Zeda.io — Purpose and Plan to improve Product Management

When you start a journey, you may have a destination or direction in mind, if you are too adventurous you may not have either, but you will definitely have a purpose to start the journey; escape from current situations, explore the world, clear out your mind, and so on. And if your journey involves people’s job, money, and expectations; it is better to have a plan.

This goes back to 15th century where European imperial powers will finance your expedition to explore (conquer) new places and people will join your voyage, but you need to have a plan.

Okay, I am a history buff, for people who live in present, here is a recent example of Elon Musk’s famous Master Plan. I am no way close to his intellect but in this post I want to write down why we started Zeda.io and what is the outcome we expect. It will be helpful as well as insightful if you read my previous post where I shared why I took the decision to start this journey.

It’s been almost 9 months from the first research and whiteboarding till now. So now after talking to hundreds of Product Managers, investors, and founders I have clarity of thoughts, which I would like to share with everyone.

Product Management is chaotic, unorganized, and inefficient. But I am a GOT fan (Not the last two seasons ofcourse).

That’s where Zeda.io comes in, last year in the quest to find a good product management tool, I entered a rabbit hole. I will not go into details, but after extensive research I decided to build something which can become a go to tool for Product Managers, like how Github/Gitlab is for developers, Figma/Adobe is for designers, Hubspot/Marketo for marketing and so on. (No, not another documentation tool, and you will see why in this post).

I have been asked a lot about Zeda.io and how will it help Product Managers, so in this post I will be trying to answer those questions.

I will break down the blog with end vision and then move backward and figure out how we will achieve it.

Long Term Goal —

• Making it easier for people to build products.
• Improve overall quality of products being made.
• Helping people focus on the core problem they are solving.
• Leveraging community to help people share ideas, collect feedback, and learn from each other.
• Becoming the complete Product Management platform.

Let’s see how all this will be achieve and how our roadmap ties up with this goal. We have planned 6 key components which will help bring all this together.

1. Define
2. Manage
3. Collaborate
4. Community
5. Intelligence
6. Platform

Now we will go in detail of each one and see how in the end they all tie together to make Product Management Simpler and Smarter.

1. Define

As a Product Manager we need a lot of things to define what needs to be built. This includes documentation, research, user-flows, whiteboard, etc.. Currently these actions are done on various tools, this results in following problems —

• Fragmentation — As we keep on using different tools for different things, we keep on fragmenting our product definition. Our PRD is on one tool, user-flow is on other, and user research on another, now here are the problems which happen due to this there is no single place which you can share with your stakeholders to show complete picture of the product. Or even for you to reflect back and improve.
• Inefficiency — Because you kept your definition on different tools, every time a change happens you have to go update 10 different sources (and we know, we don’t do that). If a PM leaves the company, half of the information goes with them and a new PM is trying to figure out things on their own.
• Expensive — If you are on budget, you are trying to create free trials or find free alternatives to these tools. On conservative side, paying $10 per month per tool, will still cost you more than $100 per month. This is conservative side by the way. Though Whimsical has helped here a bit.
• Operational — Now keep aside the cost and fragmentation. The mental load of going through different tools is draining in itself. Taking screenshots, pasting it, and the going back to update screenshots when we get feedback. This is not Product Management. Most of these tools do not talk to each other and hence, we have to do it our self.
• Complication — There are specialized tools for these things, but honestly we just use 20% of the offering. Mostly we just need basics to convey our idea, for that we need simple tools.

So at Zeda.io we have decided to provide everything which a PM needs to define a product at one place. Applying Pareto principle to offer 20% of features which 80% PMs use. Thus centralizing all the product definition at one place, making it easier to manage it and share it over time. Also giving the ability to tag different modules into each other, imagine using “slash command” to select the persona/user-flow/wire-frame in PRD or whiteboard.

List of modules we have for this —
1. Documentation
2. Userflow
3. Wireframe
4. Persona
5. Competitive Analysis
6. Feedback Form
7. Whiteboard (Future)
8. Sticky Notes (Future)
9. Tags and Labels (Future)
10. User Journey Map (Future)

And these are not forced upon you, you can choose which module you want and which you don’t. Also, you get templates for all these, so you can just pick the one which you feel comfortable and start editing. We will cover templates more in community section. Let’s move on to managing the product for now.

2. Manage

I know ideas are cheap and execution is tough. I have spent 6 years managing products for unicorn companies in Tokyo, Bay Area, India, and SEA. Even helped a lot of startups, and trust me no one had a good way to do so. Excel sheets, lost communication, project management, and time waste is all there it is.

