5 Product Management Case Studies We Can All Learn From
As product managers, we love to discuss various product best practices and frameworks. While I am sure that you've heard about all kinds of different ways to develop products, I would not be surprised if you took some of them with a grain of salt.
It makes a lot of sense since theoretical frameworks do not always translate to product success in real life. But, I am here to convince you that they actually do. As proof of my claim, I would like to share 5 case studies with you where famous companies achieve success by applying product best practices.
5 Product Management Case Studies
The five companies that I want us to focus on are industry giants. I chose large ones on purpose since it is much harder for massive corporations to successfully implement a best practice. Nevertheless, all of the following companies deserve credit for pulling it off!
1. Amazon Kindle's Capture of a Market Gap
Although many of us still prefer reading physical books, we are now in the era of eBooks.
I would not be surprised if, just like me, you associated digital books with Amazon’s iconic Kindle device.
There’s a good reason we have this association. Kindle is arguably one of Amazon's biggest successes from a product standpoint.
Of course, I can support this claim with statistical evidence of Kindle dominating the e-reader market (they hold ~75% of it). Still, I want to focus more on the sound product decisions that the Amazon team made to ensure the success of their e-reader.
Identifying and Targeting the Market Gap: Amazon’s success began from the very first step in the product development lifecycle—market research. By utilizing both quantitative (data analytics, high-level market reports) and qualitative (interviews, surveys, feedback) research methodologies, they made two important conclusions:
- The e-reader market is underdeveloped, and there are many barriers for consumers to enter it.
- The future of reading is digital, and if you manage to remove these barriers, it will grow rapidly.
Their next step was to understand the nature of these barriers and come up with a solution that could make them obsolete. The barriers in question were the following:
- Existing e-readers were considered a niche with product price tags exceeding $1,800.
- The availability of digital books was highly limited and the market was segmented. Each individual marketplace was offering only a small library of books to choose from.
- The process of buying digital books was cumbersome. That one is pretty self-explanatory.
- Existing e-readers were far from being user-friendly and lacked basic features that would help people enjoy their reading experience.
Unlike other players in the market, Amazon had an unfair advantage—it was, and still is, a massive online marketplace with access to nearly all publishers and niche writers. Apart from this access, Amazon’s marketplace platform had a fantastic user experience of purchasing goods online that was optimized and polished based on the millions of transactions they had already made.
So, they already had two of the four challenges solved for them. All they needed to do was create an e-reader that was cheap and packed with great user experience.
And that’s exactly what they did.
Achieving a Technology-Product Fit: There was a reason the competition sold their e-readers for such a high price. Building these high-tech products was simply expensive.
Amazon had a better idea. They decided to use a technology that was able to solve two major problems in the market—price and battery life. The technology in question was e-ink screens.
This unique type of screen works by applying an electrical charge to small capsules with black and white pigments in them. Based on the charge, the pixel will either become black or remain white.
The beauty of e-ink is that you spend electricity only when changing the color of the pixel. Unlike traditional screens, you don’t need to spend battery to maintain a certain picture on it. So, it is an order of magnitude more energy efficient than ordinary screens.
Its second advantage is the screen's technical simplicity, which means that they are very easy to manufacture and cost a fraction of LCD/LED screens.
So, thanks to this technology, Amazon was able to make its e-reader cheap and user-friendly (thanks to its battery life).
This technology does have two disadvantages though— it’s monochrome and has a very low refresh rate. Luckily, both are irrelevant problems for e-readers, since there are no moving objects on the screen and users are comfortable with reading a monochrome text.
As a result of these sound product decisions, we have the most iconic e-book readers in our hands and Amazon has been dominating the market.
Key Takeaways
The story of the Kindle teaches us a couple of core principles in product management.
- Look for a market or product where you have an unfair advantage. In Kindle’s case, it was Amazon’s ability to create a massive online book marketplace.
- Start with a market gap, then expand to the entire market. It’s very hard to enter the market by targeting everyone. Your competition will crush you. So, the better strategy is to find a gap and occupy it first. In Amazon’s case, it was the affordable e-ink readers.
- Technological innovations matter. Most of the time, others do not occupy the gap because they don’t have the tech to build a product for it.
Finally, don’t forget that every type of technology comes with downsides. Your job is to pick a solution the downsides of which are irrelevant to your target audience. Monochrome screens of Kindle were not a problem for e-book readers.
2. Duolingo's Mastery of App Gamification
If you have ever tried to learn a new language without taking formal classes for it, the chances are that you have tried to do it with Duolingo.
But, why is this language app so popular? What are the secrets behind its success? Well, as a product manager, I can clearly identify two important product decisions that have helped this app thrive.
Embracing users’ reality: Let’s be brutally honest, no matter how much we want to learn a new language, we don’t want to commit the time and money to a fully-fledged course.
