10 Things I Learned as a Product Manager at Carousell
Before we start, let me share briefly with you about Carousell what we do, who we are in case you already don’t know
Carousell is one of the fastest-growing consumer to consumer marketplace operating in eight markets across Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Our mission is to inspire every person in the world to start selling and buying to make it more possible for one another, on a global scale. Carousell is backed by Telenor Group, Rakuten Ventures, Naver, Sequoia Capital, and Naspers.
Classified players worldwide are getting into transactional models, as it offers more revenue possibilities, and you can offer greater convenience to the users. You are not just connecting buyers and sellers on the platform, but also giving them an easy option to close the deal via online payments and shipping.
I have spent most of my time at Carousell building and launching online payments & shipping features across three of our markets (Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore). One of the features I had worked on was launching Carousell Protection in Malaysia and Singapore.
Carousell Protection is an in-app payment solution feature that allows buyers to pay online through our supported payment methods when closing a deal on Carousell. Carousell holds the buyer’s money and only releases it to the seller once the buyer has successfully received the item in the same condition as listed by the seller.
I have decided to pen down my learnings while working on this product in Carousell, and anything else which I feel will be useful for the product management community.
This was also my first international product management experience spanning across three different countries, so I will share a few personal lessons. I am a soccer fan, so better expect more anecdotes from the sport in this post.
I’m also hoping that it could help some to consider a new career path (Join us at Carousell!) or to understand better how we conceive product management at Carousell.
1.Marketplace product management is special
When we make changes to the product, we have to think about how it impacts both the seller and the buyer (and sometimes even more personas). As they widely say marketplace is where buyers and sellers meet to conduct commerce, and it cannot survive with just one. So you have to keep both the parties happy and maintain a healthy balance :)
For example, one of the reasons we named this escrow protection feature as ‘Carousell Protection’ and not ‘Buyer Protection’ because we wanted a name that works for both buyers and sellers, not just for one side of the marketplace since this feature impacts both buyers and sellers
2. Like soccer, product management is a game of two halves
You have to build the right product first and then regularly tweak it post-launch based on users' learnings.
We saw that our order cancellation rate was significantly high in the first few months after launch. We looked at the data and saw that most of the cancellations were coming from sellers because they couldn’t ship the item in time to the buyer (we have a set limit of 7 days in which seller has to ship the item to the buyer) and as a result, they were canceling orders last minute. When COVID-19 strikes, these cancellations further went up since now sellers couldn’t import their goods from outside in due time. After thoughtful consideration, we decided to build the ‘extend delivery’ option for our sellers, using which sellers could extend the delivery window up to 9 days. This feature helped us in reducing our cancellation rate by 30% in the span of two months.
3. My product person — you’re the central midfielder
I think a Product Manager’s role is very similar to a central midfielder’s role. Central midfielders are the link between defense and attack. They strengthen the squad at its core and help the team by constantly being able to receive and pass the ball in the right direction to score a goal(💰). They are involved not just in the defensive tasks, but they also lead the offensive gameplay after receiving the ball.
As a Product Manager, you are a link between Engineering and Business, and you only succeed by bringing the whole team together and working together towards a common goal 🥅.
For example, to make sure everyone is aligned and working towards the same goal, I organized weekly sync between all the key stakeholders where we discussed any blockers, progress, and updates from everyone around the piece they are owning. In addition to this, I used to send regular updates to the leadership team about the progress and a post-launch update on how we are doing.
Overcommunication helps not only in bringing alignment but also adds transparency across the team.
For the last two months before our payments product launch in Malaysia, I worked closely with the marketing team to design our go-to-market strategy, host community meetups and events.
This is where I shifted my gear from defense(engineering)💻 to attack(selling)💰
4. Localisation helps, so better do it
It is important to localize since one size doesn’t fit all. To grow and expand into new markets, it is necessary to build tailored products to reach the masses.
Say for a company like Facebook, it is easy to localize, could translate the pages, do minor UX changes, and launch a new market. For Carousell, especially with payments & shipping localization was a different story. We not only had to deal with country-specific changes but also had to navigate local laws and regulations governing financial transactions and user verification
We have localized our product across different markets while at the same time kept in mind internationalization and a unified user experience.
For example, we made sure to make the common local payment method in Malaysia (FPX) available on our platform from Day 1. We had customized our sell-form flow and handled West and East Malaysia's geographical nuances to make it easy for our sellers to list an item.
