Bringing Mentions Feature to WhatsApp — A Product Requirements Document
What if you could tag your friend, sibling or an acquaintance when you wish him/her happy birthday. What if you could tag the business you got your favourite sneaker from on IG?
Mentions Feature on WhatsApp
Mentions on WhatsApp status ensures that our moments are shared and seen by the people that matter.
This PRD covers the work involved in implementing mentions on WhatsApp.
1. Overview
1.1 Background
WhatsApp allows users to send text and voice messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other content.
Status is an important part of the product as it allows users to share updates (text, photo, video, and GIF) in real time with their contacts and disappear after 24 hours. Sometimes we want to share life moments of ourselves and others on status and notify specific person(s) about the status update but there’s currently no way to prompt the specific recipient(s) except going to the person’s DM.
Mentions sends a DM notification to the intended recipient(s) of our status update. Mentions is a way to tag people and businesses that matter i.e. you can tag businesses/pages on IG directly from your WhatsApp Status. This means if you got a nice pair of sneakers from @vendor, you can tag them on your status and others can follow through to their instagram page.
1.2 Goal
The primary objective of this project is to ensure that the intended recipient(s) receives a DM notification whenever we post a status update.
The secondary objective is to enable IG business profile tagging from WhatsApp status
1.3 Idea Validation
Qualitative
Five one-on-one user testing sessions were conducted to get feedback on the mentions feature. The five people interviewed liked the idea and were very eager to try the feature. Also, some provided feedback which served as pointers for multiple use cases e.g. tagging business profile from IG
2. Target Customers
Mentions is mainly targeted at WhatsApp status users (for personal use)
3. High Level User Flow
4. Success Metrics
30-day user engagement rate
Comparing the 30-day user engagement rate before and after launching the mentions feature and expecting the later to be higher.
Improved user experience
5. KPIs
5.1 Adoption
- Increase in number of users using status
5.2 Usage
- Increase in volume of status uploads on month over month
- Increase in status to chat conversations
- Increase in number of status views
5.3 Engagement
- Number of status created
- Number of status engaged
6. Product Requirements
6.1 Mentions in WhatsApp
Priority: Important
New enhancement: Yes
- Ability to mention a contact or IG page on status
- The mentioned contact gets a dm notification and can view the status by following the notification.
- The username displays for everyone else that doesn’t have the mentioned contact saved.
- Ability to turn off/on mentions
6.2 Repost status
Priority: Important
Changes required: Yes
- Ability to repost a mentioned status update
7. Rollout Plan
We plan to do a closed beta to understand how our users interact with the mentions feature regarding the KPIs set and functionality, get feedback and iterate based on that.
Then an initial release to 5% of our users.
This will be followed by a teaser on our owned media as well as earned media introducing the mentions feature and announcing the world wide release date.
8. Product Components
8.1 Front-end Development
Java, Swift, C#, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, Objective-C, C
8.2 Back-end Development
Erlang, FreeBSD, Ejabberd, BEAM, Mnesia, YAWS
9. Constraints
9.1 Resources
- People : Inhouse Designers(2), Developers(8), QA(4), PM(1), Researchers(2)
- Skills : Developers with experience in the technologies mentioned above
10. Out of scope
- Mentioned IG Business Profile will not see the mentions.
- You can’t repost a status if you aren’t mentioned.
Tools: Whimsical for LowFi
Role: Product Manager
Thanks for reading. If you have suggestion on how I can improve this PRD kindly leave a comment or email me at semudaraabayomi@gmail.com
