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Lean Canvas

Olivier Kouame

Summary

Kopalan is a User Data Platform (UDP) that helps platform engineering teams collect, clean and control internal user data for messaging, user research, product discovery and user feedback. The platform offers a complete toolkit to collect and analyze data from internal systems, unify user records, identify and segment specific personas and then act on this information.

Problem

As an internal product manager for a service or product, I cannot easily send surveys or informational messaging to the users of the service or product provided by my team.

As an internal product manager for a service or product, I do not understand how the capabilities provided by my team are being used.

As an internal product manager for a service or product, I cannot easily identify and get in touch with potential adopters of the capability provided by my team.

Existing Alternatives

For Problem 1, I could manually go through my service or product and extract the list of users. I would then load it up into a 3rd party tool such as SurveyMonkey and then execute the activity from there. I would do something similar for informational messaging, but using another 3rd party tool such as MailChimp. The problem is that this is a very manual and time-consuming process that needs to be regularly repeated.

For Problem 2, I have very limited understanding of how my capability is being used. I could go through the audit logs manually (in the case of COTS software) or instrument my application (in the case of a custom software product) to assign users to specific segments but this is so prohibitively time-consuming I wouldn’t do it. This also impacts Problem 1 as without this data I cannot target my users with the appropriate surveys and messaging.

For Problem 3, there are many internal company systems where potential adopters or interested parties can be found. Getting the set of users of interest out of these systems is arduous (especially engineering systems like CodeCommit rather than more generic tools such as Teams), and syncing them with 3rd party tools is poorly developed though tools such as Zapier can help. This includes:

cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or GCP

knowledge management systems such as Atlassian Confluence or Microsoft Sharepoint

project management systems such as Atlassian JIRA or Monday

source control systems such as Microsoft Github or AWS CodeCommit or Atlassian Bitbucket

internal social boards such as Workplace by Facebook or Slack or Teams or Yammer)

Solution

A platform which ingests users from internal company systems (Confluence, Github, Azure, etc) using a plugin architecture to easily and quickly add new capabilities to the platform. This platform would then allow internal product managers to manage and segment their users and easily send out surveys and emails without the use of any 3rd party tooling.

A platform which segments the users of a product or service automatically based on the type of activities conducted within the capability in order to allow internal product managers to send targeted surveys and comms to specific subsets of their users.

Key Metrics

# of email messages sent from the platform

# of surveys sent from the platform

# of user segments created in the platform

# of Weekly Active Users

Unique Value Proposition

<Single, clear, compelling message that states why you are different and worth paying attention>

Kopalan is driven by highly motivated individuals immersed in the world of internal product management. We’ve come to understand that managing internal services and products is a very different challenge to working with customer-facing products - the context is different, the problems are different and the measures of success are different. Nonetheless, it remains product management and that’s our bread and butter alongside software engineering and so we feel the pain we are trying to solve - and are perfectly placed to resolve.

High-Level Concept

Kopalan is Segment for internal product managers (with a dash of DataBox, MailChimp, UserVoice and SurveyMonkey).

Unfair Advantage

Marketplace once we have that in place, and the growing number of plugins

Community with forum and message board

Channels (TBD)

Friends

Hacker News

Marketing?

Customer Segments

Anyone in the internal product or service owner role within medium and large enterprises where the number of users and potential users is large enough that communication cannot be managed 1 on 1.

UX professionals working with internal products or services.