TIMOTHY JORDAN: Hi, I'm Timothy Jordan,
and this is "The Developer Show."
I'm standing here with Purnima Kochikar, Director for Google
Play Apps and Games.
Purnima, welcome to the show.
PURNIMA KOCHIKAR: Thank you, Timothy.
Thanks for having me.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: It's great to have you here.
First, I'd like to learn a little bit about your history
and what brought you to Google Play.
I know that you used to be VP at Nokia
for Developer Communities.
What is it that you learned about developers there
that brought you to this role?
PURNIMA KOCHIKAR: What I loved about working with developers
is that they are always optimistic.
I don't think there's any job in the world
that you're working with more optimistic people who
are trying to solve amazing problems.
Every day I talk to people who are saying,
this is a new way of doing taxis or a new way of doing education
or a new way of supplying food.
So there's always a new way, and that's exciting.
The second thing, what I love about developers,
is that they'll take the technology or a platform
that you have built and completely
use it in ways that you have never imagined would happen.
And so the two aspects of it, the surprises
and the solutions, is what makes me excited about working
with developers.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's one of my favorite things
too is that working with platforms, we
always kind of an idea of how developers are going to use it.
And then they always find a way to surprise us,
especially with Google Play.
Because that the landscape is so huge,
there's always something every week where you're like,
that's amazing.
And I never would have thought of that.
PURNIMA KOCHIKAR: Yeah, exactly, and so it's
amazing to be able to do this.
Plus you realize that you're actually making a difference
in people's lives, both for the developer
as well as for the user.
And so that helps too.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: It's interesting to talk about Google Play
because developers who build in Android
already know about Google Play.
But sometimes I wonder if they know
all of the kind of nooks and crannies
and some of the best features.
Do you have like maybe some of your favorite lesser known
features of Google Play that are great for app developers
and publishers?
PURNIMA KOCHIKAR: Well, I don't know
whether it's a lesser known features,
but maybe we should talk about the things
that people may not think about.
Number one thing I believe that people should really
think about is that your users really
want your app to get better, and you should tap into them.
I think a lot of times I hear developers say,
there's a really bad review.
Can you make it go away?
And I'm like no, harness it.
Your user really cares.
So what can you do about it?
But they're also telling you positive things.
So on Google Play, one of the things we've really focused on
is to how to get developers to harness
all the intelligence of the users to make better products.
So everything from alpha beta testing, to staged rollouts,
and now we just introduced A-B testing, which we
call store listing experiments.
So harnessing the intelligence of your users
who are your biggest advocates and your users
to make apps better, I think, is something people
don't use enough.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Well, and we just mentioned an article
on the show about ratings and reviews
in the Google Play developer console.
And I think we've done a lot of work
there to bring that intelligence into a format that's actionable
and really like intelligible at the same time.
PURNIMA KOCHIKAR: Absolutely, one of the big things
developers told us is that we love the fact that we can reply
to reviews and that we could have a direct channel
of communication to our users.
However, there are so many reviews.
How do I find the themes?
How do I know in areas that I should focus on?
And what I find interesting is that there
are folks who will view it as something as a problem to fix,
but a lot of people are now looking at the strengths
that they need to leverage.
So they're looking at it as a way
to measure community sentiment management.
So what we did is to say how do we measure sentiment?
And the tools we are talking about
allow developers to use Google smarts
to understand all the hidden gems in your ratings
and reviews.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's cool.
Developers often ask me, and I'm sure they ask you as well,
what's the secret?
And the coolest thing is you actually recently published
a second version of "The Secrets to App's Success on Google
Play," which you should check out
and will be LinkedIn the show notes.
However, maybe you can give us a highlight.
What's one of your favorite kind of insights from that book?
PURNIMA KOCHIKAR: The first thing
we did was actually put it out linearly.
So the nice thing about the book is that you can always just
jump in where you are at the stage of what matters to you.
So if you're in design, there is a section for design.
If you are in place where building growth.
there's a section for growth.
If you're thinking about, should I use ads for monetizing,
there's a section for that.
It goes not just about Android and Play,
but also looks at other Google technologies, like ads,
for example.
So that's a huge plus.
So the big insight I would like to point there
is to really think about what it means to be not constrained
by the market that you're in.
Android is huge.
it's around the world.
And you could be a global business,
no matter where you are.
This book gives you interesting ways
to tie from everything from how do
you design for various markets, how do you localize,
but also how do you price.
So that I think is--
TIMOTHY JORDAN: It's really inspiring.
PURNIMA KOCHIKAR: Yes, I mean, think about it;
20 years ago, they would have needed a new management
team to figure out how to take a business global.
Now you could do it from your living room.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: And sales offices in multiple markets,
whereas, again--
PURNIMA KOCHIKAR: Now you can.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's great.
Thanks for joining me today.
PURNIMA KOCHIKAR: Thanks for having me, Timothy.
This was fun.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: For more information about everything
that we talked about, check the show notes for links
and, of course, subscribe to this channel
for more interviews like this.
I'm Timothy Jordan, and I'll see you next time.