We’re just too busy and cannot fit the class time into our schedules without sacrificing something else (which usually has a higher priority than the language class).
The very clever people in charge of Duolingo understood this very well. So, instead of trying to fight the reality their target audience is in, they embraced it.
Duolingo opted for lightweight short challenges and tasks instead of long courses—letting users accomplish something even if they use it a mere 20 minutes a day.
Habit Loops: The app is famous for using product-led growth practices. Specifically, they are great at creating and maintaining habit loops. If you, for instance, do your Spanish language challenges every morning, but decided to procrastinate once, Duolingo will make sure to remind you about your class.
There’s even a famous meme going around with our beloved green owl stalking you and making sure that you have finished your tasks.
But, habit loops are not what this app is famous for.
Gamification: Duolingo is arguably the #1 app out there when it comes to gamification.
Gamification is the practice of ordinary products adopting various tricks and features from video games to make the user experience more engaging and fun.
Long gone are the days when playing games was associated with childhood. Games are all over the place and the psychology of people enjoying playing games is not associated with age. Therefore, gamification works!
Duolingo has famously adopted the following gaming elements:
- Bite-size challenges that give you points/experience. Large classes are intimidating for all of us. The bite-size ones, on the other hand, are easier to tackle and finish. The cherry on top is Duolingo giving you experience points that serve as an award that enhances your satisfaction from completing the challenge.
- Leveling up: Duolingo adopted this gaming mechanic from RPGs (role-playing games). The experience points you get from completing your challenges will accumulate and increase the level of your “character” in the app. This serves as a mid-term reward that you can get for continuously completing challenges.
- Streaks: This mechanic comes from racing and fighting games. When you are completing your challenges multiple days in a row, Duolingo will show you a streak score that is equal to the days you have been using it without interruption.
All of these gaming mechanics aim to make the learning process less tedious and more fun. Instead of just learning a new language (which is satisfying by itself), you are also enjoying the “game” you are playing. Thus, you are more motivated to finish your challenges and move on to the next ones.
Key Takeaways
By looking at Duolingo’s success, we can make the following conclusions for us:
- Don't try to fight against people’s existing habits and circumstances. Instead, you need to embrace them and build your product to accommodate them. Duolingo’s bite-size challenges in a mobile app that lets you learn while having lunch or taking a break from work is a great example.
- Apart from embracing users’ habits, you can also amplify them by adopting habit loops. Make using your app a part of their routine. This means people will open your website or app on autopilot because it is part of the day for them. Duolingo uses mobile app notifications to help you set up this routine.
- If the nature of your product allows it, gamify! Gamification works best for B2C and personal products—but be careful implementing one on an enterprise security application, as it can backfire.
Overall, make sure that people enjoy your product and feel rewarded after they use it.
We’ve bet on making features that are free and excellent so that our users always tell their friends and that creates this kind of organic flywheel.
3. LinkedIn’s Use Of User-Generated Content Loops
LinkedIn has gone a long way from its original concept of a social network startup centered around people’s resumes. As you could have guessed, the older versions of LikedIn were bad at being a social media platform. Instead, it was a good public display of people’s skills and work history.
However, thanks to a wide range of optimization and improvements, they successfully achieved their vision. Modern LinkedIn is a place for people to socialize around professional topics and get to know each other. Some of the features that facilitated this process included:
- Advanced activity feed algorithms: If you want to promote your product or promote yourself to potential employers, you need to be socially active on LinkedIn. This includes actively posting content, getting people to engage with it, and engaging with the content of others yourself.
- Employer search ranking: Recruiters looking to fill open positions actively use the advanced search feature of LinkedIn. Here, too, if you want to be at the top of the search results—increasing the chances of the recruiter noticing you, you will have to be active on LinkedIn.
- Messaging activity reports: After a recruiter has found your profile via search, they naturally want to send you a message. They do, however, see the average time it takes you to respond to your messages. If the average time is high, they are less likely to send you a message. This, again, encourages users to use the built-in messenger of LinkedIn actively.
- Collaborative content creation: This feature is relatively new. LinkedIn will develop a topic and invite people with relevant knowledge and experience to collaboratively create an article about it.
The last feature is what we want to focus on today.
Collaborative content creation (even at its MVP stage) has been a massive success for LinkedIn in terms of its impact on core engagement and growth metrics.
The team at LinkedIn took advantage of introductory human psychology to ensure the engagement rate for this feature was high. Here are the tricks that they adopted:
- Making users feel special: LinkedIn sends you a notification (along with an email) telling you that you are one of the special few people they have selected to write this article. This, of course, boosts your confidence as a specialist in your field and makes you more likely to work on that article.
- Helping users stand out: The second trick that motivates users to write an article is that a person writing educational content is perceived as a highly skilled professional in their field. Apart from helping users feel great about themselves, it also lets them stand out and have higher chances of securing deals or interviews.
