An introduction to Trade Me’s ‘one-pagers’
Back in 2014, Trade Me introduced the concept of a one-pager, a business-plan-on-a-page that briefly outlines a new piece of work or project. It was designed to quickly and completely communicate the who / what / when / where / why of stuff that we are working on.
It went through an overhaul in early 2015, and nowadays it’s an easy-to-create template on our wiki:
Why one-pagers?
Trade Me is a complex, fast-moving business. While we need to move quickly to respond to our users and the market, we also need to ensure we’re working on the right things at the right time with our limited resources.
A one-pager is a quick and consistent way to summarise what we are working on in plain English, and ensure that everyone who needs to be involved has had a chance to input.
It encourages the tough questions to be asked and trade-off decisions to be made early. It also indicates that a new piece of work is starting, so we can spot crossovers and dependencies between different areas of the business.
Perhaps most importantly, the one-pager forces us to articulate what success looks like in the form of concrete, measurable metrics.
Finally, having all the one-pagers on our wiki has a bunch of benefits — everyone across the business can read and comment on them, it acts as a form of organisational memory, and it is a great way for new product managers to come up to speed quickly, by perusing the 175 one-pagers in the library.
There are seven key parts to the one-pager
1. Hypothesis
This is a simple, scene-setting sentence that summarises the work in the form “we’ll do X and we think it will have a impact Y.”
2. The Problem
This is where most of our thinking and work is done. As a guide, we try and spend twice as much effort here compared to “The Approach / Big Idea” section.
The problem statement should include data, facts, assumptions, analysis, tables, graphs — an evidence base that clearly articulates what the issue is and how it is affecting Trade Me or our members.
3. The Approach / Big Idea
These are our early ideas on how to solve the problem and as such they shouldn’t be too prescriptive — the exact solution should be defined together with the squad.
This is also the place to record best practice, patterns, comparative and competitor reviews, known gaps, what’s out of scope, Trade Me’s competitive advantage, dependencies, etc.
4. Elevator Pitch
This is our snappy, user-focused answer to “what are you working on”? An elevator pitch has the following format:
FOR <target customer> WHO HAVE <a customer need>, <initiative name> IS A <thing>THAT <one key benefit>.
UNLIKE <competitors>, OUR PRODUCT <unique differentiator>.
(To be honest, we could probably kill this section and not lose anything. It can end up being a bit of a contrived statement.)
5. Success
This is where we state the likely user and/or business benefits for the project, based on the HEARRRT framework.
6. Who’s it for?
Our UX team have done a dozen in-depth research studies to understand our users that they’ve documented in the form of personas, and each one-pager should explicitly name the personas that the project or feature is aimed at.
7. Who’s Involved?
This is where we make sure that others from around the business are across the work. We use a homegrown decision-making framework to help, that we call V-CARDI:
- Veto
- Consult
- Action
- Recommend
- Decide
- Inform
The beauty of the one-pager on the wiki is that we can easily ‘tag in’ all these people, and they get an automatic notification that their name has been mentioned.
The product manager authors the one-pager, which is then reviewed by our Product Council
Typically, a Product Manager writes the one-pager, with help from fellow product managers, squad members, analytics, legal, finance, comms, etc for input and review.
We write a one-pager for every piece of work that is more than one month of effort (regardless of elapsed time) or that is strategic in nature.
Once it’s finished, the one-pager gets reviewed by our Product Council who:
- ensure we’re following our product management processes
- question our product priorities, and how this work fits into the bigger picture
- help identify co-development and co-operation on similar product initiatives
Summary
A well-written one-pager is a thing of beauty. It’s succinct, simply communicates an idea so that anyone across the business can understand it, and forces us to properly think through why we are building what we are building.
Stay tuned for Part 2 where I’ll go into a bit more detail and give some tips and tricks for writing one-pagers.
P.S. For the most part, our one-pagers are our mash-up of others’ ideas. The lean canvas approach, the elevator pitch, even things like the RACI decision-making framework have either acted as inspiration, or been straight out copied. We owe a debt of gratitude — thanks!