Yes there are enough project management tools out there, and I am not competing with them, hear me out. What we are proposing is a way for you as a PM/Founder to manage things better and in a streamlined way.

Product Management starts all the way from deciding what to build to launching, collecting user feedback and product data, to improvement. If all these things could happen in a streamlined and interconnected way, you would be way more productive.

Let me explain how Zeda.io will help you out by sharing modules we have or are planned —

1. Request Portal — One problem I have felt and heard a lot in the research is constant requests from various stakeholders on various channels. Your lead will give ad-hoc requests, sales/CSM/customers and other sources will come with their own. Collating and managing these requests, and keeping everyone on the same page is not so easy.
   So we are building a Request Portal (WIP, Scheduled October 2021). Get requests from various sources through integrations (Slack, Email, etc.), APIs, or the portal itself. Map these to revenue, user, effort, story points, OKR, priority and do the backlog grooming.
   Assign the selected initiatives to respective teams/PMs, and communicate back the progress, roadmap, timelines and updates via comments/Emails/Slack integration to stakeholders.
2. Features — Great, now you have decided what to build, and hopefully you have used modules from above to define the product in a way which can be given to developers and designers.
   But there is one thing which needs to be done, breaking the product into set of features/requirements, here is an example — Sign up page has multiple features (Login with Google, Login with Apple, Login with Email, Password Reset, etc.). You need to break down the product into a list of features. We provide a way to do that too.
3. Prioritization — So we have a bunch of features to be made, but obviously we can’t have it all in a sprint. So which need to be picked first needs to be decided. No need to go to Excel or Google Sheets, just pick a framework (RICE or Value-Effort) or make your own custom framework and prioritize the features before you sync these with your dev team.
   PS — We have integration with Jira to have a two way sync. So no more hopping on to a different tool, focus on your work and let us take care of rest. (Trello, Github, Asana, Monday, Clubhouse.io coming soon)
4. Roadmap — Yes there are tons of tools out there to make a roadmap, I won’t go in detail here, but we automatically make product level roadmap based on start date and end date. So you can have peace of mind.
5. Kanban Board — Just in case you want to see the list of features based on status.
6. Changelog — Okay so now your features are done and deployed, a good practice is to write down the release notes and share it with your stakeholders. We have our own Changelog module through which you can publish updates to a Slack channel and your internal stakeholders can join the channel to receive regular update. We are building email support in August.
   But what good it is if your users don’t know about the update. From the same module you can publish the updates to your customer portal or a widget which you can embed anywhere.
7. Analytics — Any good PM will tell you how important metrics are in our world and probably one of the first thing we do in morning is to see analytics dashboards. Don’t worry post launch metrics can be seen on Zeda.io itself. We support embedding Google Data Studio and Tableau. More tools to follow soon.
8. Feedback Portal — This is my favorite, once a product is launched, one of the key thing to manage is customer feedback. You should know how your product is performing. On own Feedback Portal, you can collect feedback from customers directly as well as share the roadmap with them, so they know what is coming soon. Build in Public is the way forward.
   In future we are going to integrate Freshdesk, Zendesk, and Intercom. Anything we are missing?

So you see how on Zeda.io you can manage your product all the way from idea to launch and further. I know every company has their own processes and thus everything is optional and customizable with open APIs. Going to work on improving this.

3. Collaborate

One thing we all can agree is that no good product can be built alone. Product Managers role is such that you have to work closely with your stake holders and have a clear communication. We understand this and thus are building Zeda.io with entire company in mind.

So till now you have seen one place where you can do everything Product Management, how about this one place could talk to your entire company stack so you don’t have to jump on calls or meetings. Let’s see how Zeda.io becomes accessible to all.

1. Customized Access (WIP)— You can add team members with Edit/View/Comment access on product and module level.
2. Workspace/Team/Leadership View (Future)— Combine different products based on themes and show a company wide roadmap. Activity Center, documentation, and resources are some other thoughts.
3. Comments — You can comment on each module and tag people for better collaboration.
4. Integrations (WIP)— Some of the integrations we have in roadmap are Support team (get direct feedback on product from Freshdesk, Zendesk, Intercom), Development teams (Github, Gitlab, Swagger, Postman, Jira, etc.), Sales team (Salesforce, Freshsales), Zapier, and Hubspot. We already support Design tools (Figma, Adobe XD, Miro, Whimsical, etc.) and Data analytics tools.
5. Approvals (Future)—I have been in places where you need to get your managers approval or you as a manager approve changes to product. Record decisions over time and be able to go back and see why certain things were decided to be in they way they are and by whom.
6. Activity Center (Future) — In companies generally we become siloed, specially in remote environment. This just helps to know what people are working on and over all progress. Also, you can go back to your product and see changes made over time, who made the changes and even revert them.

