Udacity's Product Manager Nanodegree, PROJECT 01: Pitch a Product Vision
FINAL REVIEW: https://review.udacity.com/#!/reviews/2151547
Now that you’ve gone through the course material, it’s time to prepare your project. First, choose from the following scenarios:
Option 1: Kaiser Permanente is looking to enter into the preventative care space to help their patient base increase physical activity and improve on healthy habits. While the overall goal is improved patient satisfaction and well being, the specific financial goal is reduced cost by emphasizing improved health prior to any adverse conditions developing. Overall, KP wants to decrease spending on conditions such as type 2 diabetes. Your team is tasked with researching the potential costs, features and benefits of a mobile application that communicates with KP patients and helps them improve on healthy habits.
For example, if you’re researching use case 1, look up:
Preventable diseases Kaiser Permanente subscriber base Kaiser Permanente revenues Fitness applications Health care And see where each one of these searches takes you.
Your goal will be to research this opportunity, create a pitch deck for the product you hope to build, and then present it.
Make a copy of this Google doc Starter Template or download the PPT template from the resource section of this project. Complete each section to create a pitch deck for the product you hope to build.
Your project will be evaluated on the following dimensions:
Credibility: Does the presentation sound credible? Here’s where your research will come in handy. Are you backing up your assertions and statements of facts with citations and links? Does the opportunity you describe sound approachable? Many students will make the mistake of aiming too high “we aim to replace Facebook." This is simply not credible in a pitch deck. A more credible statement might be “we aim to become the social network for politically active millennials”.
The same applies to business cases. If your business case is too detailed it starts becoming brittle. A brittle business case is one that’s based on too many assumptions. It’s the epitome of “too many if’s”. For example “If we assume that 20% of millennials are interested in advocacy and if out of that 20 %, 10% are unsatisfied in Facebook and if we can get them to log in 3 times a week and if we assume they click on an ad once out of three visits and if we assume each ad generates $1 then our return on investment is…” This business case is brittle. If any of these assumptions are wrong then it falls apart. Even worse, if your stakeholder audience gets lost in all these assumptions, you will lose their attention. Consider the following instead: “Facebook currently generates $55B a year from 2.4B active users. If we can draw in 1% of that audience (24 million users, which is less than 5% of the available millennial audience), that would represent 55 million a year in revenue at a monetization rate 10 times worse than Facebook’s.”
Notice that difference here. You’re using clear and publicly available numbers and you’re being conservative. You’re saying that if you manage to draw in just 5% of millennials at a very poor monetization rate, you’ll still be making $55 million a year. It’s easy to follow and simple to understand.
Delivery: Yes, even the best products live or die by the delivery of their pitch. A product might be incredible but if the product manager’s delivery is poor, no one will invest in it. At the same time, bad products can get investment with good pitches. If you’re thinking to yourself “how the heck did things like Sharknado 4, Juicero, Microsoft Bob and the watermelon oreo (yes, that was a thing) ever get funded?” It's because some product managers out there made a heck of a pitch presentation. For your delivery, remember two things. Look knowledgeable and look positive. Looking knowledgeable means knowing your material. If it seems like you’re just reading off bullet points from a slide, your audience will assume you’re not knowledgeable. The bullet points are there to summarize what you’re going to say, not provide a script.
Looking positive means sounding like you believe in this product. You need to be the cheerleader of your product because no one else will. When you talk about your product you should sound positive, excited and happy. This is based on product management and it’s the key to getting your ideas approved as opposed to always working on someone else’s ideas.