How a Bold Pushback on Prioritization Led This Product Manager to Discover a Game-Changing Insight

Yes, um, would it be OK if I answered this question talking about something I didn't think was as important? Would that be the reverse, or would it be preferable to have it,

I'm talking about something that ended up not getting on the roadmap and why, and I think that might help answer the question,

exactly, yeah, yeah. Um, so I suppose I'll lay out the situation. Um, we, I was working, uh, a couple of years ago, um, as an entry level product manager. And I was, uh, tasked with researching some of the features that came through as requests in our blog. So we had around 60,000 customers that were using a CRM product and that product, um, had lots and lots of customizations and integrations with various other, um, accounting softwares and uh, it was in the accounting space, should I say. Um, so, With the amount of requests that came in through a client, uh, Um, suggestions and whatnot through the blog articles. We had one particular blog article come through in views. So the person who wrote the article and, um, one of the managers came to the conclusion that we should do this integration as a stock feature. Um, this stock feature, I didn't think I had ever dealt with in my prior software development days, many cases with it, so I thought it would have been on my radar. I Said I'll take the action to assess how much work was done. So I did the normal scoping activities and then alongside that, I, I pushed back to my boss and said, can I just do a bit more deeper investigation because we're going to implement a couple of months' worth of work with two development teams and it's going to take, um, Uh, a lot of time away from other things that I deemed more important than the backlog, uh, so What happened was I read the article that had been shown and getting these massive 10,000 views per month and What happened was it took me probably 20 minutes to read the article and I thought that that was a good indication to check how often people were doing. So I changed the Google Analytics on the page and changed it to capture more search and time on the page and let it sit there for a month and bought myself some time with my boss. I came back,

An internal blogger who kind of helped, um, he was one of the key educators in the in the in the um He was the main educator who traveled around helping business partners sell the product and, and, and be an advocate for all of the customization features. Um, so on letting it sit and gather more data and a bit more specifics from Google Analytics, we were able to see that very little people were scrolling down the page. I know it seems quite simple, but the time on the page, the average time was 43 seconds or something like that. So that was taking the people who are genuinely interested in this space. The specific customization and the people that were just bouncing. Um, I brought this information back to my boss after that period of time and I was delighted because my hunch was right, and, um, as a result, we didn't do that. Um, the person who was extremely vocal and very good at, you know, selling his idea internally to get on the roadmap, um, he wasn't too happy, but he was, he was, uh, wrong, but he was happy to accept the the science behind it. So I hope that kind of answers the question that you're posing to me.

it was decreed that it was more so, it was decreed that we were doing it and I had um. Uh, what I deemed the higher value, um, customer desire, which came from interviews, and I had backed it up with 12 interviews with 12 different clients. So I'd kind of gotten some, uh, qualitative information for the competing feature. So it really came down to, um, how I got the superior stakeholders to listen to the inputs that I had spent months getting, be it Google Analytics or, um, The interviews that have taken place, I didn't want them disregarded. So, um, yeah, it was more of a, a horse trading exercise and making sure that I use the right tools to defend my position.

Um, I, I showed the alternative things that we could do with the backlog, and I showed the evidence that although there was 10,000, we were fresh in the space of adding Google Analytics to, um, our suite of blog articles. I think we had 350 articles at the time, and, um, the The the functionality that we were getting from the analytics was basic at best. So, still with 1 ft and part of my mind still in software development, I, I made sure to look at it with a bit more scrutiny, um, because there wasn't any resources to do that. Um, so I wanted to do a deep dive in that regard.

No, I, I, I kind of, um, like as if I was preparing a meal, I, I left what I couldn't control the time off, which was leave the analytics sit there with the new improved, uh. Uh, forms of gathering, you know, scroll down and time on page information. But then I also talked to Level 3 support and got, uh, some additional information to see how many people had that configured on. And the percentage of clients that had that on hadn't changed in a large period of time. I can't remember the specifics on the time frame, but it was a low percentage and it wasn't increasing over time. So this also was a bit of evidence that made it very clear that the integration was bespoke and not a common feature that should be GA.