Tony Leng | Aspiring Product Manager

About Me

Former digital marketing account manager
Inspired to make products instead of working in marketing services
Joined a coding boot camp in 2022 to learn coding and the software development lifecycle
During boot camp, developed an affinity for design
Experienced in creating small teams and translating business needs to technical team members

Business - Strategy, market/user research, analytics, stakeholder and vendor management
Design - Personas, user journeys, wireframing, prototyping
Development - Translating business needs to technical requirements, understanding of the software development lifecycle

Project

PlayerWon

A marketplace app that connects gamers with high quality video game coaches.

This project was created in 1 week during my coding boot camp as prep for a larger, final group project to be started the following week. For this project, I was responsible for project management, design as well as frontend development. With that said, there was no proper planning due to the limited timeframe so I will present this section as planning for a potential product.

Market Research

In Japan, the approximate market revenue in 2023 was $24 billion USD. Mobile most popular and profitable, 55% of mobile gamers being women.
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Game penetration is approximately 66% for the 16-29 age group that play games on at least 1 platform, 30s at 65% and 40s at 58%.

In terms of spending, gaming consoles have the highest proportion of paying users (39%), followed by smartphones (24%), PCs (22%), and tablets (15%).

The average monthly expenditure is highest for console gamers (JPY3,057), followed by PC (JPY2,629), smartphone (JPY1,727), and tablet (JPY1,198) gamers.

Regarding discovery, friends and acquaintances are the most influential sources of game recommendations, followed by app store/online game store rankings and official game websites.

Younger gamers (16-29) are more likely to discover games through app store rankings and influencer/celebrity trials or live plays.

User Personas

Here are two potential users from two of the targets with highest penetration: a single male in the 16 - 29 age group and a single woman in the 30s age group.

User Journey

This user journey follows Shinji as he seeks help to increase his team's overall win rate to qualify for regional competition.

Monetization

Current cost-per-booking strategy is inline with other popular marketplace apps. To attract more mobile games to the app, the cost-per-booking fee has been slightly offset for Coaches.

Roadmap

Competitor Analysis

There are two similar products that exist in the market.
One focusing on game coaching in English and the other targeting the under 18 demographic.

Final Product

In 1 week's time, my team and I had created a desktop only marketplace app using HTML, CSS, Javascript and Ruby on Rails.