How Product People Led the Rebuilding, Rebranding, and Relaunching of Colkie as Sesh

The Client: Colkie

Colkie is a 30-person startup out of Spain that created a B2C social media app that connects music artists and their fans. They have overall more than 40000 users from all over the world, with more than 10 popular artists onboarded. Their current focus is Latin American artists and Spanish-speaking fans.

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The Mission: Interim Product Manager

• One of the founders was dividing his time between product and operations, we joined Colkie as Interim Product Managers to lead the product development.
• Colkie’s first app found product-market fit but reached a limit in terms of technical scalability which put a brake on user acquisition and growth
• Our main goals initially as Interim Product Managers were to lead the technical rebuild and redesign of Colkie, to launch the new app in time for the summer concert and festival season and to act on post-launch learnings with lightning speed

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Our Main Quest: Rebuild, Rebrand, and Relaunch 🚀

Launch: Onboarded Very Fast

Colkie had 15 engineers and they began rebuilding the app. However, there were no dedicated Product Manager(s) to manage the smooth delivery process and coordinate the efforts of all those engineers. We jumped in quickly and provided a helping hand by identifying roles and responsibilities based on the mission's needs.

First Deliverables and Results

1. Product Requirements document for the revamped core experience with high-level Epics and stories to kick off the refinement process
2. Established a regular cadence of refinement and sprint planning

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Explore and Conquer: Solving for the Client

We realized that the scope of the rebuild and the time available to us did not match up. One of the first things we did was to reassess the scope and remove any non-critical features from the first app launch. We knew that feature parity with the existing app was unfeasible for the first release, so we focused on:

1. The core experience that matched user needs and fulfilled business requirements as well
2. Anything needed to meet legal and App/Play store requirements

We wanted to avoid getting stuck in the review process and miss our launch window.

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Initiative 1 - Revamp the experience as Sesh 🖼️

Problem:

• The old architecture of the app did not allow for scalability that was needed
• The UX did not satisfy user needs and resulted in low engagement and retention
• UI was not able to compete with modern social media networks such as TikTok and Instagram
• The website and future App/Play Store positioning was not clear

What has been done:

• Epics and User Stories were refined with Tech Leads/CTO with scalability in mind
• Designed, refined, (de-)scoped features with Engineering, Design, Product team members and co-founders to ensure easy-to-follow UX and clean and modern UI
• Improved processes: established Refinement and Week planning processes to streamline feature discussions, continuously made it more lean to meet launch deadline expectations
• Streamlined a lean copy-translation process to allow for quick English-to-Spanish translations
• Prepared the strategy document for SEO and ASO to maximize customer acquisition and facilitate the migration of the existing user base from Colkie 1.0 to Sesh

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Initiative 2 - Prepare for launch 🚀

Problem:

• The team did not have easy-to-follow list of requirements and features to be able to pass App and Play Store review process and launch the app quickly
• It was not clear which legal requirements do we need to satisfy to minimize legal exposure
• The existing user base of the existing app (Colkie 1.0) was not aware of the switch and could have been lost

What has been done:

• Researched App/Play Store requirements & legal frameworks for various countries
• Prepared screens, descriptions, refined and added various features to satisfy legal and App/PlayStore requirements such as
• allowing users to delete their data
• preventing minors from onboarding
• allowing users to opt-out of user tracking
• Generated awareness within the user base of an old app by creating an email template to be sent to Colkie 1.0 users inviting them to switch from Colkie to Sesh

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Initiative 3 - Hit the ground running post-launch

Problem:

• The app didn't fully satisfy Artists' needs, and several features had to be added to make it much more valuable for Artists and labels compared to platforms like Instagram.
• Segmentation feature (allow to target communication to smaller segments of a large fanbase to increase engagement)
• Session engagement insights (data initiative - to allow artists to gather more relevant data about their fans e.g. number of fans, engagement level to individual messages)
• User role management (allow artists to manage permission levels in their community from inside the app)
• It was not clear how to implement the Artists requests in the leanest way possible
• Initial Product Analytics setup didn’t allow to draw meaningful conclusions about users and their actions inside the app
• The team experienced friction when they switched their task management and knowledge base systems

What has been done:

• Performed qualitative User Research to understand Artists/labels needs better
• Based on conversations with the Artists, we came up with new features, such as Segmentation, Data Insights, Role Management
• In collaboration with Design, CEO and Product team we refined and proposed MVPs of these features
• Researched and documented the ways to implement 5 proposed features:
• Prformed competitor’s analysis of various SDKs with feature tables
• Goals from users’ and company perspectives
• Sccess metrics
• Set up an Instrumentation Plan for the Product Analytics tool (Amplitude)
• Created the Customer Journey Map, prioritized the milestones achieved by the user when using the app
• Created the list of Amplitude-events and user traits linked to specific hypothesis about the user’s behavior and segmentation
• Migrated existing tasks and documentation from Notion to Jira and improved the documentation

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Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes

💡 Launched Sesh on time to ride the summer season growth wave 🌊

💡 Helped to generate more awareness among existing Colkie- and new potential Sesh users 😀

💡 We fortified the product foundation and enabled data-driven decisions by setting up Product Analytics. We designed three management-endorsed initiatives and conducted market research on five additional features. 🤓