The first thing to know about this artifact is that most of it comes from the influence and knowledge of several other Product People. This document is our interpretation of how 

we as a company should make product by learning from others and making it our own. 

The main goal of this document was to have a company effort to ensure a quality pattern around product work. As an effort that would impact different scopes of Product Work, we decided to make a Product Development Document as comprehensive as possible. 

The need for a quality pattern and common rationale emerged during a period of hypergrowth at the company, when problems were coming up as fast as the company would grow.

The problem hypothesis could come from any source. 

This hypothesis framework was inspired by Chris Compston’s work.

By describing the problem within a more overarching context, we were trying to make sure that we wouldn't fall in the trap of over optimizing on local gains but missing the bigger company goals.

This section of the document was how we envisioned different sides of the company's business strategy connecting with product work, independent of the size of the problem.

This was the most rigid section of the document. We tried to come up with a common framework that would fit different contexts of the company (and probably this is why we failed to get this to become a broader company process).

As a B2B2C business model, we had to come up with a metric that could help us measure impact from both sides: Supply (Creators selling Digital Products) and Demand (Consumers buying Digital Products). We defined Average GMV per user as a way to connect both of the sides.

Each Product Initiative Document should be centered around one problem even if there could be multiple solution hypothesis for that problem.

It was the PM’s job to lead the product pod to evaluate and prioritize each solution against the success metric defined here, and align with their Product Leaders.

Sometimes the work done in the previous section would lead to a review of the context and/or the success metric defined for the initiative.

If that happened, it was the PM’s job to communicate and align a change of goal or priority, and that should be done prior to start executing on the problem.

This section worked as the single source of truth to communicate around what should be developed by the engineering team.

While we changed a lot of stuff during the Discovery Phase, here we had a commitment to be as rigorous as possible in order to maintain the engineering team's velocity.

Even though we were rigorously documenting the planned execution of the features and/or solutions for the Product Initiative, as we all know, a lot can happen while the engineering team is writing code.

This section's purpose was to provide the engineering team a way to report and negotiate back to the PM, PD and Product leadership around decisions that should be made in order to deliver and ship the feature / solution.

Within the same section, we also added space for information that should be more widely distributed around the company and to customers, to help the Product Marketing team distribute the feature.

Not all product initiatives were the same. Some would be big bets for big problems, and other would be optimizations of already established product features.

But one thing we needed to address when we created this template was reporting our success and our learnings upward in the company.

By generating a Database with all the Product Documents created by PMs using this template, we were able to enable other teams and stakeholders to have more visibility and understanding of the Product Team's work for each cycle, and also participate in it when need be.

Even though we had some success in more isolated contexts, we were never able to fully rollout this to the entire company.

What I can say as part of the team who worked on this is that we certainly created a more cohesive product process by getting to the right amount of space for team flexibility when creating product documentation.

Joao Xavier

Gabriel Mota Silveira 

This document showcases our product process from business hypothesis to deployment. With this documentation template we were able to sync Engineering, Product, Design, Data and Marketing efforts providing more focused work for our PMs. We've made this by assembling together multiple PRD templates.

community consumers who've already published

How does this initiative relates to Product overall Strategy? What are the main user needs our initiative must address? How will the initiative address these issues? Who is the target audience?

Users who generate content within the community currently 

have limited access to the "results" stemming from their posts and/or comments

. With the development of the "My Publications" interface, an avenue has been created to furnish content creators with information regarding the quantity of comments, reactions, and views generated by their posts.

By leveraging these metrics, our aim is to 

elevate the level of engagement exhibited by these users towards this functionality

. Furthermore, we are striving to confer visibility upon the most engaged users within the community to the broader membership. This strategic move intends to 

motivate non-publishing members to contribute as well

, thereby bestowing a reputation upon them to uphold.

Consequently, our objective is to expedite the 

availability and significance of supplementary content for consumption and interaction within Club communities

. This initiative will effectively heighten the value proposition for Creators who have embraced this feature. In order to ensure a more impactful influence on the adoption of new creators into the community, it will be imperative to harness creators who have already embraced the community concept as a foundation for supporting our acquisition strategy.

Any data that reinforce this problem/opportunity

Average of [Redacted] members per membership with access to Hotmart Club.

Ratio of [Redacted] communities to clubs.

Active presence of [Redacted] communities across [Redacted] memberships, comprising [Redacted] members.

[Redacted] 2022: [Redacted] posts by [Redacted] authors, averaging [Redacted] posts per author.

Distributed across [Redacted] communities; [Redacted]% of clubs unused for publication.

[Redacted] posts received at least one read, generating [Redacted] reads in the last 30 days ([Redacted] reads per post).

Community's primary use: addressing course-related questions.

A notable portion of users don't engage monthly.

RFM analysis shows higher-value segments align with more frequent and recent Club access.

What's the vision around what we are trying to build? How will it works if we are successful?

1. Engaging Power Users for Content Enrichment

Leveraging insights on post interaction and community adoption, our strategy involves nurturing Power Users – dedicated content creators – within Club Communities. By ensuring abundant content availability and visualizing Power User contributions, we aim to enhance content distribution and accessibility, fostering a thriving community ecosystem.

2. User-Generated Content Loop for Growth

Creating a User-Generated Content Loop, we harness the engagement of our most active community members to attract and onboard new users. By showcasing vibrant discussions and valuable contributions, we create an organic growth mechanism, expanding the community's reach and impact.

We're introducing features to celebrate member activities, highlighting impactful content and contributors marked by reactions and comments. Additionally, our vision extends to tailoring content and influential members to individual user journeys, creating a personalized and meaningful experience. The establishment of a recognition system for individual accomplishments further reinforces engagement and user pride within the community.

