SportsBud
5 months, Jan 2022 - May 2022
Duration
Product Manager in a group of
2 designers, 2 engineers, 1 product manager
My Role
Product Vision, Product Specification, Product Roadmap, User Interview, User Stories, Prototype, Usability Testing
Key Contribution
SportsBud is a mobile app that helps individuals find fitness buddies online and motivates people to achieve fitness goals strategically. In the Product Management course at UC Berkeley, I worked closely with my team to create a product by following a complete product development process with Agile-SCRUM methodology.
I contributed to the product strategy and roadmap, key features prioritization, user stories based on user impact. This experience inspires me to develop a product management mindset to consider the needs of the business.
Problem Statement
To understand the challenges, we are facing and learn about the problem space, our team did an industry exploration by reading online articles and conducting informational interviews with professionals working in the fitness-tech companies. This led us to define what problems we are solving for the customers:
Lack of Accountability
People who are accountable for their actions are motivated to work out. When motivation is low, people are less likely to achieve their fitness goals.
Low Productivity
Most people who drop out of exercise do not have a fitness buddy or someone who share similar commitments with. People are struggling to find a buddy who can fit their fitness routine and level.
Lack of Guidance
According to Verywell Fit, there's a lot of inertia in hiring personal trainers due to confidence issues, monetary concerns and expectation uncertainty.
Vision Statement
"At SportsBud, we believe that exercising should be inclusive, fun and wholesome."
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The biggest and most reliable virtual community for people to fine a fitness buddy.
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The most comprehensive platform to provide personalized fitness plan.
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The most compatible mobile application to connect with various fitness monitoring devices.
Competitive Analysis
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Fitness app has large user base and a well-run tracking feature, buy they focus too much on fitness performances, making doing sports competitive.
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Social media platform such as Facebook Groups have the ability to connect millions of people, but groups are lack of management and the random user base leads to mismatch of skills level.
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Gym such as Equinox has professional experts and training courses, but the fees can be quite expensive, and people may feel self-conscious.
To figure out how our target customers are solving the problem today, we conducted competitive analysis on three types of products: fitness app, social media, gym, and analyzed their strengths, weaknesses:
Metric: 1 - 5 Functionality degree
Core Experiences
Registration
To provide users with a personalized experience, during the registration flow, they can input information such as gender, location, sports preferences.
Find Fitness Buddies
Users can match with buddies both individually and in group formats. Users can make choices based on sports interest, group’s distance, sports level, and request to join.
Enter the Prime
Wardrobe page
Users can directly input “Prime Wardrobe” and enter the prime wardrobe page.
Track Fitness Progress
With the combination of the physical devices and our mobile application. Users' efforts in doing sports can be recorded and analyzed, so they are more able to quantify their work and witness their progress.
Create Fitness Goals
Users can manage their goal sheets by creating or deleting their goals. When editing a goal, they can select the dates to work out.
Join Fitness Groups
The fitness group launches sports events periodically and allow users to register. Users can also create, manage their own groups and invite other people to join in.
Target Customers
Type1 - Individuals who need extra motivation to achieve fitness goals
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people currently lack motivation to achieve their fitness goals.
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Overly self-conscious and anxious when working out or going to the gym alone.
Type2 - Individuals who want to find affordable trainers
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Personal trainers can be too expensive.
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People who lack fitness experience, which could be dangerous to work out without guidance.
Type3 - Fitness professionals who enjoy sharing their knowledge
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Hope to expand the social network in a positive way.
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Seek to earn some extra compensation through their professional fitness knowledge.
User Interview
We conducted interviews and online surveys to understand target users’ fitness behaviors, preferences, and expectations with 100 responses. We also reached out to 5 professionals in the fitness- tech industry to gather their thoughts on our product and potential challenges we may face with.
Research Key Findings
User Pain Points
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Feel boring when doing sports alone.
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Want to learn a new sport but don't know how to get started.
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Hard to find people sharing similar fitness interests.
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Easily forget about fitness schedules and lack experience of making fitness plans.
User Goals
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Take exercise with like-minded people on a regular basis.
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Connect with experienced people who can share knowledge with.
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Explore local fitness clubs and events.
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Stay motivated with clear fitness goals.
Value Propositions
" Find your fitness family easily! "
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Find your fitness buddy to work out together in the safe virtual community.
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Get affordable trainers and personalized fitness plan easily.
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Merge sports culture and expand your social network positively.
Concerns & Risks
Risk
Description
Probability
Impact
Mitigation Plan
Anxiety over meeting strangers online
Adoption of the platform might be impacted by users’ anxieties over meeting strangers.
High
High
Build a range of the accountability commitment levels and use multiple monitoring methods to keep safety.
Misuse and abuse of the platform
The platform could become prey by users with ulterior motives.
Mid
High
Community rules, verification of identity as well as reporting users who abuse could reduce such encounters.
Inaccurate matching
results
Inaccurate matching of different skill level might be unmotivating for some users.
Mid
High
Optimize the algorithm and matching supporting mechanism to improve the marching accuracy and users' satisfaction.
Unique Approaches
Approach 1: Provide a variety of ways to encourage users to meet their fitness buddies
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A matching system that connects like-minded people based on information from the user’s sign-up sheet
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Matching with buddies individually or in group format to meet the needs of users with different preferences.
Approach 2: Establish a benign and healthy fitness community rather than competition
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Connecting users to accountability partners who share similar goals, which allows them to feel a sense of belonging.
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A community section where group members can communicate before meeting in person and share their interests.
