A case: Add to Favorites

Hello everyone, Andrew is here. Today I want to present you with a real-life case.

So suppose you are a PM in a big online shop, think of something like asos.com. Your manager invites you to evaluate the value of the "Add product to Favorites" feature for your business. Then you will decide whether to develop it further or leave it as it is.

Let's imagine that you have a data analyst who can be assigned a task, but for 1-2 days, no more. Let’s also assume that the analyst indeed rocks, and expects you to also specify what conclusions you want to draw from these results. So the template would look something like that:

What percentage of active users use Favorites? → if less than 5%, then no one needs the feature.

What share of sales are products that users added to Favorites before purchasing? Both in quantitative and monetary terms? → if the share in money is less than 10%, then this is not a significant turnover.

Obviously, one can ask a dozen different questions here. However, it is important to prioritize the key questions that should help you understand how important this product feature is from a business point of view. What three to five questions would you ask? Feel free to take your time and think about it, and maybe share your thoughts with us in the comment box.

Here’s my answer to that.

This case is a fairly typical element of a product interview. See for yourself how much you need to demonstrate here:

• Identify and formulate the user task (JTBD) that the feature solves
• Analyze data and formulate conclusions
• See how this user task is related to the product economy and financial result

Two things to be avoided while working on such cases:

• so-called magical numbers. I put them into the example above on purpose: why 10% there? Why not 7% or 15%? Sometimes you have to make such rough estimates, but if you can choose a clear benchmark for comparison, it is always better.
• asking too many questions. Imagine you are on a job interview and you are given a similar case: you simply won’t have enough time to talk about everything you can talk about. Instead, you want to focus on the value and be super clear about it.

Now, what questions would I ask?

1. What percentage of goods added to Favorites eventually becomes a purchase? I will compare this number with the conversion of viewing a product to purchase, which is usually ~1%. If the conversion from Favorites is way higher (10%-20%), then Favorites are most likely an important CJM step, and its development may affect the overall conversion.
2. What proportion of visitors and buyers use Favorites? If the proportion of visitors is lower, then you can try to popularize the feature, if it is lower among buyers, you might wanna try to improve the mechanics of it. From here we get the Reach estimate for prioritization according to RICE.
3. How do the conversion and average check differ for those who use and do not use Favorites? Based on this difference, we can very roughly guess what kind of improvement we can get from increasing the reach for this feature.

All other questions about behavioral parameters — how long it takes, what retention we have, what products are usually added to Favorites — I will postpone to the stage when we will brainstorm how exactly the Favorites feature can be developed.

#productdo #productcase