Creating a Product and Team We’re Proud Of
On the 1st of July this year our new team was formed.
We’d all just come out of lockdown. We were all in the process of adjusting to new roles, as well as a new product/delivery/engineering operating model.
We didn’t have a clear roadmap, let alone an ambition or vision for what value we wanted to deliver for our customer segment (casual sellers).
We had two weeks (while our three squads were wrapping up previous work) to decide what we wanted to build next.
Over the next three months, this wonderful group of people grew into a phenomenal team, took on the most ambitious project I have ever worked on, and delivered the most impressive results I have ever seen from an A/B test.
In an attempt to capture and share a bit of that magic here is a bit more about what we did and what I’ve learnt as it relates to product management.
What we did
As with most decisions, we had imperfect information, but we knew a few things about our customers and their pain points:
- For a large segment of our sellers, selling their items quickly is important.
- This segment also wants their items to sell the first time they are listed; relisting is frustrating.
- ~16k questions are asked, each month by buyers, about lowering the price.
We asked ourselves: what could we do to reduce the time taken to sell and increase the chances of a sale?
We explored existing research, analysed the results of previous experiments and held several rapid ideation sessions. From this, we decided that creating a new way to buy and sell, by allowing buyers to make offers, would go some way to addressing these customer pain points.
As a team, we got to work. Designing, estimating, descoping, scope creeping and descoping a minimum viable product.
Within two weeks, our squads had started building our new Make an offer feature.
The results
When the results from our A/B test came in, we realised we’d achieved something pretty special:
- ~25% of items listed by casual sellers have Make an offer enabled.
- The average time to sell reduced by 22.6% (target was 15%)
- Sell through rates increased by 19% (target was 10%)
The learnings
You can make great decisions, with imperfect information.
The truth is, if I had the option I probably would have spent months on discovery for a project like this. Ideally, I would’ve organised days talking with customers, building financial models with different sensitivities, and putting together a compelling business case about why this was the right thing to do.
I’m not confident this process would have led to better outcomes. It’s okay to make decisions with imperfect information.
The key, in this particular case was deciding on the most efficient way we could learn what we needed to, keeping our scope narrow, listening to our customers and gradually iterating.
Product managers don’t need to be ‘the’ decision maker in a team.
I had no experience with this customer segment or market. I wasn’t familiar with our product or how it was being used by customers. I knew very little about what our international peers were doing.
I was not a specialist, I could not be the decision maker. This was a GREAT thing!
Every person in our product, design, delivery, and engineering team had the opportunity to participate in decision making.
Business rules were created collaboratively, with a diverse group of people participating in the process. Insightful, efficient decisions were made regularly by every team member.
Having the freedom to be ambitious is engaging and empowering.
We’d been through a lot of change, never worked together before, and were all feeling a little off kilter when we came together as a team.
Setting an ambitious, exciting goal allowed us to rally as a team. We came together in the moments of success but also the moments that were frustrating and the moments of failure.
We didn’t always get things right but those moments gave us the opportunity to have reflective and constructive conversations about the way we work together and how we want to grow.
We were united in our ambition to deliver something meaningful for our customers. We were excited about this tangible, impactful way we could genuinely make things better for them.
As a product manager, I’ve learnt a lot from working on Make an Offer and I’m very thankful for the experience.
But mostly, I’m grateful for the exceptional people in our team, the constructive conversations, our resilience, and our determination to deliver great outcomes for our customers.
I’m really looking forward to what comes next.
