Leveraging Product Management During a Crisis
Product management can be very beneficial during recession times, and it can help further grow your online presence and increase revenue
The morning after the COVID-19 burst left a lot of companies’ futures uncertain. With the closure of retail stores and the danger of the pandemic, most of them have seen their revenue shrinking drastically. As a result, companies have turned to e-commerce to maintain a positive balance and keep on driving revenue. Professionals and executives are under pressure to find ways to maintain their online traffic, increase conversions and drive revenues via their online channels. Teams have started brainstorming on initiatives, focusing mostly on short-term solutions, while building department silos and not sharing information. Can this approach benefit them?
Let me clarify that it might be hard to survive a crisis such as this one, if your company hasn’t already invested in a strong online presence. Unless your online budget is very high, building an online brand presence from scratch can be very time-consuming, and the results will take a long time to show. Getting the basics right will give you a competitive advantage against any other companies that are now striving to find a way to drive online revenue.
Performance, SEO, content optimization and good UX are the elements that can help your company stand out and further enhance your online presence. Making sure your website is available and fast when users need it, is indexed high on the search engine result pages (SERPs) organically, and has content that is going to complement your brand and further allow you to stand out, are important elements.
If your company belongs to that category, act fast! By assessing those elements, coming up with a recovery plan and implementing your approach, you can further work on a presence that will allow your company to stand out. Although miracles cannot happen overnight when it comes to SEO, you’ll be able to improve your long-term SERP ranking and enable your company to have a better index presence in the long run.
For all those who have built a robust online presence already and are working on ways to keep their company afloat, it’s important to exit the panic mode. By building silos, you miss out on cross-functional opportunities that will help your company stand out or even save costs. Product management, due to its pivotal and cross-functional positioning, can offer insights that will facilitate discussions and drive outcomes.
How can product management really help?
Product managers keep users in mind in everything they do. They invest their time understanding what are the shopping behaviors, underserved needs and jobs to be done. They dedicate a lot of their time to diving into data that comes from tracking tools, customer service logs or usability tests they run. They work with personas and target audiences, and they have a clear understanding of their customer segment.
For every decision made, a lot of supporting data and user-centric thinking is applied. That is why you may hear them say “No” very often. It’s not that an idea isn’t good, it’s just that the value it brings may be lower than thought, or the supporting data isn’t favorable, if there’s any at all.
Their knowledge is very useful. They can help you identify the short-term solutions that will enable your company to stand out, but also identify the long-term solutions that will allow your company to be ahead of the competition when the recession is over. They will do their best to help you understand your customer, and in that sense, enable you to make optimal decisions.
Product managers know the technical limitations and capabilities of the software used by a company. They can advise on the best ways to implement marketing activities or technical issues that may arise due to a certain approach. Most importantly, they can provide alternatives. They can communicate all possibilities currently supported, or even provide an estimation for implementing new requests, which may add a lot of value to a company’s bottom line, in a short time and with minimum effort.
During a recession, it’s important to approach the situation as an opportunity to re-evaluate and innovate. Just think of the startups founded during the last recession: Uber, Airbnb, Slack, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Square and Venmo are only a few. Their futures were uncertain at the time, but by understanding their target audiences and their underserved needs, they managed to build strong brands that bring value to their users. And guess what: Their users stick with them. Because what was once an underserved need is now met by products that add value.
Together with your product managers, you can find a way to create solutions to existing or new needs that will arise because of the circumstances. You just need to be ahead of the game. Product managers can help you do that. They know frameworks and techniques that will allow that to happen. They can help create long-term solutions that will allow your company to be ahead of the competition when everything is back to normal. Be creative, and think outside the box. In the end, this is what product managers are known for.