Details about the solution worth calling out to avoid problems

Each community might have its own content creation frequency influenced by particular use cases.

User might not understand that they are being recognized by the community if these frequencies are not aligned

specifically excluded from the concept: functionality or use cases we intentionally aren’t covering to fit the appetite or make the problem tractable

Provide a analytics view of this engagement information for the creators

Calculate Initiative Priorization Score by assessing its 

 in terms of amount of users per use case frequency, 

 in terms of Touched GMV per user (i.e ARPU), 

 as in how sure we are the initiative capability to attain the foresaw 

 as in how long will it take to ship assuming team's current velocity.

Reach (# of users): [Redacted Weekly Active Community Consumers

Impact (Touched GMV): Avg [Redacted] BRL GMV by user in the last 12 month

Moderated confidence arises due to the absence of confirmed community use cases, alongside the natural frequency of engagement in addressing the member-creator connection challenge. Nonetheless, it's worth noting that community platforms often implement recognition policies and functionalities for their most active members, fostering consistent engagement levels. This aligns with our vision of creating an ecosystem where engagement is nurtured through tailored recognition and personalized content integration, ultimately ensuring a vibrant and impactful community experience.

The development effort required is substantial, particularly considering the potential to streamline the rewards display interface. However, a critical aspect involves establishing a robust data structure – a repository – that seamlessly links user community activities with the specific parameters warranting rewards

What are we optimizing for? What we don’t want to get worse? What metrics don’t concern us?

 % of user who keep creating publications in community for at least to weeks

 % of New Users generated by Treding Posts Components

 Amount New Weekly Users from Trending Posts Components / Total of New Weekly Users

 Total Posts / Total Members with at least 1 post

 Total of distinct Ranked Users / Total Users with at leat 1 post

What are the User Tasks we are covering and what are our feature/solution hypothesis we have foreseen within this initiative

[Feature 1]: Recognition Scale for Community Activities

Target: X users who have previously engaged in reading

User Value: Users are uncertain about community usage, leading to a perceived lack of value in participation.

Business Value: By enhancing community engagement frequency, we will generate more supplementary content for the Club. Increased supplementary content enhances the community's ability to execute the strategy of elevating AGMVPU (Average GMV Per

What Data Insight evidence helps us design our solution?

Segmenting users engaged in community activities over the last 6 months based on their activity levels (posting, commenting, reading) reveals significant insights. Top 1% users (with at least 15 activities) exhibit a weekly read retention (W1) of 42%, accessing content roughly every 9 days. In contrast, users with 1 to 3 activities show a W1 retention of 1.80%, and those surpassing 3 activities have a retention of 13.7%. 

Analyzing community access (pageviews) among users who accessed at least one community, one product, and total users in the new Club, reveals a retention boost of approximately 2x due to community access. 

In tag-based experiments indicating community purpose, "Access Additional Content" tag exhibited a conversion rate of 17% for community access and post reading, surpassing the control group (without a tag). This indicates room for optimization in content discoverability. 

What Data Insight evidence helps us prove the solutuion's Business and User Value?

Our primary challenge lies in efficiently disseminating the existing content within our communities. An imbalance persists between the volume of content generated and the effectiveness of this content reaching all community members. This is evident from the substantial variation in member totals across Clubs, with minimal variance in the member-read ratio. 

While there's a correlation between total publications, comments, and member count, it's less pronounced than the correlation between post interaction (comment/post) and community adoption by members (reads/member). To address this challenge proactively, our strategy involves cultivating Power Users – consumers who actively create content – within Club Communities. This aims to ensure content availability and subsequently improve content distribution by visualizing content generated by Power Users. 

RFM segmentation highlights that users engaged in community activities tend to align with segments representing higher GMV. Increasing engagement in the community activities can drive users to transition between segments, emphasizing rewards as an engagement objective.

How do Customer Insights differ from our assumptions and impact how we are solving the problem?

balance engagement depth with habit formation

 (i.e. retention). Users who extensively use the Club in a single day might be less inclined to return the next day.

At Duolingo, every user sets a daily goal: a specific number of lessons to complete each day. Until a year ago, users could only maintain their streak by meeting this daily goal. Interestingly, learners with higher daily goals were actually less likely to maintain a streak, even when they used the app daily.Surprisingly, the learners with the most "intense" daily goal – the highest tier – were the least likely to maintain a streak. Almost 40% of learners who were active for two consecutive days without a streak had set the "intense" daily goal. Setting a goal seemed to act as a deterrent to forming a daily habit, which goes against our objectives at Duolingo.Notably, our discovery emphasized that lowering barriers to consistent daily practice holds greater importance in effective language learning, especially in the initial stages, since we can't educate individuals who discontinue using Duolingo.

How is the market solving this problem? What do their solutions lack? How will we differentiate ourselves from them?

: Utilizing a streak mechanism that requires recurrent behavior, they introduce variation in the value of recognition. This implies that the longer you maintain recognition, the more valuable it becomes.

Duolingo employs the concept of a streak to address this issue. The streak is a quantifiable number that holds you accountable for daily practice, even if only for a few minutes. This variance in achievement aligns with mathematical reasoning: progressing from a 2-day streak to 3 represents a 50% increase in length, while moving from 200 to 201 days signifies a mere 0.5% increase. Consequently, our team of designers, animators, and engineers strives to make extending streaks as rewarding an experience as possible.

Insert UX/UI wireframe here for team comments and tech team analysis

What technology we have available? What can be built to create this? What options do we have to deliver this?

Product Development Document at Hotmart Co.

Product Initiative Hypothesis

Ready to Validate

Business Context

Opportunity

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