Social Shopping Product Development Life Cycle

Posted: April 19th, 2010 | Author: Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Filed under: Uncategorized |

A truly public depiction of one company’s attempt to make it in the world of the Internet.

What is the Value Proposition for the Jittr Social Shopping Application currently un-named
Perhaps should call it ShopOn. Anyway, the name is not important at the moment.

At the outset, the demographic we are going after are teenage Girls. Not sure of the value of that demographic for monetization purposes but if you provide something useful and hip, I feel the adoption rate would be high. Of course useful and hip are not easy to achieve.
The basis of the idea centers on Teenage girls’ shopping habits. Not ever having been a girl myself, I have to go with observations including my own daughter’s behaviors. What I have noticed and what I have been told centers around the social aspects of “shopping”. I put quotes around shopping because in fact the activity doesn’t always result in an actual purchase. Fro me shopping is purchasing. I go to a retail establishment with a firm idea of what object or service I need to procure.
The only thing social in my shopping is to ask someone I know to stand on the checkout line while I retrieve the article or articles and then to remind me where the car is after the shopping event.

Though I am treating teenage girls as a homogenous class , it simplifies the problem for the moment and allows the distilling of the core ideas for a Social Shopping application centered on mobile devices.

A distinct shopping experience is an “event” , well organized and with a distinct plan of attack of who is going in person, which mall (typically close by as mommy or daddy need to drop them off) which shops will be frequented. There is usually an underlying purchase intent ie dress for next dance or someone’s birthday or graduation party, but the event is mostly social and if that goes well the fact the purchase intent goes unfulfilled does not detract from the value placed on the event. Of course a part of the equipment are cellphones which of course every teen carries around. These are a generation that has grown with cell phones that are used for more then making or receiving phone calls so the idea of texting and taking photos and interacting with the mobile variant of social networks is already well understood and exercised.

The intent of ShopOn (as for GameOn) is not to create another social network. On the contrary, the idea is to leverage the big players such as Facebook and Twitter and the up and coming Foursquare networks and leave the issues of privacy and all the particulars of making a social network on the web to them.

The ShopOn application will ride on top of the social networks and disparate normal functions inherent in smartphones to provide an extension not replacement of the typical social shopping experience.

Taking the liberty of calling it an “event” for the rest of the writeup. The event is attended by a certain number of people in person but can be extended to include those that can’t attend but are interested via the social networking route.
The event artifact will also have different output of normal activity associated with it – photos taken , sms/text sent and received and others and all of them will need to be activated ,coordinated ,packaged and persisted with a tight coupling of the event artifact by the ShopOn application. No new ground in terms of fundamental mobile functionality is called for instead the wrapping of such within the event construct.

*Artifacts at the outset
photos taken by smartphone
including
sms/mms messages
social network which is invited
social network that is subscribed – acknowledged the invite

Define the event – Saturday at the West Hartford, CT *mall
Purpose – shop for Spring fair dress
syndicate/invite part of the social network you are part of. Can be as broad as a mass blast to Facebook/Twitter or more targeted so just a subset of those friends.
Invites can also be accommodated via sms with action code attached to reply that one wants to subscribe to the event.
Once subscribed , you can be notified of all that transpires during the event as it occurs OR you can view in typical digest form after the fact.
There is an association of place with an event. No one forces you to checkin as you bounce from store to store but will make the checkin process as seamless and easy as possible. This is one of the integration points with Foursquare.
Of course the place can be as general as “Fifth Avenue, NYC” or as specific as Lord and Taylor’s on Fifth Avenue and 38th Street. The greater the specificity the better from an application point of view as well as from a future monetization of the application. Hence seamless and accurate checkins are a key component. All artifacts coming out of the event will be tag with “place” starting with the most specific one known ,assumed or guessed all the way to the one which is part of the defining event if nothing else is available.

A *mall is simple to understand metaphor in this case. In New York City, it can be an avenue or district (Upper East Side).

Additional Relatively Simple features
- simple syndication of image artifacts to photo sharing services with well defined api’s such as Flick.

Few additional high level requirements musings:

Does the concept of “My Group Gift” have any applicability? The pooling together of monetary resources to procure something of greater value for an individual by combining resources for one big thing instead of everyone buying based on their individual contribution.

Integration with QR codes for virtual comparison shopping? Technically known how to incorporate if one available but are goods actually commonly tagged with these. The bar scanner code on all merchandise , is it unique to the actual product or is it also tailored to the merchant for their particular inventory and cost control processes.

