Top Four Lesson for Aspiring Product Managers
Throughout my career I’ve participated and/or launched several products that gives me much of learning — Of course those are not my own creation, it’s a product of a team that I belong to — including first Tokopedia-Gojek delivery integration, 1st and 2nd gen. GoSend Sameday Delivery driver app, Zendesk Wigdets, 1st gen. Sameday Delivery algorithm, LMS-CMS-Loyalty system for vokraf.com, Vokraf’s Webinars, Vokraf’s Digital Marketing Bootcamp, and Vokraf’s Video-on-demand courses.
Here are several key lessons that I wanted to share to the aspiring PMs:
Too much thinking about edge case
When releasing a new feature or product, usually we think of all scenarios. Naturally, we want to cover all the possibilities and risks. While this is a good sign that you and the team think deeply enough to the user flow, beware when it’s starting to become your blocker. It can delay your release date because your team spent more time brainstorm (or overthink) about it, and developer took more time creating complicated features. And when you release the product, ironically, the scenario that you hardly anticipate might be just an edge cases, or even the feature can be misused.
Story: When GoSend team want to build the first version of courier apps, we faced several discussion about the process of pickup and drop-off. We agree that there are possibilities of pickup failure and drop-off failure so we require tech team to build the logic in the driver-app to cover the scenario. Whenever pickup or drop-off failure happened, there should be an automated ticket created in our Customer service Zendesk widget. The tech team was a bit struggling, they said that the failure scenario makes everything complicated. They spent more than 2 weeks extra just to cover this failure scenario. At the first day of launch, the ticket in our customer service was sky rocketing! Our customer service agents were panicked. I talked to our head of CS, and tried to understand the situation. After aggregating the phone confirmation, we figured that most of the failures were not real. Apparently, the drivers that wanted to cherry picking orders were choosing “pickup failed button” instead of “cancel button”. They did it because they don’t want to be blamed for the cancellation. After we figured the situation, we decided to eliminate the failures scenario and everything went back to normal. The very complicated and costly feature that originally built to cover necessary scenario led to doom days in customer service because it’s misused by drivers. The lesson learned. Think about the edge case later. It’s better to fix a problem when we’re sure that it’s really a big thing.
Not thinking about usability
When the feature is released, the most important metrics to monitor is the funnel. What I figured out is that most of the time the main drop in the funnel will be improved when we tweak something like icon, banner, or text to be more relevant and intuitive. So think about usability in the beginning will be crucial and save a lot of time for the next iteration.
Story: When GoSend team redesign the driver app, the whole concept changed, including the icons. One of the icon that affected is “call customer service button”, at the previous version of the apps, the call button is obviously placed at the top right of the screen with a phone symbol. At the new version, the call button placed inside the hamburger icon at the top right corner. After the new app released, there are no issues. However, when the operations team visited several driver base camps, they received a lot of complaints said that the new driver app was not really great, especially, there’s no longer call button to reach customer service. The hamburger menu was even not considered as a button for majority of them. After the feedback received, the product team reuse the phone icon and drivers were happy.
Not thinking about scalability
When you want to create a product, there are three key risks to mitigate. Those are value risk, scalability-technology risk, and financial risk. When I first failed to create a tech product, my first learning was to create a non scalable product at the start, just to prove that the solution works, and the value offered is appreciated by customers. It’s right. The rough version of MVP can give the answer to the value risk, but at the end, any technology product needs to be scalable, so it’s important to think about the scalability risk in the operation model before you start anything.
Story: When product team at Vokraf released a video on demand courses, we found out that the amount of transaction was not good. After doing some iterations, we concluded that at that time, video-on-demand solution is not really fit for Indonesian customer, especially the vocational non-degree study. We decided to try using more Indonesian way, live webinars. After doing tens of iterations, we figured that if we’re repeating the classes, the transactions dropped, and it became unprofitable. The model only worked when there are constant flow of new topics in webinars. While this can be done, it’s not scalable and it’s not really a technology solutions (despite this is still an interesting problem to solve). So, we decided to stop it.
Copying successful product is not the solution
Replicating what’s work is the fastest way to reach market fit. But, don’t think you can compete in the market where you just copying a product from the leading competitor. You’re late in the game, so you need to catch up with the market and the product. Unless you have capital more than them, think twice before you start replicating. With 5x capital you can either launch massive marketing campaign or iterate product faster, which requires more manpower. Nevertheless, it’s still doesn’t guarantee success against first mover.
Story: In Vokraf, after live webinar and video on demand initiatives hit the wall, our product team looking for one solid business in vocational field. Our eyes fall into the intensive bootcamp business with job guarantee. It’s really trending at that time, boosted by the pandemic situation people have more free time than usual so they spend more money for education. We decided to enter the market and tried to match our benefits with the closest competitor while offering it on a lower price. After several batches, we were struggling to increase the number of students enrolled despite implementing very similar product-market strategy. It appeared that our competitor spent far more money on their marketing effort and they seemed to have solid expertise on that field. Now we decided to stop the application for the next batch, and back to the drawing board to figure out next thing to do. Before you decided to compete the winning product in the category, make sure you understand them inside out. Why they’re succeed, and what it takes to get there. As Sun Tzu once said; to win the war, you need to keep your friends close, and your enemy closer.
For people who aspire to be a great Product Manager, you can do it! … Thank you for reading until the end. And, wait for my next nuggets of learning! see you.
