In which I pretend to be a PM for an app called Sidekick, a live application debugger. I talk to Nived, a software engineer with experience debugging and doing root cause analysis, but, as it turns out, in a different layer of the stack than Sidekick is intended for!
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As a PM my objective is to help build products that are applicable for increasingly high-frequency jobs so it can acquire newer users at lower cost and retain existing ones at higher value.
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To understand jobs, I'm trying to understand how often the user faces a trigger to use the app. Is there a higher frequency behavior upstream it can be relevant for. Eg: Whatsapp taking a bite from Shopify because buyers have already interacted with the store multiple times by chat and can just buy there.
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To understand acquisition, I'm trying to understand barriers to try and switch.
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To understand retention, I'm trying to understand how quickly s/he's deriving value.
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But on this call, I learned something I wasn't expecting, which is a sign of a good call. If you learn exactly what you're expecting, something might be wrong.
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Nived won't be a user of Sidekick, which is used to debug cloud applications higher up the stack while Nived works closer to hardware and OS at the "low level" of the stack.
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Good customer segmentation through a call like this saves hours of endless naval gazing. It helps position customers vs non-customers. It also helps to decide what not to build. In this case Sidekick probably doesn't want to build a C, C++ equivalent of their app because this audience is not winnable.
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Big thanks to Nived for the call. Also a clarification that he is not a Tesla employee even though he references them. The information of OTA updates is public knowledge :)
