Sleep Timer feature

Hello, In today’s story, I am a Product Manager at Luminate. Luminate is an audio streaming mobile app containing books, biographies, and podcasts. It has unique features like:

• Generating Playlists
• Advance AI search
• Pay it forward and so on.

We are missing one of the generic yet important feature needed in an audio app - The Sleep timer. Audio apps are in the rise these days. Sleep timer feature is one of the critical feature, available in most audio streaming platforms.

Let’s get into the Product Management lifecycle and see how we discovered this issue, and launched it into a successful product feature.

Discovery

One fine day, I was carrying out a User Interview to gain more insights on how our users are using the app. The user mentioned a critical pain point she was facing:

She said “I love the content and everything, but I mostly listen to the podcasts when I am driving to work. Its usually an hour long drive. But as I reach the parking lot, things get a bit hectic and I forget to turn it off. The app keeps going on and on and I miss the podcast. When I finally get some headspace and look at the app, the entire podcast is over. I wish the app would somehow know that I am not listening anymore so that I don’t have to keep turning it off, you know.”

Now, this tingled my product manager senses, and I instantly got a feeling that this might be an issue with many of our users. So that’s what i did. I went into an in-depth generative user research.

It is a type of exploratory research done to gain a contextual understanding of the users and help understand the context the users are in when they are facing any issue, how much of a pain it is, what kind of problem they are facing now, and how they are solving it.

I conducted a user survey first to our power users.

Not mentioning the actual feature, but asking them if they are facing similar issues.

From the survey, we discovered that 45% of our users were using the app while they were driving, and 40% of our users were listening while going to bed. The issues they highlighted:

• I don’t know when the content is over because the app keeps going after I am asleep. If there was a way to stop it after I fall asleep.
• I drive for 2 hours back and forth everyday. I play it in the car for the entire drive, but when I am home, I sometimes forget to turn it off while my air pods still connected. It plays the entire book and I don’t have any idea.

So, we identified that our users were facing a common issue. They wanted the app to play for a certain time, and needed it to stop automatically after.

As we identified this, the product team gathered around, and we discussed a number of ways we could solve this problem.

• We already had a feature called “Plans”. Through plans, users could choose a number of content they wanted to play, and choose for how long they wanted it to play. But this feature targeted longer time frames. Like users could choose content they wanted to play for Day 1, Day 2 .. and so on.
• We also thought of another feature where users could add the content they wanted to listen to in a queue and after all the content is over, the app stops.