Anuradha Sridharan

In 2020, I wrote about my experience with a brain-training app called Elevate , which I found incredibly engaging. At the time, I shared five reasons why it had completely hooked me. Five years later, in an era where apps grab our attention quickly and then fade just as fast, I find myself writing about the same app again. My daughter and I are still using it—so much so that we upgraded to the premium version. Over time, we reached the highest difficulty levels in most of the games. Eventually, our interest dipped slightly. My daughter wanted to keep her streak alive, so she began playing with minimal effort, just enough to maintain it. About three months ago, Elevate introduced a new feature called Leagues. It was a simple leaderboard system where the top ten players advanced through tiers such as Bronze, Silver, Gold, Ruby, and Diamond. This immediately reignited our interest. We found ourselves eagerly playing games across Math, Reading, Memory, Writing, and Speaking categories. It...

The way we interact with the physical world and the digital world has a lot of similarities. Let me explain. Last weekend, I had been to a book store, which had a wide collection across various categories. How did I navigate this place? First, I went to the categories that I'm mostly interested in - psychology, business, marketing, spirituality. As I was walking through the different aisles, I picked up books to browse - those I have either heard of OR added to my Amazon wish list. Except for a few random books with an interesting title, I mostly stuck to books that I was familiar with. I wanted to take a look at this book "Behave" by Robert Sapolsky but couldn't find it under psychology. I asked an associate working there and he brought the book from the "Science" section. I also enquired about a few other books and also wanted to check if they are available in the used books collection. The associate answered all my questions patiently. I ended up buying t...

One of the common work-related challenges that I face in my professional responsibilities (irrespective of B2B / B2C, startup/established organization, mobile app/web product etc) is how to make a product more engaging so that the adoption and retention rates are high.  What motivates a user to try out a software product? What's required to sustain the same motivation for a longer time? As a product manager, what do I need to do to enable both?  Over the past 6 months, I've been using this mobile app called Elevate and I'm loving it. Except for a few days, I have been maintaining a solid streak of using this app daily. What makes me come back to this app every single day? Why am I loving it? Let me try to jot down the answers to these questions from a "user" POV and capture the key lessons from a product management perspective. I came across this app through an Instagram Sponsored Post. I don't remember the exact phrase used in the ad, but some...

While reading Chapter 3 of the book " Thinking fast and slow " by Daniel Kahneman, there were multiple "aha" moments for me, when the author talks about how self-control is a tiring task for humans. Below are some of the key take-aways for me from this chapter (quoted directly from the book): "People who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation" "Cognitive load is one of the causes of weakened self-control" "Self control requires attention and effort" "All variants of voluntary effort - cognitive, emotional or physical - draw atleast partly on a shared pool of mental energy. This phenomenon is called ego depletion" "An effort of will or self-control is tiring. Exertion of self-control is depleting and unpleasant" "Effects of ego depletion could be undone by ingesting glucose" These points give us some clarity on many areas of ...

Couple of weeks back, I participated in a Product Camp event in Ebay-PayPal office premises in Bangalore. It was one of the well-planned and executed events. Product Camp is an unconference where the interested speakers volunteer for a topic they want to speak about and participants vote on such topics before the event. The schedule of the event is decided just before it starts, based on popular topics and speaker availability. The event kicked off with two inspiring keynote speeches. Piyush Shah, VP of Products at InMobi talked about how the playing ground for mobile startups is the same irrespective of geography. Couple of interesting points he shared: "You can build and launch an app in 100+ countries on the same day" "Fast iterations, pilots and making mistakes crucial to learn in fast paced markets like mobile" "Make every detail perfect and limit the number of details" The second keynote was by Ravi Gururaj, Serial Entrepreneur and Chair - Product C...

