Product Management Skills - Avoiding over-focus
Focus is an excellent tool, but don't let it disrupt your ability to see the bigger picture.
I once worked with a Product Manager that was assigned to do a single task: get donors to give our company more money. A typical growth area within transactions and monetization.
To do that, he had several levers he could pull:
Increase donation size
Increase donation volume
Increase donation take rate
He was a smart guy and he hit the ground running. He explored and delivered on several different areas in his first few months:
He created leaderboards, attempting to increase donor engagement to instill competitive spirit in donors, hoping to increase donation size.
He encouraged campaign leaders to run multiple campaigns, hoping to increase donation volume in addition to their annual giving days
He added a tipping feature, an automatically applied amount on top of the donation that went straight to the company, hoping to increase take rate.
He reduced the number of steps to make a donation, hoping to optimize conversion rates.
Many of these were extremely successful. Donation size increased by 3%. Campaign leaders ran more 300% more campaigns. The tipping feature led to a 2% increase in donation take rate. The donation conversion funnel improved by 10%.
The Product Manager was extremely pleased. He proudly showcased these results in his quarterly review and presentations.
At the review cycle, he was fired. Leadership had lost confidence in him.
What? Why?
The importance of combatting myopia
As a Product Manager, he focused exclusively on his goals with a laser-like focus. He monitored the outcomes he was trying to impact carefully - but nothing else. This laser focus would be his downfall.
He hadn’t considered the other effects beyond his immediate impacts:
He created leaderboards, which revealed donor names when they wanted to be private. This led to reduced trust in the platform, leading to a decrease of 10% in the number of donations, including larger donors who preferred to remain anonymous.
He encouraged campaign leaders to run multiple campaigns, which caused campaign leaders to not run their annual campaign and move towards an ongoing gift model. This started to reduce a large source of company revenue, which revolved around providing white-glove support for these special annual days.
He added a tipping feature, which caused complaints as users thought that the donations were going to the organization when in reality it lined the company’s pockets - campaign leaders were deeply unnerved by the loss of trust, and vocalized their complaints to the executive team.
He reduced the number of steps to make a donation, removing key anti-fraud checks like CVV and Zip Code, leading to expensive automated credit card scanning by fraudsters and accompanying chargebacks.
Individually, he thought he had met each of his goals and desired outcomes. Taken together, he caused significant harm to the company’s bottom line and positioning.
After he left, I took responsibility of fixing the issues with his execution and ideas:
Creating the capability to post anonymous donations, carefully preserving privacy.
Updating go-to-market practices to emphasize the annual giving as the special focus campaigns, and the ongoing campaigns as general funds, re-positioning our company as thought leaders for campaign management.
Providing users the ability to opt-out of tipping, and being extremely clear the donation was going to support the platform, and not the organization.
Re-adding key security fields, developing anti-fraud and rate limiting controls, nd adding the capability for campaign leaders to issue refunds for erroneous donors.
With the appropriate balancing factors considered and their risks mitigated, overall outcomes turned net positive and the ideas that originally had harmed in their initial execution brought it roaring back to life.
Having a wide lens
This is the importance of having a wide lens and not being myopic.
No change takes place in isolation. Every change has first, second, and third-order effects that have to be considered.
Product Managers must consider them, and understand the constraints and anti-goals they operate under. Otherwise, they can over-focus on the positives.