Boosting engagement was not the only goal of LinkedIn’s product strategy. Collaborative article writing also created a user-generated content (UGC) loop for LinkedIn. A UGC loop is the process of:
- Users generating content (hence, the name) on your platform >
- This content getting indexed by search engines >
- People who look for that kind of content using internet search find this article and land on your platform >
- A portion of these people signing up for your product and creating a content of their own >
- Rinse and repeat from step 1.
The beauty of UGC loops is their self-sustaining nature, as the output of this loop (new user) becomes an input in the next iteration of the loop (people creating content).
Therefore, introducing this feature will significantly increase LinkedIn's growth rate.
Key Takeaways
LinkedIn’s success with collaborative articles teaches us the following:
- You can pursue multiple goals with a single feature. In this case, collaborative articles let LinkedIn increase its engagement rate and contribute to growth.
- Growth loops, including the UGC loop, are powerful tools in the right hands. Thanks to their self-sustaining nature, they can continue bringing in new signups without spending extra effort on it.
Anyone can personalize when it’s a small set of population, but if you are a large organization trying to reach millions of users with personalized content, AI enables dynamic audience segmentation as well as content creation so that you can actually personalize your message at scale as well.
4. Google Maps’ Iterative Improvement
When compared to other tech giants out there, Google is unique in its overall product strategy.
Unlike Apple which polishes its products to the minute details before the product launch, Google usually releases a half-baked MVP. Is Apple doing a better job at product development in that case? No, both Google and Apple are making fantastic products. It’s just the style and the prioritization that is different between them.
There is a good reason Google releases minimum viable products first. This way, they can:
- Save resources and time on products that might fail. They are famous for killing a wide range of products because of this. This is the regular process at Google, they build something small, take it to the market, and then either continue building it or kill it.
- Test core product hypotheses before committing to completing the product. Google’s decision-making process is heavily reliant on the scientific method. They will not commit significant resources to a product unless they have gathered empirical data supporting the potential success of that product.
- Gather customer feedback. Google’s product teams want to base their features and design on what customers want, so they release MVPs or even prototypes for the sole reason of hearing what users think about it and building their product roadmap based on real user pain points.
- Test the product’s integration with the overall ecosystem. Google does not just want you to use that product, they want it to increase your retention in their ecosystem. So, this point is a must-have in their definition of a successful product.
This logic applies to everything, including new features, big initiatives, product design elements, and even entirely new products.
Google Maps is one of the most prominent examples of this mindset. When first released, it was just an online map with no significant features. It was, of course, not the real product in their mind. However, they wanted to enhance it based on user needs and not their own perception of what needs to be done.
So, by continuously gathering user feedback, running ideation sessions with them, and hearing the thoughts of their external stakeholders (e.g. city authorities that could provide up-to-date information about the upcoming construction plans), they were able to improve the map gradually.
Thanks to this, the current iteration of Google Maps is just fantastic. It can predict traffic jams based on large events in the city (e.g., a football game), show navigation routes in real-time, including walking and taking multiple types of public transport, and more.
Key Takeaways
While Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Slack, and many others do their best to adopt the classical product best practices, they are nowhere near Google's level.
So, the main case study question here would be—do these theoretical product methodologies work? And the answer is YES! Google Maps (with its massive profitability) is living proof.
5. Uber's Strategic Market Expansion
The final story that I wanted to talk about focuses more on the marketing strategy as part of an overall product strategy. Specifically, let’s talk about Uber’s market expansion.
The ambitious co-founders of Uber could not limit themselves to ride-hailing and decided to try their luck at additional markets, too.
Firstly, there was geographic expansion. Uber understood that the market segmentation they had in the United States would not necessarily match that in other countries. So, they ran extensive research studies in the countries they wanted to enter in order to understand the specific user needs there, the players in the market, as well as the legal/infrastructural environment.
For instance, in countries with limited mobile internet access, they added an ability to hail a ride over SMS.
Secondly, Uber started expanding in adjacent markets within the United States. Having built a robust infrastructure for users ordering transportation online, they soon understood that they could do the same for food. Hence, the company introduced Uber Eats, which allows customers to order food from local restaurants. So, the next time you are in the mood for delivery while vacationing in India, you can use the Uber app to get it.
Key Takeaways
Uber’s success in expanding to multiple markets teaches us the importance of taking advantage of your existing capabilities to enter an existing segment with an unfair advantage. Uber Eats would be hard to make if the company did not already have a well-established infrastructure.
Yes, Product Theory Works In Real Life
I hope I convinced you that the product best practices you have read about work. No matter if you’re working in a tech giant or a small startup, adopting some of the practices mentioned in this article might land your organization in someone else's case study!
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