Difficult product decisions

Building a product from scratch is a dream, especially for those of us that have worked for already-established companies, brands, and products. You suddenly find yourself in an alternate universe where all decisions related to features, product strategy, and prioritization are made by you or your small team. It’s invigorating — and it’s challenging.

Over the past few months, we’ve had to make some challenging product and prioritization decisions as a team. Today we want to talk about two of them: streaks versus points and forced app updates.

Streaks versus points

This challenge was more about prioritization of new features. It was a week before the NBA Finals were starting, so sometime late in May. We had the engineering resources to build only one feature in time for the Finals. The two features we were weighing are defined below:

Streaks: Pretty self-explanatory. Each show a user participated in successively counted toward their streak. Play 3 in a row and earn an extra life.

Points: This feature would allow all users to earn something for merely participating in shows, regardless of whether they won or not. Accumulating points would eventually allow the user to “buy” extra lives or enter raffles to win real prizes.

Both features were aimed at increasing our active user stats. We wanted more show participation during the Finals as one last push before the season ended, and both of these features incentivized that.

Ultimately we went with streaks.

Why? We hoped that rolling out streaks in the last few weeks of the regular season would ensure people came back once the season was over to keep watching Zach’s show. Just because the season was over didn’t mean we were changing anything, and we thought streaks would help us get there.

The other factor in play was that we weren’t ready to roll out the prizes section of our app yet that allowed users to actually use their points to win anything. The value of earning points decreases by proxy.

We have two engineers now, which brings us to the next level, but it’s still only two people. Additionally, working on a product that revolves around seasons and schedules that are out of our control will always bring unique challenges. This was a valuable lesson on how to prioritize new features with both an engineering resource constraint, as well as a time constraint — something that we’ll have to continue to do for the foreseeable future.

Forced app updates

We’ve had a few times so far that we’ve had to force users to update their apps in order to participate in shows. In all of these instances, we’ve debated whether we should be forcing anyone to do this unless absolutely necessary.

From one side, forcing users to update ensures that everyone that uses the app has the same experience. We know what they’re seeing and it eliminates both the necessity to support old app versions as well as confusion. On the other hand, forcing users to update an app before being able to use it is introducing a relatively large amount of friction. In our early stages, we rely heavily on shows that are live at one moment in time. Introducing additional friction to that flow is not a good user experience.

We talked extensively about this as a team more than once. Below are some excerpts:

We had a convo on Hangouts as well and ultimately came to the conclusion that we’ll only force users to update the app if it’s absolutely necessary from a technical perspective (i.e. moving to Redis)!

This conversation and decision is a great example of how we’re able to talk openly as a team, even if we’re coming from different perspectives and valuing different things. It also showed us how we can move forward as a team together after having to make a tough decision.

The most important thing that this discussion illuminated is this idea that we’re at the perfect intersection of games, entertainment, content, social media, and interactive video. It’s normal for video games to force you to update in order to continue playing, but it’s not normal for content consumption platforms. We are positioned in the middle of those two experiences, and that’s exactly what this discussion showed. We’ve used this philosophy and perspective to continue building the product, make decisions, and fundraise.

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