Like in Taiwan, keeping in mind the local user habits, we offer a cash on delivery shipping solution in collaboration with convenience store chain 7-Eleven, one of the most widely-used shipping providers across e-commerce platforms (you can find a 7-Eleven store in Taiwan every 500m).
Backend payment and order infrastructure is the same for all countries, but we localize it on the client-side, handling local nuances.
5. Beta launch or launching gradually is a smarter way to launch
Always do a beta launch for big projects. The beta launch means the pre-release of features to a smaller group of users to try under real conditions.
It prepares you for the final launch in terms of product improvement and other essential things such as server load, downtime, speed, payment failure rate, and your infrastructure’s ability to handle concurrency.
For example, after our escrow payments beta launch in Malaysia (launch with a few selected users), we had faced a high payment failure rate in the double digits in the third week of launch. We worked closely with our payment service provider and quickly fixed the issue, but it impacted a few orders as our users were stuck on the check out screen due to payment failure. Since we did the beta launch and went live with limited users, it helped us handle the situation without causing damage to the brand and reputation of the product.
In payments, users trust you with their money, and if there is a bug in the payment flow, that’s equivalent to the loss of trust and is unforgivable.
6. Diverse Peers
It is important to have peers from diverse backgrounds, different countries, different cultures in your team. At Carousell, we have employees from about 20 different countries. Each individual brings up a different perspective, which adds a lot of value to your product, creativity to problem-solving, and personally, makes you a more evolved individual. When we went to Malaysia for our user research trip before building the complete product, we made sure to have folks from diverse backgrounds. We had folks from design, customer support, business, marketing, sales, engineering, and even folks from the HR team accompanied us as well
Having local team members as part of our user research trip helped us in communicating well with our users. I can recall from a few of our user interviews, how users were more comfortable sharing their pain points with local team members
7. Product Management in Fintech — More stakeholders, more complexity, but a lot more learning
The number of stakeholders you deal with increases by 2x-3x when you’re building a payment product (API or even integrating with a third-party vendor in a marketplace) vs say a growth or a search product.
You not only need engineering, business, data, and design, but also need to consult your legal, finance, compliance, accounting, partnerships, operations, customer support, and marketing teams, and third-party payment partner. This adds to the complexity, especially in alignment and clearing dependencies, while at the same time you get an opportunity to learn about different functions.
8. Implicit needs > Explicit needs
The hard part of product management is identifying and solving the *implicit unmet* user needs. Very few product managers or companies have been successful here. It is easy to solve for that explicit user need. Your users, Sales team, Business team, and Support team will always be vocal about these explicit user needs. What is most important is to solve the implicit user need.
If you solve it right, it could be a game-changer for your product. I have learned that the best way to find these implicit needs is by talking to users from the target segment and asking those non-leading questions. When we launched the shipping solution in Malaysia, our initial hypothesis was that users would choose us because of cheaper pricing. In reality, it turned out; the price was not the most important factor in decision making; it was convenience. Users are okay to pay a premium price if you offer them extra convenience.
Always remember building products is easy, but building products that solve a real problem, and getting a product-market fit is hard.
9. Being a remote Product Manager
My Engineering team sits in Taipei, and the Business team is spread across South East Asia, depending upon the country I am working on. Written communication is essential for a Product Manager, and while working from home (post-Covid), it became very *critical*. I didn’t have the liberty now to do a quick discussion/catchup with engineers/any other stakeholder just by going to their desk. Based on my experience, I am sharing a few tips which worked for me -
10. Care Deeply
Care deeply is one of the core values at Carousell, which has had a strong impact on me. Having strong empathy towards your users and peers is one of the most important skills I have developed.
Before relocating to Singapore, I had spent all my career back in India. When I moved to Singapore, it took me 3–6 months to adjust to the new culture, learn how to give feedback to colleagues, practice active listening (getting used to different accents), and watch my nonverbal communication as well my tone of voice, and most importantly understand when not to counter or be too direct. A lot of credit for this goes to my mentors, peers, and managers at Carousell, who gave me actionable feedback at each step.
In the end, journey of building this product was all worth it
We finally had an end successful payment transaction going through our system, when everybody from our local business team, finance, legal to our payment partner gave us the green light. At Carousell we’re not afraid of any kind of problems or challenges.
I don’t work with Carousell anymore. Please share your feedback in the comments. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn / lakshaykalra0609@gmail.com for any honest feedback or in general want to discuss or brainstorm anything in tech :)
