What is Zeda.io

Zeda.io is an early-stage startup that is simplifying and innovating Product Development for Product Managers by building a tool that provides all the functionalities needed to define and manage a Product over its entire life cycle.

It will be one place where one can define, manage, collaborate, and share their product descriptions.

My Role

When I joined the team, the product was at its idea stage, the team had already conducted a few surveys and interviews to fine-tune the idea.

My role was first to understand the users that we were targeting and take an understanding of the competitive landscape around the idea so that we weren't building yet another solution.

Overall I was responsible for research, defining, and designing an MVP prototype of the product and essentially build a product that can help other companies smooth up their product development process.

Introduction to the Problem

A product manager’s role is strategic, much like a CEO but for the product.

This involves typical tasks such as :

• Talking to users to gather requirements
• Identifying problems and opportunities
• Deciding which ones are worth going after
• Creating a roadmap and defining features
• Prioritizing development tickets

and much more.

While this looks very overwhelming the role of each product manager varies according to many dynamics like company size.

But one thing that all product managers do is manage & collaborate.

Manage and collaborate with different teams, with multiple timelines and sometimes multiple products, and this can end up in chaos, and here enters ZEDA.io🎉

Research

1. I started with understanding what product management is by reading a lot of blogs and talking with a few product managers.
2. I also did some courses on product management to understand how product managers work, their toolsets and how they go about making their workflows.
3. Explored a lot of tools in project management and roadmap space that I found from the blogs to understand how product management tools are currently solving the problem.

Major Insights

The major insight drawn from the all the user interviews, blogs and courses was the Coordination Problem.

1. Product Management involves the coordination of teams, data, processes, business systems, and more. In reality, product management can be a complicated matter.
2. Product managers have a variety of tool stacks involved for different parts of their product development process. (Product-Manager-Tools)
3. Each of these tool stacks have a learning curve.
4. Communication is one of the most important soft skills of a product manager which sometimes gets lost on a bunch of tool stacks.
5. Documenting everything is the way product managers deal with keeping all the team members on the same page.

Mind Mapping & Conceptualization

Using the insights from the courses, blogs and few interviews we started conceptualizing ideas into a mind map and finally started structuring the ideas into features.

Here's the final map that we came up with.

It's very easy to get lost in the features ocean and even we got lost many times since essentially a tool is supposed to solve the problems of the users right?

So we followed a basic principle and started sketching the initial screens :

Focus on 80% of the users who use 20% of the tools

Solution

Zeda.io solves the coordination problem and makes product management simpler and smarter. It becomes a central hub where teams can collaborate with each other in real-time. It helps users define their roadmap, manage features, create wireframes, define persona, releases, user flows, and more all from a single place.

It is the simplest way to get rid of chaos in product management.

Low Fidelity Wireframes

Using the basic flow that we conceptualized, we started with sketching screens and the basic dashboard, it helped up in iterating faster and also to explore as much as we can.

High Fidelity Designs

We had bunch of themes and ideas from various brainstorms and finally after setting up a basic design language we started designing the final solution in high fidelity.

While the product consists of 100+ screens, edge cases, sign-up screens, and onboarding etc but here's the main experience of the dashboard.

Coming Soon Landing Page

While we had started designing the core platform, we had kept a template Wix site at zeda.io, just so that we are able to "at least present ourselves", it was super ugly, and was not helping in any kind of conversion.

Side by side our team was thinking of starting a newsletter as well, so I had to come with a just enough designed coming soon landing page which can convert our users for the waitlist and also so that we are able to scale our newsletter as well 😄

Dashboard Navigation Breakdown

Before showing the Dashboard, let me show you the navigation sidebar which serves as the main navigation of the Dashboard.

Home

Home is the first point of experience when a registered user visits the platform.

It has widgets that give users a summary of what they were last working on and lists down their actionable items of the day.

• Recent Product - Shows the most recent product user was working on & helps them get started from where they left.
• To Do - All the actionable items are displayed here, and user can get to know upfront what they have to work upon next.
• Mentions- If any of the team member has mentioned the user it will be displayed here, so that user can directly tackle it down, from where they were mentioned.
• Notes- A handy note widget to Jot down all the sudden Notes and Thoughts.
• Calendar- It shows everything that's on the plate of the user, meetings/releases/events and user can connect their google calendar as well.
• Customization of widgets allows user to hide or show all the available widgets.

My products

Lists all the products that user is working on

Teams

• All the members can be sorted down into teams example design team, android team etc.
• Each team has it's own set of tasks, roadmaps and calendar.
• This way Zeda follows the real world structure of an Organization:
  • A company has multiple teams based on what they do example - design team, android team etc.
  • Even those teams are divided into small teams based on what product they are working on, you see how easy it is for the managers to checkup what's happening around the products and teams?

Modules

Modules are the the soul of zeda, each product has different set of documents and to do lists, personas, roadmaps to tackle.

And each of these are called modules, and user can access these modules under each product and is free to customize it their own way.

In total of 14 modules which we had decided I designed 9 of the modules for MVP.

Here's a glimpse of the 9 modules 😉

Concept Validation and User interviews

Well ofcourse Zeda has much more to offer.

But before building something so huge it was necessary that we do a concept validation with a some of our users and get our insights on the product that we were about to build.

Till now we already had around 80+ people in the waitlist, and also our founder had many connections himself since he was a product manager before Zeda.

And so, we connected with few more product managers to get insights and feedback on our product, the overall conversation was around :

• Their current workflow in the company in which they work?
• The things that annoys them about tool stack they currently use?
• Covid-19 affects on their teams.
• Collaboration in remote situation.
• And prototype presentation to show them the product that we were envisioned to build.

The overall feedback was super, which actually gave us the confidence to build and develop it.

Closing Notes

1. Well making a product from scratch was a crazy task, hundreds of concepts, ideas were gone into trash some due to technical feasibility, some due to prioritization, but the learnings were massive.
2. Rushing to the high fidelity stage might be tempting, but a lot of the work happens before that step which helps in faster iterations.
3. The product is currently in its development and already has 300+ people joined in on the waitlist, I am super pumped up for the product to be launched and see the traction it gets 🥳.