Why is aiming a bazooka the main strength of a Product Manager?
Align on a user problem, an impactful solution and a metric
I joined ManoMano as a Product Manager (PM) in October 2018 after having failed to launch a B2C mobile app. During the past year, I have discovered a new job and a new company at the same time.
As any PMs, we are tackling issues every day. There are several ways to overcome an obstacle. If your obstacle is a wall, our main goal is to demolish it. There are 2 ways to do so: either using a hammer or using a bazooka.
My major learning as a PM at ManoMano is:
How to aim a bazooka?
- Aiming a bazooka by aligning on a (user) problem
- Aiming a bazooka by aligning on an (impactful) solution
- Aiming a bazooka by aligning on a (non-vanity) metric
Even though from the outside, tech companies might look attractive, successful and powerful, and because failure is the way you learn the most, I would like to share with you how I learned to aim a bazooka by failing on a weekly basis (daily might be excessive) at ManoMano. My 3 main failures are followed by some tips either at an individual or at the company level that can be implemented for you to avoid making the same mistakes.
ManoMano is a DIY/gardening specialist marketplace. Our daily obsession is our DIY users. Like any marketplaces to monitor our users’ satisfaction, to know if the job has been done, to know if we enabled our users to find the product they need, we track the conversion rate.
But the problem to solve is not: How to improve the conversion rate? The problem to solve is: How to help our customers find what fits their needs?
It seems obvious… it’s not.
Aligning on a user problem
“The AB test’s results are disappointing but what if…”
Once upon a time in ManoMano…
Our goal was to improve the conversion rate of our product pages. Looking at the market trends, we know that videos and user-generated content have a strong impact on the conversion rate. So we decided to launch a POC (Proof Of Concept) both to check the impact of these videos on our product pages conversion rate and to see if our users were willing to share their videos.
Long story short, the output was far under expectations.
Then the snowball effect starts…
It’s hard to admit that we were wrong, so all of the people involved in that initiative reacted in 3 different ways:
Challenge the test’s protocol, we already aligned on
- “We are not looking at the proper conversion rate, it should be tracked a month after the video was displayed as users don’t buy a drill from one day to another”
Challenge the POC features
- “The POC was not reliable, the video was not visible enough, so the results are biased… We should launch another POC”
Focus on the benefits
At the origin of the project, these topics were only considered as “side effects” to observe, and perhaps to learn form. Of course as “side effects” there were no clear protocol or success criteria for these items.
- “Look at this trend, it has a huge potential for our Youtube acquisition and it improves our SEO”
- “I am convinced there is a positive impact on retention, it might be an amazing feature to lower our churn rate and improve loyalty”
- “This feature is good for our brand and empowers our DIYers community: they enjoyed sharing their videos and had a great experience with our marketplace”
Then we realized that this snowball effect wouldn’t have happened if we had started by aligning on a user problem. We should have started (before launching any POC) by identifying the user problem to solve. The main question is: Why a user that is on a product page doesn’t buy the product she is watching?
- She doesn’t need it
- She is not ready to buy, still thinking
- She is missing technical details
- She is missing functional details
- She doesn’t trust our marketplace
- She has the feeling that the product is too expensive
Now that we have identified the main problems, we can start thinking deep, diving on one of them:
Why is she missing functional details?
- She needs to check if the product is heavy
- She needs to check if the product can be handled easily
- She needs to check one feature in particular
Having all these in mind, providing more functional details might be solved by something simpler than providing user-generated videos. And then time to think about a solution can start:
- How to help our users check if the product is heavy?
- How to help our users check if the product can be handled easily?
- How to help our users check one feature in particular?
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying user-generated videos doesn’t bring any value to our users (it’s an innovative feature and even though it was under our expectations, it still helps us to increase our product page conversion rate). It’s a methodology issue. I am saying we should start by aligning on a user problem, and thus the solution and the metrics to track will come more easily.
At ManoMano, it is the responsibility of the PM to align all the stakeholders on the problem. And if an initiative starts bypassing this “problem step”, the PM has to raise his hand and say: NO
Obviously, it is time-consuming to understand why our users behave the way they do or what they have in mind but without this initial step, we won’t be able to deliver value.
ACTION PLAN
- As a PM:
1️⃣ Challenge any stakeholder’s request by thinking problem first
2️⃣ Define a problem space for any new features (even technical debt tasks have benefits and are problem-oriented)
3️⃣ Start by a problem reminder when presenting the features in your demo
- As a company:
At ManoMano, our roadmap process is problem-oriented (divided into 3 steps: problem space exploration, problem pitching, and solution space exploration)
(keeping in mind that a roadmap is not a commitment but a way to align all the stakeholders 🙄)
Aligning on an impactful solution
“We don’t have enough bandwidth finally…”
Once we have spotted a user problem, we tackle it.
There are several ways to overcome an obstacle (without bypassing it).
