Lesson from “Start-Up” K-Drama For Product Manager
Building things that matters to human
I first got introduced to this Netflix Drama when it was launched back in October. I was initially interested due to the technology aspect it introduced in the plot, but I was blown away by how the director deliver each episode with business oriented nature yet still able to catch the viewer attention.
Article contain spoiler to the Start-Up series
Story in a nutshell
The story began with Seo Dal Mi’s father dream on food delivery app that everyone will use through the mobile phone in the near future. After successfully pitched the idea to the investor, he tragically died, leaving Seo Dal Mi with her grandmother who was a corndog stall owner herself.
15 years later, inspired by her long lost pen pal, Seo Dal Mi leave her job to start a business like his father was and go through the Hackathon held by Sandbox-a business incubator that support small business to grow.
After winning the hackathon with her team by proposing AI driven solution, her pen pal who’s currently the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) Nam Do San share his idea of building NoonGil, an AI driven app to help blind people get through their daily activity. This idea was initially rejected by their mentor due to its high cost, and low profit business model.
Regardless of the rejection the team built the prototype and did a user test to some of their colleague and Seo Dal Mi’s own grandmother who suffers from worsen eyesight.
After countless iteration and argument, NoonGil was released globally on mobile app.
True to it’s nature, the app was used by millions of user, but the team encounter a great cost that they have to incur, in which one Korean company invest in the application to keep it going.
Hundreds of people along with Seo Dal Mi’s grandmother wrote a review that help the team to iterate.
The story fast forward to 3 years later when Seo Dal Mi currently reside with different company building self driven car for people with disability. Nam Do San returns from US to join her new team to continue develop and pitch the self driven car to korean government, in which case they won the bid and become a successful unicorn company.
Phew! obviously the story was much more complex than it was. for more detail synopsis you can read it here.
Lesson learn for product team
I think there are four aspects in regards to product management that we can learn from this Netflix series :
- Build outcome driven product
- Understand how big is the impact
- Play as a team, celebrate as a team
1. Build outcome driven product
As a product team, we always think ahead of the game on how we can achieve the business goals through countless iteration and features. However, there’s one aspect that we need to remember : how does our product influence the users life?.
In Seo Dal Mi’s case, her team built NoonGil to solely help her grandmother “see” through the app via voice command. The outcome she’s willing to achieve is for her grandmother to be able to live as if visual impairment is not an obstacle and that NoonGil voice act as an eye for her grandmother.
This focus on the positive outcome leads to hundreds and even thousand of users to use NoonGil.
2. Understand how big is the impact
Now, before we develop the product, the question of how big is the market is a very important part of it, we started from the pain point of specific user and look in a higher margin to see how much impact we can contribute if we solve that pain point.
Let’s see if we can breakdown the NoonGil impact globally.
Data from WHO shows that :
- Globally the number of people of all ages visually impaired is estimated to be 285 million, of whom 39 million are blind.
- People 50 years and older are 82% of all blind.
So, 285 Million is our total available market for this application. That’s about 3.3% of world population (7.7 Billion human population in 2019)
If we dig deeper, how big is the current servicable available market for this app, let’s say that only people with visual impairment that use mobile phone apps is the target.
We can make an assumption that person ages between 16–60 years old will use this apps (for the easy calculation sake we’ll use 50% of total available market), that will be 142 Million potential users globally.
After that since NoonGil is develop in South Korea, we want to take the servicable obtainable market that NoonGil can realistically obtain, so we look at the assumption of visual impaired person that can use the apps in South Korea.
Realistically speaking, since south korean population is pretty small (under 1% of world population) we can assume that 1% of previous servicable available market is the NoonGil obtainable market (about 1,5 Million potential user in korea)
Above number are just an assumption with few data sources to back it up, the real number can be different.
Now, that’s just an example of brainstorming that product team can do to know how big is the impact of our product. It can even be used to brainstorm the impact of small iterative feature that we want to build.
3. Play as a team, celebrate as a team
Product manager works with a team of Developer, UX, Data, and Business Analyst to reach its goals. Without the team, any increment towards the goal would not be possible.
It’s very important for product manager to continuously remind her team of the product vision and how it will contribute to higher goal. She has to keep empower and trust her team to build great product.
When Seo Dal Mi were faced with a huge objective of winning the bid to support korean government in producing self driving car, she trust her team to overcome any challenge and finally won the bid that made them a legit unicorn company.
Any obstacle and challenges should be taken heads on with calculated risk that usually product manager will talk together with her team for final decision.
