hiring At Citizen
Help us Protect the World

68. www.productschool.com
Part-time Product Management Training Courses
and
Corporate Training