What does it mean to be a Consumer PM?
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About us: Andrew (AM) and Chandrika (CM) met during their MBA program at MIT Sloan and connected over their passion for product, growth and paying forward the help they got transitioning into product management. AM currently works as a Product Manager at Moveworks and CM works as a Product Manager at DocuSign.
In this new series, we are covering our peers in PM roles across different organizations to give you a view into what various roles demand and which role is likely the best fit for you. For this post, we spoke to our friend Parth who is currently a Sr. PM at Ebay. Prior to Ebay, Parth obtained his MBA at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.
As a Product Manager at Ebay, Parth is focused on onboarding over 20M sellers onto the new eBay payments platform. This role is “highly” cross-functional and has stakeholders such as compliance, design, product marketing, analytics and many more to ensure a high percentage of existing sellers transfer successfully to the new eBay platform.
How do you define the business objectives that you are working towards with your project?
I’ll provide some context so that it’s easier to understand today’s business objectives with the new payments platform. In 2002, Ebay had purchased Paypal but spun it out in 2015. Although they were two separate companies, they continued to work together so that Paypal was the de facto payments processing provider. Yet, Ebay knew the need to own this part of the user experience to reduce costs for buyers and sellers, gather checkout data to learn more about user preferences and behaviors, and reduce costs in the long run. In January 2018, the companies announced they would not be renewing their partnership and so Ebay was set to create the new payments platform.
When I started in Nov 2018, I was in the early part of the multi-year journey of the new platform. The main business objective was to make Ebay the #1 service for remittance for buyers and sellers on the platform, which is true today. In order to achieve that main objective, we needed to make sure that we migrate 100% GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) to the new platform and at the same time ensure that there is a high conversion rate (i.e. the percentage of sellers who exit the flow successfully) while sellers go through the onboarding process. Conversion Rate is the North Star metric for the product.
How do you go about defining requirements for your projects?
eBay has a global presence and the requirements for each country are quite different. My first step is to meet with various business, risk and compliance partners to understand what attributes about a seller (who is to be onboarded) absolutely needs to be collected and which of those attributes need to be verified at various milestones in the seller’s journey post onboarding. These different teams often have conflicting goals and it is important for PMs to identify and get to a consensus to get to a sweet spot. For example, business partners would care about growth and make onboarding as frictionless as possible, while risk partners would care about collecting as much information as possible in order to reduce the risk of sellers signing up with fake information and using that for fraud.
Once all stakeholders have aligned on the requirements, I spend time scoping things down to deliver the most value in the shortest time possible. This translates into looking at the various “user types” (also referred to as personas) to prioritize as the product experience could differ for each persona. eBay broadly has 2 types of sellers - business (such as Nike, LG, Overstock etc.) and casual (like me and you) and their way of interacting with the eBay site is different. One basic lens would be that business sellers mostly use desktop and APIs while casual sellers are more app focused.
In terms of execution, one very important thing to keep in mind with any consumer product is how to take it to market - Product Marketing and customer support play a very important role. Product marketing helps translate the product features into benefits for the consumers and helps with (especially) the pre-launch awareness and activities=> this is critical to drive adoption. Customer support is usually one of the larger operational costs for any business that has scaled, and I need to ensure that our call support staff have all the required tools and knowledge to manage the thousands of calls from users.
The onboarding flow is a multi-step process, in which we identify the drop-off rates and optimize the leaky parts of the funnel. I work directly with Analytics to define the metrics so they can create the dashboards. I’ll also point out that AB testing isn’t a technique we can implement now as our high-level strategy is simply to “connect the pipes” to ensure everything works within the onboarding experience. Later, we will focus on optimization to squeeze more out of the pipeline.
How do you prioritize projects?
In order to prioritize, one needs to have a list of problems to prioritize on. To do so, I have created channels for feedback from the users so that one has continual access to new ideas. We get feedback directly from users through in-product surveys, via customer support, social media pages, account managers of large business accounts etc. These new ideas along with a bunch of old ideas that didn’t make the roadmap earlier go into the prioritization process every quarter.
We use the cost-benefit analysis framework to figure out the priority. In an ideal world, it will be good to have all the data around the benefits and costs but in most of the cases, we use our knowledge of the domain to take a call and run the prioritization through the leadership. To provide greater clarity, projects that are for business sellers are usually prioritized higher than individuals because of the high revenue contribution. Unless and until, any (lack of) feature is causing high stress on operational aspects/costs of the business, it is usually kept on the back burner. Again, while this is not a purist approach to prioritizing, it allows for one to develop a good product sense and makes one move fast- which is often the need of the hour.
Overall, who do you think will enjoy the role of a ‘Consumer PM’?
I think the role of a Consumer PM is quite challenging and comes with its pros and cons. In order to enjoy this role,
You must enjoy UI and partnering with designers. As such, you need to have a good sense of design and be open to new perspectives- some of them coming from the non-core stakeholders (design, product, eng.)
You must enjoy stakeholder management. Consumer focused flows have a lot of stakeholders especially if you manage a global product.
You need to have strong critical thinking skills and taking data based decisions should be your second nature.