One of the challenges I had faced as a product manager in an earlier job role was to ensure that my users are actively engaging with my product/app. When I looked at the numbers, I noticed there was a tremendous dropout after the first login. There wasn't any huge marketing budgets back then and so the users who were visiting our product/app were primarily organic. After a round of data analysis as well as talking to a few users, the conclusion was that the onboarding experience wasn't so great. We went back to the drawing board and redesigned the entire onboarding experience from the ground up. I have been reading up and researching quite a bit on the best practices of onboarding since then and I have distilled it down to the following 10 points: (1) Issues such as time constraints, short attention span and cognitive overload make it much more important to design a smooth and intuitive onboarding experience. In case of mobile apps, it is even more imperative, given the challen...

I have become quite fascinated with the theory around gamification, more so after completing the course by Prof. Kevin Werbach (Highly recommend you sign up for this course whenever it is offered next, if you want to understand gamification beyond points, badges and leader board) It was exciting to come across an app like " QuizUp " that has applied the best practices and principles of game design and game mechanics in a fun and engaging way. QuizUp is a basic trivia game on the mobile that challenges you on various topics ranging from Math, English grammar and spellings and even on the popular sitcom "Friends".  You pick any topic you like, start the quiz with any player in the world who is using the app (or challenge your friends from your social circle) and play the trivia which lasts for 7 rounds. Points are rewarded based on your performance in each round and the final end state. You gather points to reach different levels and the game progresses further. What...

As discussed in my last post , customers try to satisfy their needs by going after specific goals. They evaluate a product/service to see if it helps them achieve these goals. The evaluation criteria is based on multiple factors but the bottom line is to conclude whether the product helps to achieve their goal or not. When I came across the jobs-to-be-done framework by Professor.Clayton Christensen and the famous milkshake example, it felt like an "aha" moment. The key learning is that people choose to "hire" a product or service to do a job. Couple of his lines that made a lot of sense to me: "marketer's task is to understand the job the customer wants to get done, and design products and brands that fill that need." He also emphasizes that every job has a social, functional and emotional dimension to it and that's where a marketer's focus should be. " the job, not the customer, is the fundamental unit of analysis for a marketer who hopes...

With the amount of noise and hoards of information consumers take in everyday, it's quite a challenge to stand out and get noticed, especially in consumer markets. No amount of loud marketing or jazzy advertising will give you the reach unless your product adds some value in the life of a consumer. Flipkart advertisements are cute but if the state of their customer service, delivery processes,  inventory and their shopping interface aren't what they are today, the ads wouldn't have much of an impact. In consumer behavior terminology, we call this as " attitude towards the ad " which inturn triggers the "attitude towards the brand". We might like the ad but the brand/product wouldn't gain much from the ad. I would keep referring to this book again because it's one of my favorites. Marty Cagan talks about three important attributes of a product in his book " Inspired " - valuable, usable and feasible . Usefulness of a product is a ...

Marty Cagan in his book " Inspired: How to create products Customers love " talks about the characteristics of inspiring and successful products. Apart from the popular ones such as usability and visual appeal, one specific characteristic that struck me is the importance he has given towards human emotions and the role they play in creating a winning product. Being a key enthusiast of marketing strategies driven based on consumer behavioral aspects, it felt like a "aha!" moment while I was reading the chapters on the role of emotion in products. Marty says, "People buy and use products largely for emotional reasons". It could be a positive emotion that is triggered by the product or a negative emotion that has been wiped off by the product. For example, Facebook users might feel friendship, love and pride by being part of their social community and being in touch with their friends Anyone who had to make an urgent phone call might have felt irritated...

I use a Yahoo! mail account for my personal emails and I have subscriptions to many group emails. Over the past few months, my mailbox has been overflowing with many unread emails as I tend to scroll through the list and read only the most important ones at the beginning of my day. I have unsubscribed from many group lists to keep the incoming information under control. However there are some groups in which I might get a few important messages occasionally which I do not want to miss out. So I decided to create a few filters and organize my inbox. This is exactly THE time in the lifecycle of product-user interaction when one starts to think about filters in a mail product - when there is a bunch of unread mails and the user feels that it is getting unmanageable and wants to get organized; not when the time he/she creates a new mail account and immediately starts to create filters. Coming back to my problem, I located the "Filter emails like this" and created a filter. S...