Approach 3: Develop an organized tool to help users track their fitness progress.
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A goal-based management tool that allows users to set their fitness goals strategically.
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Introducing a convenient way to track users' fitness efforts and visualize their progress to motivate users in achieving their goals.
Business Goal
At this early stage, we are a small startup competing with established companies who already have sizable user bases. Thus, attracting a critical mass of users is the major objective for us, which also allows us to gain customer insights and create user experiences that would convert users to loyal customers.
Early Stage
Attract and acquire a critical mass of users from diverse fitness backgrounds.
Gaining new customer insights to assess the feasibility of this product.
Ensure the usability and increase user-engagement time, repeat usage.
Growth Stage
Drive customer acquisition volume and further promote this product.
Generate sustainable and reliable revenue streams.
Increase users’ retention rates and expand into new markets geographically.
Mature Stage
Reduce the cost of customer acquisition.
Reduce security risks.
Make products widely popular throughout the country.
Constraints
To accelerate our time to market, we need to set constraints for our product so that we can quickly gather user insights and keep improving the product.
Geography
Bay area
Customer
College Students and Office Workers
Device Platform
First focus on a mobile platform
Industrial Verticals
Niche - multiplayer sports
User Lifecycle
Users from all sports levels can join
Features
Matching, setting goals, joining fitness groups
High-Level User Stories
Based on our main business goal of acquiring first-time users, we narrowed the product scope by considering different factors. According to main features, we made these decisions:
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"Matching" and "Community" are highly prioritized features.
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One of our target customers are individuals who lack motivations, so we wanted to propose a "Goal" feature that allows users to set their fitness goals in an organized format.
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Since we are in the starting stage, it would be hard to attract fitness professionals. We decided to build the fitness marketplace feature in the next round of release.
As an individual who needs fitness motivation, I want to be able to be matched with a gym partner(s) of similar goals so that I will feel accountable to my partner.
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As an individual who likes doing sports with other people, I want to participate in group activities and contact group members, so that I can maintain exercise on a regular basis.
Break-down User Stories
In order have a clear working focus in each sprint, we broke down the high-level user stories into smaller user stories and added these into Jira to help manage the product developing process more conveniently.
User Story Mapping
Information Architecture
There are four main sections in SportsBud: Buddies, Group, Goal, Profile. We also provide users with a customized experience of finding buddies by inputting key information in the preference sheet.
Wireframes
Find Fitness Buddies
The “Buddy” feature allows users to match with buddies both individually and in group
formats. Users can make choices based on buddy’s distance, interest, gender, sports level.
Set Fitness Goals
Under “Goal” feature, users can set their fitness goals by selecting dates to work out or
import group goals. By clicking on each goal on the goal sheet, users can mark whether they
have completed it.
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Join Fitness Groups
Users can find their groups under Community feature. Each group has a chatting room and a
goal section where users can choose events to import to their goal sheet.
Prototypes
Home Page
Match with Buddies
Manage Goals
Group Activities
User Testing Results
Our team reached out to 12 individuals to conduct usability testing. Most users were excited about this app and expressed it is aesthetically pleasing and easy to use. We also got some feedback that challenged our previous hypotheses and design decisions:
Hesitate about matching with other individuals
" I am worried about meeting another matched buddy in person because of safety issues and his/her unexpected personalities. It also makes me feel this is a dating application. I'd be more comfortable in joining groups before going to 1-on-1 workouts.”
Manual-operated goal completion decreases motivation
“ After I finish each goal, I have to manually mark it as finished, which is complex and frustrated. I expect a more advanced way to help me track my fitness progress. "
Question the need of group goals
“ I prefer the groups to be more interactive and free-and-easy, instead of goal-oriented."
Product Iteration
Decision 1: Prioritize group matching than individual matching
To increase user engagement and reduce risks, we changed the home page to recommend groups nearby, and brought "groups" as the first section on the "Buddy" screen. In this way, users will feel more comfortable of using the matching feature and find more fun of our product.
Decision 2: Track Fitness Process Through Physical Devices
By connecting an activity tracker to our app, such as such as Apple Watch and Fitbit, our system can automatically estimate users' efforts, allow them to quantify their work and witness their progress. In this way, we could encourage users’ willingness of keeping using our product and increase user retention.
Decision 3: Propose Group Bulletin rather than Group Goals
Users can simply check group activities and register events in their group. The "About" section guarantees transparency and "Chat" allows users to get familiar with each other. Compared with the previous goal-oriented group, users would better like to check the bulletin regularly by using our product, which also increases user retention and could potentially attract more sports lovers.
Measurable Metrics
We decided to observe the Number of Daily Active Users (after the user has given a try to our feature) as the primary metric to validate our product. This metric is easy to measure and can better quantify the success of the app as it is primarily linked to our primary business goal.
Performance Target: 200 daily active users
Number of Daily Active Users
NPS
User Retention Rate
Match Results Testing
Conversion Rate
Business Feasibility
Reflections
Takeaway
For four months, I worked with five members to go through a complete progress of developing a product. when we were scoping the key features of the product, what I learned most is to balance the importance of different ideas by several ways, such as referring back to user goals and business goals, prioritizing hypothesis and user stories, and defining MVP. This practice reminded me that prioritization is very important during the whole journey of product development.
Future Steps
In the first release, we only developed a part of the key features corresponding to the product roadmap, and the key business goal is to attract the base of our customers. During the next growth stage, we are planning to generate a sustainable and reliable platform by introducing fitness professionals to form a stable relationship with sports lovers.
