This project truly allowed me to learn a wide range of skills and ways of thinking for being a potential product manager. When we were first assigned MusicStreamCo, I was really excited. As a music lover and daily user of Spotify (with a slightly ridiculous number of minutes listened every year), as well as having friends that have worked across the music industry in the past I was excited to learn a lot more about the intricacies of the music business through this project. While we initially ran into some challenges when given many different routes that we could take in terms of product differentiation and our general competitive analysis in comparison to a few of our companies we were looking at, we ultimately narrowed down our 3-4 new key features into a focus on live streaming.
After many discussions to finalize the financial models that we would use and conversations surrounding how we would incentivize users to use the live streaming features (as well as many recalculations of TAM/SAM/SOM), we landed on a model that would incentivize subscribers and non-subscribers to utilize our new feature in the app. One of the most rewarding processes during this project has been the many in-class/section activities that we have done to help us brainstorm and narrow our focus. I think in many ways this simulates what would happen in real life as a PM. You are often given many different challenges and ways of approaching it, but when working with your team it is important to collectively create a plan of action that is tangible and direct. The feedback that we received every step of the way from the teaching team was also very helpful in helping us to move forward in our process. Specifically receiving feedback from industry experts was helpful to better understand what truly would work in the market versus in theory.
As a team, I think we all brought many different assets and experiences to the project. With my background more in business and design and many of our other teammates backgrounds in computer science and economics, we really were able to view many of the challenges that we encountered from multiple facets. Our team worked really well together and we were able to utilize many of the team norms, especially converging and diverging ideas and brainstorms, throughout the project time. Going forward, I am excited to continue fleshing out this project and really bringing in a user/human-centered focus into the lens of our work. I am excited to continue developing these skills as a product manager and dive deeper into our project in the coming weeks.