What is the Value Proposition of GameOn which is the Code name for Jittr’s Social Gaming application

With the increasing prevalence of Smartphones, the troika of Local, Social and Mobile is upon us. As individual entities have been around on the web for some time and without the web at least for the first two since human kind walked up-right.
With mobile exploding in more then just to make or receive phone calls or simple RSS, with the richness of Web Services developed since the advent of the web but especially since the social networking revolution and with large social networks already in place such as Facebook, Twitter and to a lesses extent Foursquare, putting together Applications with a bent towards the mobile form of interaction and with true utility in all realms of human experience is distinctly and practically possible.

What are the Product Ideas

Social Gaming – people like to take positions on things be they the stock market , sporting events, final disposition of a liked/disliked executive. How often have we heard
something like “if there was a pool that so and so would get fired, I would take the bet on the side of getting fired by… some date”.

The Jittr GameOn Social Gaming application will be the vehicle to whet the appetite of people to take positions on all sort of events , public or private and to be able to stake their positions in a social way leveraging their selected network be it Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare. As a side note , the inclusion of Foursquare is to nurture the local angle to the GameOn Application. Though Twitter and Facebook are both expected to release forms of Location based features soon, Foursquare is the current leader albeit with an overall network that palls in comparison to the two leaders.

Public Events are those that have a wide appeal and usually centered around Professional or collegiate sporting events but sports are not the only win/lose gaming propositions of a public nature. All political races, the passage of congressional bills (Health Care most recently or the financial regulation bill moving through congress at the moment).

Private Events are those that are defined by an individual user and tend to be of a type that have resonance with a particular person’s limited social network. Not the vast everyone is a friend on Facebook but usually the much smaller Twitter people that you are following or the even less number of location based followers on Foursquare.
There is also a sense of immediacy in the private events. It can be “how many times will Mr High Falutent Executive use “align” or “synergy” in the forthcoming All Hands Presentation. That immediacy is a primary driver of the mobile aspect as people are more likely to go to work forgetting socks then their cell phones and even if you can’t bring or use your laptops in a meeting forum ,the cell phone is usually given a pass and is active and perused continously regardless of the social setting.

As is usually necessary with any gaming activity , there has to be a payoff for the winner and a corresponding loss of value for the loser. The nature of GameOn will not be centered on monetary wins or loses as that can run afoul of gambling prohibitions all over. As a side note, what a 3rd party does with the Web Services offered by the platform in their own jurisdiction is a different story. The platform will offer the necessary infrastructure to support the equivalent of virtual gains and losses. Whatever the unit of conversion is used to calculate a user’s current winnings or balance is immaterial as one unit can just as easily be replaced by another.

The concept of Badges won for overall gaming activity, wins or losses will also be supported.

How does Local fit into the mix of product features? The thinking is through Foursquare and it’s core proposition of checking in to business establishments or anywhere that is considered somewhere by someone. The example that comes to mind for this football fan is surrounding Monday Night Football. A common activity is to go to the neighborhood bar to watch with a few friends. In a City like New York, that means a few friends and perhaps scores of other people.
Right now when one checks in, Foursquare communicates back the number of others that are presumed to be checked in. The algorithm is simple, anyone checked in within the last 3 hours.
One of the product features for GameOn would be to define a “game” and then share it with the network of Foursquare users that are currently checked into the establishment.
IT is not currently know if Foursquare provides a push mechanism to make that event surface in a timely manor to other checked in users who are and are not your Foursquare friends. Foursquare does provide an api that delivers the people who are checked in to a particular place but that is only 1/2 of what is necessary to effectuate this feature. Another limiting factor of the features current utility is the small adoption rate relative to Twitter and Facebook so even for large populations in most contexts, the number of Foursquare users will usually be a small percentage. SXSW was a notable exception as the demographic of the typical attendee is early adopter and because of all the hype surrounding location services and the explicit competition between Gowalla and Foursquare.

What type of team and roles necessary to execute:

• Product Advisor – Provides strategic and goal oriented guidance in the Product Requirement Definition for GameOn which is the Social Gaming Product and
  the un-named Social Shopping Application targeted at teenage girls.
• Product Engineer
  • Provides the detailed product requirements at the detail level within the confines of the Strategic direction defined by the Product Advisor.
• Chief Architect/Developer
  • Responsible for Defining the overall technology blueprint for effectuating the Product requirement in a robust , timely and cofst effective basis
  • Lead developer for building out the core application components
  • Authoritative reviewer of code contributions from other parties internal or external.
• Designer –
  • actual design of the user flow through all forms of navigation, including menus, forms, events.
  • Visual Design of the artifacts that present the experience and initiate the product actions.
  • Cut art for Mobile devices and the corresponding Web Presense.
• Test Engineering
• No definitive Test Engineering Group but a role instead played by all principals testing the application at appropriate time
• Tech driven through the use of automated tools and a test driven development methodology
• Investment in various handset devices especially of the Android variety. Those are the devices likely to have subtle differences between one handset maker’s model and another

---