Let’s imagine your obstacle is a wall. Your main goal is to demolish it. There are 2 ways to do so: either using a hammer or using a bazooka.
It’s all about the difference between a 🔨 hammer and a 💥 bazooka.
Here is a short story to illustrate it:
We created a dedicated feature team within ManoMano to work on Qualification, which means extracting attributes, structured data, out of raw data (description, titles, pictures, etc.). To do so, 3 teams were involved:
- The dedicated Feature team, who created an interface to enable manual qualification
- Data-team, who created an algorithm
- Content-team, who started to work with the qualification interface
Once qualification was in production, Data-team and Feature team switched to a more urgent topic. In the meantime, the Content-team carried on using the interface. Then during 6 months, the Content-team was asking for new features, UX improvements… The feature team dedicated some bandwidth for bug resolution but in the end, everyone was disappointed and exhausted.
As we did not align our priorities:
- Content-team couldn’t understand that the company did not invest in the tool they were using every day
- Feature team had to push back Content-team requests for 6 months and was frustrated because of the lack of recognition from Content-team
Aligning both teams on a long term solution would have avoided frustrations. Not only does alignment avoid frustrations, but it also provides a huge power. Let’s go back to hammer vs bazooka:
🔨 A hammer is easy to use, it’s not too heavy and you can hit the wall wherever you want. But one impact won’t be significant. Your main challenge is then to hit the wall as quickly as you can and with as much power as possible.
💥 A bazooka can’t be used easily: your shot will be devastating but while shooting you might impact people around with shrapnel or rocks. It’s really heavy, it takes time to be loaded and moved. You can demolish the wall with only one shot. Your main challenge is to be as accurate as possible to hit the proper area to demolish the wall in one shot.
In a small company, it’s easy to move fast and have small and quick impacts. It doesn’t take long to make decisions, nor to act. In a bigger company, aligning all the teams and making decisions is a challenge. But once the decision is taken, get prepared for the detonation ;)
As product managers at ManoMano, our main challenge is to align people internally to aim the bazooka.
ACTION PLAN
- As a PM:
1️⃣ Keep one dedicated business owner among all your stakeholders per topic
2️⃣ Communicate in advance (using slack or workshops if needed) and afterward reflect on the outcome - As a company:
Coming back to the roadmap process, the goal of the problem pitching step is to make sure all stakeholders are aligned around problems to tackle in the coming sprint.
Aligning on (non-vanity) metric
“Why is my metric decreasing and yours increasing, while monitoring the same feature?”
Once a problem is identified and all the stakeholders are aligned around it and the chosen solution, we need to set some metrics to make sure the issue was tackled. This step is crucial for your team as a PM as it is your best way to measure the outcome and to show the impact of your team.
Here is my last story of the day: regarding reviews, the KPI we decided to focus on to track the increase of the volume of reviews collected.
The problem to solve was “it’s difficult for our users to leave a review”. We were all aligned. The solution exploration phase was done, we started to implement these solutions, the metric was increasing.
Don’t you see anything going wrong? Neither did I, until our CFO raised his hand and asked why the % orders with a review was decreasing, whereas our metric was increasing…
Actually, when looking at the whole funnel to collect reviews, I realized that this metric did not take into account the very first step, the shipment of the email. And obviously, no email sent, no reviews collected…
We had some issues with the email shipment. We finally fixed it and we updated our KPI by taking into account the whole reviews funnel.
ACTION PLAN
- As a PM:
1️⃣ Make sure to align all stakeholders on your KPI, that’s their main data point to evaluate your team
2️⃣ Don’t hesitate to define a global and understandable KPI that will be communicated and sub-metrics that you will follow either to spot some accurate features or for monitoring - As a company:
Being data-driven doesn’t mean being data-obsessed. Data-driven without user mania doesn’t lead anywhere. While taking decisions, make sure you have in your hands quantitative, but also qualitative data
Conclusion: Your roadmap is your bazooka sight
A ManoMano PM daily life often looks like aiming a bazooka:
Align on user problems
- challenge any requests not based on users data points/user research
- start by a problem reminder when presenting the features in your demo
Align on impactful solutions
- keep one dedicated business owner among all your stakeholders per topic
- Align your tech roadmap with your stakeholders’ roadmap
Align on non-vanity metrics
- Build your team’s KPIs with your stakeholders
- KPIs can be used in both communication and monitoring purposes. Align first on the ones dedicated to communication
The roadmap is often criticized internally as for PM it can be considered as an unachievable list of tasks that needs to be done in an unrealistic amount of time. And for stakeholders, it is considered as a commitment from the feature team, that will, obviously, be delayed for blurry reasons.
At ManoMano, we tried to turn our roadmap to an advantage: we built a process to use our roadmap as a tool to align all the stakeholders. Thus at the company level, the roadmap is our best lever to aim the bazooka and have a strong impact 💥
Special thanks to the ManoMano product team for proofreading and suggestions.
