I worked as a product manager for Dergilik for nearly two years, and I’d want to share my journey. Since I couldn’t cover everything in this series, I’ll focus on the ones in which I’ve been actively involved. First of all, during those two years, I had the chance to meet and work with amazing people, thanks for all. Let’s start by explaining the product.
Dergilik is a digital reading platform in Turkey with around 1 million monthly active users and 20 million downloads. Users can read a wide variety of magazines and newspapers as well as listen to podcasts from any mobile device. In fact, users can play different games just like Netflix does these days. The app allows you to access a wide range of magazines, newspapers, and podcasts of your choice anytime, anywhere with just one click without having to carry them physically. https://dergilik.com.tr
Even if Dergilik is the biggest and leading digital reading platform, it is clear that reading habits are decreasing, that’s a whole other discussion. Anyway, we identified that as our focus and adopted a new strategy. “Find innovative ways to deliver digital content and make user experience easy and enjoyable”. The product has changed dramatically since this new strategy was implemented, but I’ll concentrate on the changes that I’ve been actively involved with.
Data & Analytics
We started with data & analytics and our objective was obviously to send all necessary data (events, dimensions, etc). It was very important, there is no need to go into detail to explain its importance. It helps you build the right thing and solve problems quickly. “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion” (W. Edwards Deming). So we made a gap analysis and prioritized each necessary metric. Although it may not seem like a very difficult job to do, it was not. Let me try to explain with an example; we wanted to track reading and listening durations and we had to consider all edge cases. For example:
User gets a phone call in the middle of reading a magazine or listening an article User abandons the app and attends to the caller. What happens to your duration metrics?
Our most important KPIs were related to duration. If we hadn’t thought and covered those edge cases we would be in a worse situation before. So there were showstopper edge cases that must be considered carefully.
Of course, it was really critical to monitor those KPIs. But there are other priorities, and if we only focused on these KPIs, we wouldn’t be able to provide any benefits to our customers.
As a solution, we used 20% of our velocity per sprint for these tasks. I think it’s good practice to allocate a percentage of each Sprint’s sprint capacity to handle such ongoing tasks.
We were using Firebase and Google Analytics as our analytics tools. We even created a dashboard using Google Data Studio to make it easy to focus on specific metrics. Finally, we were able to track key metrics (KPIs) such as:
- Average reading durations for each content type (article, magazine, newspaper)
- Average listening durations for each content type (article, podcast)
- # of read, listen, download, favorite, share for each content type
- Search activities
- Retention Rate, Churn Rate, MAUs, DAUs, Average Session, Installs/Uninstalls, Registrations, Subscriptions
- App Performance: Load Time, Crashes, API Latency
In Part 2, I’ll be talking about Text-to-Speech Experience. As a memory, I’d want to share some highlights from our team. Since we started working remotely after covid, we did not have a chance to get together. That’s why photos may not include all team members.
