Understanding Data and User Behaviour to Encourage Sustainability Through Technology
In MixPanel’s “Ask an Expert” series, mymizu’s Product Lead Tanmay Goel explores building the product vision, encouraging active usage, and why data and metrics matter.
You can see a short excerpt below, and the full article here.
Tell us a bit about mymizu. What behaviour are you trying to get your users to adopt?
Our founders wanted to reduce the use of single-use plastics since it was the main source of plastic waste, so we started using open-source information on the location of free water refill sources like water fountains, to create maps of where they were.
The idea is that people can get water at these spots and won’t need to buy bottled drinks and generate plastic waste. We quickly took it further because we realized that lots of cafes and family-owned restaurants provide water to customers for free, and we were able to organically onboard more than 1,600 such small businesses in Japan onto our platform.
Our app helps people find these refill points. This connects members of the public who want to be sustainable to suppliers who want to support the cause.
How did you translate the founders’ mission into a product vision?
The first thing I did was to have open and honest conversations with the team to map our vision and what we would do from a product perspective to achieve that.
For example, we want to reduce plastic waste in Japan and be more sustainable. Everyone should be able to head out without needing to buy a bottled drink again because they know they’ll have somewhere they can just get water. This should become a habit.
From a product perspective, we started thinking, how do we use our app to do this? It became clear that we need to make it fun and addictive for the users to build a habit, so we need to measure things like, how many people are refilling their water bottles and how many refill spots do we have.
Once we decided on this, the product decisions became easier. We knew which features we had to build and how we would improve our KPIs. I think the product vision is important because execution is easier if you have something to align to.