Today we post the latest article with abstracts from the Product.Degree product management course . In it, a student at the kirillkobelev course talks about business models of applications (fluently), featured (in detail) and his own experience in product management (a little).

Earlier in the series:

→ Part 1 - who are the product managers and a little about design.
→ Part 2 - about the stages of application development.
→ Part 3 - about monetization and team management.
→ Part 4 - about ASO and Data Science.

Lecture 6. Fichering, or go there, I don’t know where

Unlike the king of motivation, Mark Ten, the creator of one of the most sought-after organizers of personal affairs and goals of Chaos control Dmitry Tarasov was extremely brief:
Get, - says, things done.

Dmitry’s application got into the Google Play and App Store features many times (and if I don’t confuse anything, even in the Windows Phone Store). Fichering is an editorial selection of applications in a certain category. Both platforms strictly select candidates for the featurer, and getting into the selection brings a huge wave of organic traffic.

Getting into phishing is a trick from a series of banal and at the same time difficult to implement: the parameters themselves are trivial, but it takes a lot of effort to achieve a breakthrough for each of them.

• Application quality. The first obvious and hellishly complex aspect. Quality in the broadest sense means lightness, and the absence of bugs, and prompt solution of problems, and a nice design within the framework of the platform’s design code, and a convenient interface. Cool should be app, lick your fingers.
  
  
• Multi-platform. A little unexpected, but this is a plus in karma, even from the point of view of the story itself. If you find a worthy application in the functional category, you will most likely want to install it on your Android, your wife on your iPhone, at home on a Mac, and on your work PC.
  
  
• Demand. And this is perhaps the most important point - before getting into the collection, your application should already be needed. And not to five of your classmates and (if possible) not to five hundred bought schoolchildren, but to real living people who will write laudatory reviews and put five stars in the rating.

In addition to editorial collections, there is also such a fashionable thing as “New Products” - by the way, they bring up to 20 thousand downloads, if you're lucky. The list of new applications is updated approximately once a week and actually serves to show that something is changing in applications. It is appropriate to recall once again that in order to get into phishing you need to demonstrate active work on the product. Even the coolest functionality, abandoned by the developers halfway, will not be able to win the cold hearts of the employees of Apple or Google.

By the way, the tech giants really recommend apps to collections, and this should be taken into account. Remember, successful communication with the outside world is one of the most important tasks of a product manager, so you need to use any opportunities to communicate with platform representatives. There are specialized conferences, round tables and, God forgive me, mitaps where you can meet the right person. Carry a napkin, prepare speech for the elevator, and everything will be fine.

Quiet haven in the world of phishing - thematic collections : they live for a long time, but bring relatively little, from 300 to 1,000 downloads per day. Such collections have rather low visibility, although the traffic that comes to them is super-relevant.

After all, if the collections are compiled, then someone needs this?

Surprisingly (in fact, no), but the sites think not only about users, but also about themselves. On the one hand, it is terribly convenient for us users to open a thematic selection and choose the best email client in the world. On the other hand, collections help introduce new technologies - handoff, continuity, remember these words? So this is a good way to get developers to add new features to applications. Google can sometimes directly indicate the development it needs. Perhaps it’s time to open pick-up courses for product managers: GR appeared in the PR sphere, why not AppStoreR?

What is the catch then?

It’s impossible without a catch. Fichering cannot serve as a support for the strategic development of a product, because - it is true, even before getting into the selection, someone needs your product.

There are 3 simple arguments against elevating the featured to the altar:

• Unpredictability. No one knows if his application will fall into any collection, and if it does, then for how long.
• Instability. As the classic wrote, "the bad thing is that he is sometimes suddenly mortal."
• Ambiguity. If you read an article about working with data, you probably already set up a lot of formulas and forecasts, and a sharp wave of downloads will definitely break them. When it subsides (and this will definitely happen), the product manager will figure out for a long time where the result of his painstaking work with ASO, and where is the traffic.

Interesting fact: it was noticed that on Google Play massive semi-organic traffic reduces the average rating.

Lecture 7. Vinaigrette

Below are a few small pieces that have not grown to a separate chapter, but useful for a novice product manager.

Dmitry Tarasov (Chaos Control) about business models

Practice shows that by far the most effective earnings model for an application is a subscription. But as the price of attracting a new user grows, it is likely that the subscription will soon cease to pay off. In such a situation, the secret to success is:

1. hold the user for as long as possible,
2. offer him truly unique content, and
3. make relatively expensive in-app purchases.

A small life hack: attracting new users and increasing profitability can be tried to breed at the build level. Freemium-application will drive the installation, and a full-fledged - to finish for the money.

The task of the product manager in this maneuver is to strike a balance between optimizing costs and creating good content. The user should see the value of the product not in the only key feature, but in the service that accompanies it.

Mark Ten (Sports.ru) about optimization

Two easy ways to optimize semantics if you are a very, very lazy person:

• Browse the store’s keywords for your category;
• Go to the App Annie and see what the top and generally the market in your category looks like.

Perhaps all you need is a less competitive environment in which you can make your way upstairs with less effort.

Some useful analytic tools:

• Sensor Tower - mobile analytics;
• Similar Web - traffic research;
• Priori Data is another mobile analytics resource;
• ASODesk / AppFollow - search engine optimization in application stores, work with semantics.

How I became a product manager

Having worked as a project manager for many years, I became convinced of the usefulness of introductory trainings on the project: it is important that you understand at least a little what is happening and what kind of bird language we speak. During the Intensive Product.Degree for 6 weeks I got into the shoes of the product manager of a mobile application, and I want to say: if we all treat our business as a product that requires attention, investment and a clear development plan, the world will definitely become a little better.