Ideal vs Practical Product Management

Let’s start with an example. Don’t worry, we will be having fun here ;)

Suppose, you are a product manager at Swiggy (a food delivery app) and you came across the below problem statement;

?70% users are not making payment after selecting the dishes in Swiggy app

How would you approach this? (suppose data is validated)

Ideal way

1. First, find answers of basic questions.

• Is this a new trend or same since long time?
• Is it happening in all regions or just some?
• Is it happening on all platforms or just some?
• Is it happening for all users or only new/old?
• Is it happening for all the marketing channels/campaigns or just some?
• Is it happening entire day or on particular times?

2- If above answers are generic or not much helpful, move to stage 2 and analyze user journey.

Here user journey is;

Order summary page-- Payment page--- Payment success page

Funnel is;

100 users on order summary--- 40 on payment --30 on payment success

60% drop on first step and 25% drop later on.

3- Next, prioritise what to pick using RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort) or any other framework. You can’t do everything at once.

Suppose if you need to make 40 successful payment at the end, you will have to do either of below two things;

• Take 54 users on payment page (reduce order summary to payment page drop by 25%, i.e. 46% from 60%)
• Or, Get payment from all 40 users coming on payment page (reduce payment page to payment success drop by 100%, i.e. 25% to 0%)

Which one you are more confident to do? which one can get you high impact? and which one require less effort?

I suppose, first one ??. Let’s go with that.

4- Now redefine the problem and build hypothesis

In this case, redefined problem statement is, 60% users are not going ahead from order summary page. So let’s understand what this page does

• It shows delivery time
• It shows dishes selected and their price
• It provides options to apply coupons
• It shows bill details
• It has button to go ahead

Possible pain points can be;

• Delivery time is very high
• Coupons are not working/available
• Dishes/delivery price are higher than competitor (zomato)
• Button is hidden/not looking clickable

5- Validate hypothesis with qualitative (events data) or quantitative (session recordings, user survey, market research etc.) analysis.

Here you can check average delivery time/price for dropped off users, coupon success rate, restaurants based drop off etc.

6- Once hypothesis is validated, prioritise again

7- Write the PRD, Coordinate with relevant teams and check the impact post fixes and do further improvements

Practical way

Someone in the management ( can be from business team, strategy team or any other team) came across the problem, find a solution as per his understanding and requested your manager to prioritise that in upcoming sprint.

As a PM you are just asked to coordinate with relevant teams and make this out ??.