Oh! You are a Product Manager! What things should I do to improve my product ?
I don’t know!
Have you ever faced a situation like this ? I have, a lot of times! People have come up to me, to ask for suggestions on what should they do in the website/app to increase engagement, conversion; What works on the website and on the app; What are the immediate few things they could do, which will magically improve their metrics.
It’s difficult to make people understand that these questions are not that straightforward. Product managers are not magicians. There are no set rules that will make the product a hit among the customers. If you have anyone suggesting you anything regarding your product, you should take that advice with a bag of salt.
Here’s why!
Product management is a deeply involved process. There are no set rules that, x works and y doesn’t. Example : Google and aws console : both interfaces work, irrespective of being fundamentally very different.
So, What do you need to understand before suggesting anyone anything ?
- Business goals : What is the team trying to accomplish ?
What if you are suggesting them some changes that will help increase customers quickly click and move to the next page, will increase click through rates (CTR’s); when the business, actually wants the customers to go through the page, take their time and understand the product, have higher avg. time spent on those pages.
So, its very important to understand the end goal and the metric the business is targeting.
2. Customer : Who are their customers ?
This is very important. While designing great products the effort should always be to keep the user’s mental model and your conceptual models in sync. But for that, you need to understand the customer. Like in this example (aws console screen)
If the customer is a techie, aws console might not be a high cognitive load.
If you or any other user, who is not the target audience, sees the screen, you will feel there are too many elements on the screen and definitely will end up suggesting simplification of the interface, which will seem very obvious.
But should it be simplified? No!
Even though you feel that it is high on cognitive load, it is not for the customers who use aws console. For them, this interface is getting task done, the fastest.
3. Local / Market influences : Some initiatives that you come up with might be perfectly valid, just that the market or the location might not be right.
For example, e-commerce did not work in india for a long time. Flipkart, which now is an $11 billon company, tried to copy exactly what amazon did but it did not work. Market was different, the mindset of the people was different.
Only later, they realised that the online fraud was a common fear in the minds on people. People here were skeptical if the products will reach them or not. Cash on delivery as a payment option was introduced by flipkart, in India, which was one of the greatest innovations in e-commerce industry here. It solved the issue of people fearing that even after paying if the product will reach them or not. It worked great
But if this option is copied blindly by the companies in west, thinking it will change the game there; will it make sense ?No.
This option is not required there. People in US are not used to paying by cash on delivery. The laws over there protect the people against any such online frauds, so this is not a concern for people.
4. Data : deep dive in data to understand what’s working, whats not.
For instance, an e-commerce website might be facing lower conversion rate issue (Transactions happening per session ). How to fix that issue ?
The listing page doesn’t look good, the navigation is bad, so your most obvious suggestions are, fixing listing and home page.
On observing closely, you realise, the issue is something else. This is how a usual purchase funnel flow looks like, once someone lands on the site/app :
HomePage -> Listing pages -> Product pages -> Cart -> Checkout -> Pay
In this example, 3–4% of the users who land on the home page are adding the product to cart and reaching till checkout page, but finally not paying.
You are trying to improve the home/listing pages. Only when you deep dive into data you realise, as per industry standards, on a e-commerce platform only 2% of the users reach to checkout flow. So, you are already 50% ahead of industry standards. The issue might be the payment gateway. May be people don’t trust the website or the payment gateway that you have provided.
Only after understanding the flow will you be able to figure out the bottleneck. Fixing Listing, Homepage, without deep diving in data, would not have resolved your issues.
So, only after going through the factors mentioned and may be more in-depth understanding, you can get a holistic view of the things.
So if you are a product person :
The next time some asks you for any advice, hold your horses, don’t recommend even the things that look obvious. First make sure that you know the points mentioned above, before giving any suggestions; or else you will be doing them more harm than good.
And if you are a person, asking people for suggestions about your product : first of all stop asking for these immediate initiatives that you can take to improve your product/metrics, from people who do not completely know the above mentioned points.
Secondly, if anyone is suggesting you something about your product, please take these advises with not with a pinch, but a bag of salt; as people more often than not, do not completely understand the space you are in, your business, your customers etc. And no matter how good they are, if they don’t understand these things, anything they suggest is useless.
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