Manage cross-sectional teams to build a functional URL Shortener. SHORT IT!

Welcome to the third week of awesome growth! Today, we would go live!!!

DURATION: 6 days

PM Teammates:

1. Chika Benjamin
2. Ogbodo Ogechi Stephanie
3. Achebo Favour Elileojo
4. Alagbe Motunrayo Mayowa.

Cross-sectional teams managed:

1. Oladapo Abiola (Mobile dev team1)
2. Ekene Anthony IkeOkoro (Backend Nodejs)
3. Godwin Onuh (Quality Assurance).

PROCESS After the week 2 task where we managed different teams, working on the task this week became a bit easier as we already had experience.

We first held a meeting with the different teams to know the way forward and start on execution. Once again, to make things easier, we divided ourselves into a mobile app and a web version team. This was to help speed up the process and also to help with clear-cut roles for all team members. We did our research, came up with solutions, and drafted our vision statement as well as a target market. We also did in-depth industry research and studied our key competitors. Of course, we had to follow up with both teams as PMs to familiarise ourselves by holding more meetings, getting opinion polls, and critiquing as well as commending ourselves. In following the software development cycle, we moved from research to analysis of the research material to design to development, and after, we had to implement, test out our designs, and finally, launch. There were a lot of things to do in just six days but we were set on it already. To know more about how we did all that, keep reading.

IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM: In a bid to deliver an exceptional product, identifying the problem we are trying to solve is the best thing we could have done.

We understood the problem with sending out extremely long URL links and how people are being careful about what links they click on. We did our market research and understood that a Url shortener app is a solution.

A URL shortener is a website that reduces the length of your URL(Uniform Resource Locator). The idea is to minimize the web page address into something easier to remember and track.

Product Vision: To minimize the webpage address into something easier to remember and track. It converts the long URL to a short, case-sensitive, and alphanumeric code.

Competitor Analysis: Who created the best URL shortener? What can we do better? What to look out for in other URL shortener apps.

We carefully checked other URL shortener apps from Linkbash, Shortlink, Shorty, Tiny URL, and, URL shortener. We carefully checked insights and reviews, we got to understand their strategies and how missions so we can get better with ours too.

User Research: From the review of the market research, we were able to primarily understand the problems the target audience face and with this, we drafted a questionnaire with good specifics to better understand them. Here's the link to the responses. %[bit.ly/3dV12NP]

Assumption: From the research, we were able to come up with some assumptions about the primary and secondary problems the market was facing. An example of such is the question- “What are people clicking on? What are they passing by without a second glance? Do long links make people lose interest? What type of link looks easier to share?”

Market/industry research: The focus was on understanding the common problems associated with long links. We did this research to understand the needs of the target audience, the value of the market, the size of the market, potential returns, and common problems such as lack of the ability to track performance, we learned that most URL shorteners provide analytical data, and this information is easily accessible within the link. Compared to the sometimes overwhelming long URLs.

But wait — why should you care about this?

By monitoring the success of links, a business or organization can understand what its audience is engaging with and adjust its strategies accordingly.

USER PERSONAE Persona 1 Name: Ajah Lois Occupation: Entrepreneur Demographics: A 25-year-old woman whose focus is on the selling and buying of electric gadgets. Goals

1. Tracking the number of clicks on a particular link
2. Higher click-through rate for her website

Frustrations

1. She needs to brand her links both for aesthetics and for more trust
2. She needs engagements on her website

Persona 2 Name: David Birch Occupation: Blogger Demographics: 32-year-old man who owns a personal blog, as well as freelance, writes for other clients. Goals:

1. For more engagement on his blog
2. Tracking the metrics on link clicks
3. More traffic on his blog

Frustrations:

1. He needs a URL shortener to help give authenticity since it will make the links across his blog and socials similar
2. He needs a higher click-through rate for his blog

Persona 3 Name: Chidi Soma Occupation: Digital marketer Demographics: Soma is a 29-year-old woman with a knack for digital marketing and media management Goals:

1. Client branding
2. Engagements for social media pages
3. Page and site organization

Frustrations:

1. He needs a way to brand client links for better awareness
2. He needs a way to track the link engagements on his media pages

In knowing the problems faced by the target market, we were able to work on a product idea and solution to these problems.

PRODUCT STRATEGY: The users are mostly businessmen and women, bloggers, social media managers, and digital marketers.

The main use of the shortener is to help shorten brand links. These links are easier to share and let businesses track marketing campaigns and other incoming traffic as well as help with personal branding and media engagements.

BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS: This is the strategic planning tool we used to illustrate and develop our business model. It identifies the key elements that make up a business. Key partners: Students, entrepreneurs, workers. Key activities: Front-end development, web development, marketing Key resources: web development team, quality assurance team, front end, backend developers. Value proposition: Increased day-to-day productivity, convenience, and ability to track performance with data. Customer relationship: Automated and long-term. Channels: Google AppStore, Apple store.

EXECUTION: The Url shortener App is a one-week project and despite the short timeline and challenges we faced, we were able to work as a team to deliver on the project, We worked with a back-end developer who helped to deliver on the API links, the mobile developer worked on the user interface and App development while the Quality assurance analyst tested for the functionality of the API and mobile App. We explored Jira and Confluence for our Kanban boards, Road map, and documentation while we consider strategies to overcome the constraint of not having product designers to design the prototypes and frontend developers to implement the user interface for the url shortener website.

SUCCESS METRICS: Goals

1. Simple and user-friendly: Customers rating on the App.
2. Onboard Users: Number of active downloads.

CHALLENGES No product designers - UI/ UX No front-end developers Zero budget Short timeline

LESSONS Teamwork/Division of Labour: We learned to work with different teams and used division of labor as a means to ensure that all parties were hands-on.

Management: Managing and following up with different teams for one task was not easy but we did it.

Time management: Although the timeline was short and resources at our disposal were limited, we prioritized, improvised, and delivered the project as and when due.