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Patreon Podcasts - Quick Case Study Exercise

In this exercise, I am a Product Manager at Patreon. This exercise is meant to be a free-thinking creative exercise rather than an in-depth research piece, so I will limit myself to just an hour to complete this exercise from start to finish. For full transparency, timing starts immediately after the “Prompt” section and will end before the “Retrospective” section. Additionally, no outside research will be done for this exercise so any factual information will have to be assumed.

Prompt

What changes would you make to Patreon to improve the platform?

Clarifying Questions & Assumptions

I would first approach this question by asking for clarification on the scope of this project.
Is there a particular user group in mind?
Is there a KPI that should be targeted?
Patreon has many features, is there are particular feature that we should be targeting?
Does this feature have to be engaged with by all users of Patreon?
Should this be focused on the Mobile or Desktop experience?
The following are answers to the questions posed which will be the assumptions that I will be operating under.
There is no user group in particular, feel free to choose whichever group you can identify and work around.
There isn’t any particular KPI that we are looking to raise or lower.
Any Patreon feature is fine.
The reach of the feature to the users of Patreon won’t be in consideration for this exercise.
Either is fine, simply designate which experience is being improved for the exercise.

Identifying User Segments

The following Patreon user segments are based on my own assumptions.
Patreon is divided in 3 main user segments, mainly defined by their intent when subscribing:
Supporters - These users are mainly subscribing because they like the creators they’ve found on other platforms so much that they simply want to support those creators with no strings attached. These users are looking for no return on their investment, they just want to enable their creators to continue doing what they are already doing.
Exclusive Content Consumers - These users probably make up a majority of Patreon subscribers, and are mainly subscribing to gain access to paywalled content. They have some tendencies of Supporters, but if there was no exclusive content that was locked behind a paywall they would not be subscribing to anyone on Patreon whatsoever.
Creators - These are the users that Patreon’s platform is for. They are enabled to continue creating new interesting content via user supports through Patreon subscriptions. Creators provide additional content and special interactions through Patreon that users can’t get anywhere else, all while being able to make a living doing what they love to do.
Since the Exclusive Content Consumers make up a majority of the user base, that will be the segment that we will be targeting when thinking about feature improvements.

Improvement Opportunities

This segment can be broken down even further based on the type of content that they subscribe to creators for. This will most inform what kind of features Patreon can implement/improve to make the experience for these users better. A few of the content types that come to mind are as follows:
Video Games
Podcasts
Video Content
Artists
Of course, Patreon is such a diverse platform so there are definitely more different kinds of content available on the platform but these are the kinds of content that are top of mind for me. Since I’m most familiar with Podcasts, I will identify a few opportunities for improving the experience of listening to podcasts - particularly for the Mobile experience

Feature Ideas

These are a few ideas of features that may improve the podcast listening experience on Patreon. These solve for pain points that I have personally experienced when using the Patreon app.
Content-separated feeds - Patreon already has a tagging feature, but this is up to the Creator on Patreon to create the tags so that users can separate the different content on the feed. Having a built-in ability for Patreon to recognize the different kinds of content (whether they be community posts, video embeds, or audio embeds) would make it easier to navigate for users to find the exact content that they’re looking for.
Pre-loading - This would allow users to pre load podcast episodes so that when they want to listen to them at a later point where they may not have signal, they can still pull up the podcast episode since it will have been preloaded on their mobile device.
Playlists - Right now navigation to any podcasts that have been released early on in the cycle of the Patreon is difficult since users will have to scroll through the entire Patreon feed to find earlier episodes of Podcasts. Having a Playlist view will allow users to navigate between the different episodes more easily, as well as queue up podcasts to listen to in a user-defined order.
Separate podcast platform - Patreon already has a different experience for listening to podcasts with critical podcast features like picking up where the users left off, as well as playback speed control. Patreon could go full-fledged into creating a premium podcast platform and partner with creators for podcast exclusivity.
These features are listed in order of ascending difficulty and impact. Creating an entire Podcasts platform is a long shot possibility for the possibility that Patreon may want to compete with other large Podcast platforms. I would select Playlists as the feature of choice for this exercise since being able to create playlists would alone bring Patreon up to the level of many other media consumption platforms since the podcast listening experience is already pretty good.

Measuring Success (KPIs)

The main goal of the Playlist feature would be to get users to engage more with podcasts on Patreon. Some KPIs to monitor after implementation of this feature would be:
Podcast Creator Monthly Subscriptions - If this number goes up, then Patreon can look into whether or not users are holding back on subscribing to creators on Patreon because they don’t like the current experience of listening to podcasts on Patreon. This is a measure of total subscriptions across all podcast creators, so this would have to be measured against numbers of previous months for subscribers to see if growth trends continue.
Playlists Created - This KPI will have to be measured over the course of a few months to understand how much engagement the feature is getting overall. One risk of any new feature is that users won’t engage with it leading to a bunch of time being spent on something that isn’t used. Keeping in mind the number of playlists created over time will be a guiding measure of other KPIs.
Average Podcast Play Time - This is another indicator of the success of the playlist feature, since we can expect this number to go up if users are able to more easily queue up podcasts to listen to.

Retrospective

I had a difficult time thinking of the different user segments since I have the limited experience of engaging with Patreon in my narrow perspective, so I wasn’t exactly sure what other users tend to subscribe to Patreon for. It may have been easier to separate the user segments into the different content types immediately rather than the trichotomy that I identified, especially since I had to identify a content type to figure out a feature for in the end anyway.
Similarly, I think I spent too much time identifying the different features and detailing them. I could have cut out one of the features and simply stated the features and elaborated on the feature that I would end up choosing rather than detail my brief vision for the different features that I initially ideated. This is a bit trickier since I organized it based on difficulty of implementation and impact, but I think this section could be less detailed for all of the individual features and instead simply focus on what the Playlists feature would look like and what may be core functionality.
I also should have spent some more time to explicitly justify the creation of a playlist feature based on potential business goals. The way that justification came out was more as an implication based on the KPIs. Overall, this was a valuable learning experience and I hope that this was an interesting read about my approach to this kind of time-limited exercise.

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