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A guide on implementing effective AI evaluations

The most common skill gap in aspiring product managers — and how to fix it

How to deal with information overload in product management

Meta bets big on AI while Lovable reaches $2 billion valuation: AI news roundup

June’s top product management reads

With his background in technical editing, community building and product marketing, Chris' approach to product management is inherently centered around user narratives. He spent the first few years of his career working with the B2B developer products, prototyped an experimental technical publishing platform along the way, and then kick-started the Mind the Product platform. You can find him at ProductTank, or on twitter as @camassey.

Product Manager

Chris Massey

<p><a href="https://twitter.com/nikisrinivasan">Nikila Srinivasan</a> leads the effort for Facebook&#8217;s ads products in emerging markets, having built up a cross-discipline product team from scratch at Facebook in London. Nikila talks us through examples of how people in emerging and high-growth markets “hack” mobile, and how smart product teams can tap into this groundswell of innovation. Facebook wants to be global, so has to consider the whole market.</p>
<p>As a starting point, it&#8217;s crucial to remember that what the &#8220;average&#8221; mobile experience in the global market is not a high-end smartphone, but rather devices like feature phones and varied and restricted data plans.</p>
<h2>The Signficance of Emerging Markets</h2>
<p>Emerging markets make up 85% of the world&#8217;s population, with a hugely varied attitude towards mobile phone use and advertising. As an example, Nikila mentions India &#8211; the 3rd largest online country, and the source of 1 billion mobile subscriptions. However, those subscriptions are not &#8211; as you might expect in the USA or Europe &#8211; one per person.</p>
<p>Many people in India have multiple sim cards with different data plans for different situations, such as calling internationally, or using data at night. Moreover, the mobile devices are often shared.<br />
And not only are many emerging markets are mobile first, some are even mobile only. As a result, not only are they culturally and technologically diverse, but they are also approaching connectivity and the internet in ways that we might not expect, and this is unlikely to change.</p>
<h2>Building for the Next Billion</h2>
<p>The emerging market is already huge, and it&#8217;s only going to grow. More importantly, it&#8217;s crucial to remember that this is a hugely nuanced market, and they are almost certainly not in your own demographic. Many people are coming online for the first time on a mobile device, and so they have no other frame of reference for the experience. As a result, Facebook uses four core principles to guide their product design:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Be Diverse</strong> &#8211; Account for perspectives that are different from our own. Work closely with user researchers, and be aware not only of cultural / social nuances, and but also <em>technological</em> variety.</li>
<li><strong>Be Local</strong> &#8211; Understand how to be relevant locally. This doesn&#8217;t necessarily mean building a new app for each locality, but perhaps just designing locally relevant experiences. For example, in India it is now pretty common for brands to invite potential customers to leave them missed calls, as it costs the customer nothing, and allows the company to call them back.</li>
<li><strong>Be Lightweight</strong> &#8211; Bandwidth in emerging markets tends to be much lower than in the UK or USA, so it&#8217;s crucial to build a product experience that takes that into account. To that end, Facebook built an &#8220;empathy lab&#8221;, allowing product teams to test different types of mobile devices, and different kinds of network conditions, and experience their products in as similar a set of conditions as possible to their users (25% of traffic comes from people on 2G conditions)</li>
<li><strong>Be Flexible</strong> &#8211; Sudden changes in local conditions (politics, infrastructure, sports) can impact your ability to deliver your service. More to the point, be ready to have your notions about behaviour in diverse markets proven wrong.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Empathy is Crucial</h2>
<p>There are significant technical hurdles to building mobile products for emerging markets, but the bigger challenge is understanding <em>what</em> to build. Be open-minded and adaptable, and make sure you experience your product across different conditions.</p>


core/freeform

What good product design looks like – Miguel Fernandez (VP of Product Design, Slack)

10x Product X Design: Product and research team collaboration by Jane Austin

Learnings from London: What is it like to hold Google in your hand?

Learnings from London: How to build a billion dollar app

Product Systems: How to manufacture lightning in a bottle by Oji Udezue

Product management meets UX design by Tanmay Goel, Emi Kwon, Simran Kaur

Designing a sustainable future by Leyla Acaroglu

Making Hard Product Decisions for All the Right Reasons

Product Vision 2020

The Importance of Empathy, By Jack Sheppard

Building Mobile Products in Emerging Markets

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