3 no-scope / low-scope “feature hacks” for Product Managers short on resources
As a product manager, I find that the two greatest challenges I face in my work are prioritization and lack of resources. And according to Alpha HQ’s 2018 Product Management Insights report, most PMs are in the same boat.
We all have those “no-brainer” and “must-have” features our companies need implemented today — only, when we hold them up against the roadmap, it seems like “today” might have to be in six months, a year, or even never.
If I could, I would spend half my day coding and supporting the developers on my team as a contributor. I would love to be able to work on new features and fix distracting bugs. Unfortunately, I have a pretty non-technical background, so when I want to change how the product works, I need to do so without touching the codebase myself.
True to PM form, I’ve gotten creative with my workarounds. Here’s some of what I’ve done:
1. Add / Remove Users via Google Form
The context: The productI work on is a B2B desktop application. Firms on the network have “accounts”, and every account has at least one user.
The problem: For years and years, there was no way for our users to manage who else was at their account, short of writing an email to our help line that looked like this:
“I’m trying to create an account for my new analyst but I can’t figure out how. Please advise.”
An account manager would then have to respond, asking for certain required info, and after hearing back, could add the new user via our admin panel.
We knew this process was hurting the business. For starters, my colleagues were wasting their time with a frequent and invariable back-and-forth which culminated in a mindless data entry task. Beyond that, we were wasting our users’ time, as they fruitlessly searched for a feature that didn’t exist, and ended up having to reach out to us instead. Further, we were missing out on potential to grow and retain existing accounts, by getting more of their users on the platform, and decreasing the likelihood of having one contact serve as a single point of failure for one of our accounts.
The solution: The solution that comes to mind looks something like this:
- link(s) in the application to add / remove a team member to your account
- a form to collect required information about the new user
- back-end functionality to take that information and create the new user
- an auto-generated welcome email with requisite on-boarding materials
Not a small amount of work. It’s exactly the kind of project that gets perpetually sidelined for features which more closely deliver on our value prop.
The workaround: We came up with a solution that solved the problem with about one hour of a developer’s time.
- I created a survey using Google forms, which prompts the user for all the info we require
- A front-ender embedded it within a page on our app, and added a few links to this page
- Upon submission, the user’s response is automatically stored on a Google Sheet. At this point, I also get an email alert from Google
- I set up an email filter so every “New User alert” would also go to our offshore team, who process the request and create the user
- I worked with our customer support teams to write a series of customized on-boarding emails for our different customer types
- I created a “robotic” email address: onboarding@axial.net
- After creating the user, our offshore team sends the appropriate email from that address, and copies the account manager for a warm introduction. Problem solved.
2. “Deprecate” old pages with AppCues
Context: Last summer, our team was up against a major deadline. We were replacing several core parts of our app with new pages — with new URLs. We had originally scoped out the work to deprecate the old pages and have them redirect the user to the new, but we ended up cutting it to hit the deadline.
The problem: We soon realized that users were still hitting old pages with some regularity and having broken experiences. When could we implement those redirects? This was clearly something we would need to prioritize, along with about 200 other “fast-follows”.
The solution:
***Heads up: this is the part of the article where I turn into a total AppCues evangelist. If you haven’t heard of them, they provide a third-party integration that allows non-technical people to “add a layer” on top of their applications, so to speak. As a product manager, AppCues is your secret weapon. The next two shortcuts in this article rely completely on AppCues.
AppCues allows you to throw a full-screen takeover on your app. Any time our users hit one of the retired pages, instead of seeing a broken version of our app, they see something like this, turning what would have been a maddening experience into a smooth one:
3. “Take down” the app for maintenance (AppCues)
The same hack can be used to prevent user activity when we’re running migrations. It’s not totally bulletproof, but it means we haven’t yet needed to actually engineer a “downtime” version of our site.
Hopefully these ideas make their way to a PM or designer who finds them inspiring.
If you enjoyed this article, I followed up with a second one. Check it out here!