We believe if up to date product information is available to entire company, everyone can work better and be more productive. Saving ton of time replying slack, emails, and meetings.

Even better, automating the workflow which we have plan to do next year. So making the company actually product focused and not just for words.

A break here, because all you have read so far is either available or is planned for next 6 months. What you are going to read now is what we envision for future and is going to be outcome of having centralized product data and integrating this central hub with all the stakeholder’s tools.

4. Community

I know I know, there are enough Slack communities, The Product Tree, Mind The Product, Product Folks, etc. I am part of all. I am not talking about a community like that, I am talking a community like Figma Community or Github.

Take for e.g. mobile apps which have login with phone number. A PM at a dating app will still have to write a PRD for this flow, get it reviewed, and approved. Why not go to Zeda.io community, search for login PRD, find the most rated PRD, copy, edit and focus on the core problem which you have to solve. PS — Don’t forget to upvote the person who wrote the PRD.

We keep on writing same requirements again and again, whereas these are not the core problems. Why can’t we focus more on the core problems of company. These secondary items can be driven through community efforts.

Imagine finding best templates, definitions, ideas from people all over the world. You can comment, like, share other PM’s work (If they allow).

This is already being done for design and code. Why not for Products?

PS — ProductHunt is for complete product launch, not definitions and ideas.

5. Intelligence

Have you experienced Gmail suggesting you to complete your sentence or AI based code optimizations (Yes Github AI Copilot), what if we can use ML to assist, analyze, optimize our Product Management.

YES, your data is secure. We are not using your data for anything, it is a pre-trained model. Here are few examples —

1. You are writing a user story, and you are suggested the best rated template for it from community.
2. You define an API in your requirements and model suggests you to put a rate limit.
3. You are writing a fintech requirement and model auto checks for legal requirements and compliance.
4. You can connect your support tool with Zeda.io and tickets are auto suggested. You also get insights on what to fix in your product.
5. You make change to roadmap and model give you insights about impact on revenue/timelines.

I can keep going on, but the idea is, in future if AI models can write code, movies, drive cars, etc., then for sure they can help us build better products.

If you still don’t feel secure, you have an option to turn everything off and have on premise deployments too for your data. We want you to be at peace.

Another break, if you just go back to top and read the goals again, you will remember that we want to —

• Making it easier for people to build products.
• Improve overall quality of products being made.
• Helping people focus on the core problem they are solving.

Now you see how with the help of centralized platform, community, and AI we as Product Managers will be able to help each other, as well as increase the over all quality of Products in the world, while we innovate and solve our core user problems. Future is together and future is using science. Tesla/Boston Dynamics/DeepMind have shown us this.

6. Platform

This I won’t go in detail, because it is not well thought out yet, but I believe there is a limit to what we can build ourselves and thus eventually we would open up the platform where we become distribution channel and developers/companies can publish their mini apps/plugins. A PM looking for best survey tool, will just come and search on the platform, find what they need and start using. Underlying user and product data will be managed by Zeda.io. Same as we have marketplace on Jira, Salesforce, Slack, etc.

I know this is a very long and has a lot of challenges, but what is the harm in imagining and thinking, if you have feedback please comment or email me.

If done correctly, we will become the place to build products (May be adding some no code elements in future). But yeah, wanted to write it all down and collect feedback from people.

Few points to highlight before I close this out —

1. We are not going to compete with stakeholder tools like Figma, Jira, Github, Hubspot, Salesforce etc. Whatever a PM needs we will build and whatever our stakeholders use we will integrate with.
2. As you can see we aim to cover entire product journey from start to defining and managing it. Not everything will fit everyone’s taste, but that is okay. If you try to be everything for everyone, you are most likely gonna fail.
3. We believe in the goal of making Product Management simpler and smarter. The journey or plan might change.
4. I have not covered a lot of aspects of product, because this is not a feature list and Zeda.io will have a lot more to offer.
5. It was important to list down these thoughts to have clarity and share across teams and community to collect feedback. This is more like a direction and details may change.

That’s it. That’s what I had in mind. Writing down what I have planned for Zeda.io and why. Please do share feedback and feel free to be part of the journey.