Minimum viable experiment in action

I started writing these articles a few months ago as an experiment, as an MVE about me using product management methods and skills to prove that the stuff that I've used in software industry would be transferable to something totally different. And to prove myself that most of the methods worked as I thought they would. There was no direction, a strategy, at the point I started it, but just to see where it takes these articles and me. I thought that this would be fun and educating for me and what's best, it only took me couple of hours per article and it was free! It simply was the cheapest way to fail fast with real customer reactions! Now this article is all about why and how everything was done so far and where to go from here:

The who?

I thought I write about the same thing I'm experimenting, it was natural to me, since I'm really interested in product management and agile/lean methodologies with it and it feels like I'm continuously learning more from it. My first question was that who would read stuff like that, created a couple of user personas in my mind. Probably they would be beginning or aspiring product managers or experienced software developers, 25-40 year old. Since product management is still a rather young field of interest, I thought that it's nicer to write in English to get more reads. I set myself a target of 100 views on one article, it shouldn't be that hard to reach when I get to right channels. There might even be a couple of entrepreneurs or CEO's that are interested in maximizing outcome with minimal effort - they usually are interested in profit and revenue after all.

So I already thought about marketing, who are my customers and why they would read my articles. They wanted to get more info about product management to land a job or to progress further in the beginning of their product management journey. I did already think about where to publish, should I cross-publish, should I join a network and cross-post to get more audience, but didn't. I just wanted to do a simple experiment and see if I'm up to it.

First article and reading user behavior

So I published my first article. At first I tried to see if I can use provocative content to get more views from Finnish audience, would anyone but my colleagues and friends read it? It was called "Shortage of developers? or mindset issue after all?". It was about using agile and promoting it against the fact that fast training of developers wouldn't be a silver bullet for current issues of recruiting developers in Finland. For me it was a hit, since it gathered about 77 views. So, close to 100 views what I was going for. I thought to write the next article after a week or so. Even though LinkedIn as an publishing platform doesn't tell much about users, I wanted to go data driven! If I didn't take the reader data in account, I wouldn't be able to fully go with my product management experiment. So the data showed on previous article, that Finnish users read it a lot (about 70% of views), and even though the majority of it was from my own company or people I knew, there still were people reading it from other companies and cities. And as I projected, most of them were product managers or software developers, even 4 CFO/CTO/CEO views. So I proved that my assumption in audience/customer base was right! Success number 1.

Targeting and marketing it to get international views

My next article was about "Why stories work?" and it was about using user stories and personas in providing shared understanding instead of writing lengthy requirements. The goal was just to get MORE views to reach the magical 100 views by just changing the content from provocative to informative. Now I tried to forget Finland in it so that the article itself wasn't that biased. IT was actually surprising that this time there were 74 or so views, so quite the same amount, but most of them were from people in marketing positions! And still in Finland? What? That article didnt' have anything to do with marketing? So I reasoned a bit about it, product management does include quite heavy connection to marketing, but it just doesn't explain it, since the content wasn't about marketing. The only thing I could think of is that years ago I heard that a Finnish elevator company (called KONE) used stories for marketing and making their strategy understandable, and it was a hit (okay, someone can correct me about what they used it in in detail, just don't remember at the moment). Technically they just did what user stories do, they shared understanding with stakeholders, employees and their customer base, and they did it so that they got amazing results with it. Especially in Finland this is known everywhere, since Kone is one of the great success stories. Anyway, I think that the headline of the article was a bit too clickbaitish, since it didn't attract the product managers I was after. Well, I'm still assuming, but it might even sound plausible.

Targeting more precisely

Well, I was quite sure that still the product management was the target "market" - or it wasn't that obvious, but it might still be viable to continue pursuing to it. I thought that two previous articles were still too biased to Finland and it wasn't obvious that for who the articles were meant. So I adjusted the headline a bit, including a "PM"-word to attract right kind of people and since the target PM's seemed to be very ambitious people, I added a monetary reference to the headline. so I released "Minimizing effort and maximizing outcome - one PM's lessons learned", which was about saving time and centering on the "right things" instead of doing a lot of unnecessary work - so, it was technically about agile and lean. I also posted this to a few product management related channels and I even networked a lot with international PM's in linkedin (should've used slack also, but well, didn't). The views were 78, so AGAIN it was the same. But I succeeded in getting more of international readers, there were about 60% Finnish and 40% others, still Finnish crowd was dominant. All the articles so far had ~10 likes, which were 90% Finland, and this wasn't an exception. This article on the other hand attracted by far the most CEO/CTO/Entrepreneur/CFO likes and IT/business consultants as a new customer group. You can never underestimate the meaning of headline!

Failed article and time to pivot?

I wrote one more article, didn't think more about it. Didn't share it on other "channels", created a bit cryptic headline that was probably only understood by experienced PM's. The article was: "Validate your assumptions", it was about creating hypothesis from assumptions and validating them through mvp. And wtf, it collected again Finnish readers! The numbers were crushing, this one got 22 views. I decided that I had to do something. I clearly had some success in defining my target audience, but probably the international "market" wasn't that easy. Market research in this competition situation would've been great, I just didn't know enough about the other writers. I couldn't get the measurements up in any way, so I thought that it was time to pivot this blog! Currently what my experience has proven is that Finnish people do read these and even comment/share them on their network, most of them are on software industry and look for information on the other hand about agile approach and on the other hand on the business side of product management. Too bad I couldn't get accurate information, but only information shards with the tools provided by CMS, but you got to use the data you have, learn from it and try until you found the way.

What did I learn & next steps?

Actually this has been quite educating in the sense that I've automatically analyzed the available data and tried to measure my success in some way. The user personas have refined along the way and I've learned on some sort on what to do to get finally the 100 views. So the basic build-measure-learn cycle has been in use. I've used max 2h per experiment, so 8h-10h of time spent so far, It's not much. As an MVE I think it has been very succesful, it hasn't got me to my goal yet, but at least I've got an idea of where to go next. What I will need to do is to evaluate myself too, since there's no strategy in this, but I know my values. I love Finland and Joensuu (city) especially, I would be proud to evangelize product management so that finnish companies could thrive and they would understand the value of how things can be managed by agile/lean methods. Just by removing waste and using data to prove your own assumptions wrong to focus on the big picture and right things to do to create revenue. I have no revenue hook in this, so I'll probably just have to align my values to strategy and go with that, since the readers also seem to be on that line.

This will probably be the last article written in English and using this platform. I need more data about the readers and align my own values to the articles. Implementing something like hotjar, some A/B testing tool and analytics might give me enough edge to continue developing the content to finally get the 100 views :) We'll see if I can reach it ever, but worth a shot.

But what can you learn? Well, I've used only a fraction of time to TEST my assumptions that were quite different in the beginning. I can pivot using the data that has been gathered for me automatically. I've tried the cheapest and easiest way to prove my assumptions to reach a goal that is measurable. If you do something, whether it was marketing or a feature, try to get real use for it and measure how it works. You'll learn on every cycle, just try to keep the cycle short so that you can run multiple experiments in short time so it becomes effective. It's cheaper to fail in early stages than in later stages.