Navigating Uncertainty: How This Product Manager Decided When to Reopen Retail Stores During COVID

So Unfortunately, I guess most of us had to deal with the situation one way or another during COVID, post-COVID era, right? So, um, for me, it was specifically, uh, around our retail strategy, um, you know.

The, the, the strategy for opening up, reopening of the retail stores,

Right, so what happened like during lockdown, we locked down as well. Um, we closed all of our stores, but then the question was, you know, how do we open it up? Um, um, and then it was a combination of, you know, uh, factors which we had to consider one, you know, the safety of our own employees, that's important, right? We, we want to make sure we open it up when it's safe to open. Um, second is, you know, are there customers who are going to. You know, we, we're coming into the store, do they feel comfortable enough and, and so. Um, what I had to do there is, uh, pulling, pulling data from different, um, external data from the COVID thing, uh, you know, where the COVID situation is, but that just gives you, you know, um, where the cases are coming in and, and all that stuff. It really didn't get to the point where I could use the data to say, let's open it here because It's turning yellow from red and it makes sense to open because what we were seeing is, these places were there like COVID was very, very, you know, severe, but people still were out and about. Not a good thing, but that's what our customers wanted. versus, you know, COVID might have Been easing up, but your customers are still being careful. Maybe it's the demographics, young versus old. So that, that didn't give me what. So what we had to do is we had to look at alternative or complementary source of data as well. I pulled the network data from, uh, from Verizon and just use that as a combination to say, I see mobility here. Um, I see COVID is there, but it's not as bad that we can't open, and the combination gave us kind of a good indicator to open the store now. The ambiguity part was the network data is not like so. Um, I couldn't get to the store level, right? Because I had to, like, just do this very quickly. So I, I kind of managed it at the county level. That was easy thing to do for the time being, we're looking to make the decision. Um, so that was, that was a trade-off, basically, not, not, not trying to get to the place. But

Yeah, so generally when it comes to foot traffic, um, it's the pings are not enough because, um, things, so, so I didn't get the ping. What I got Brandon was the handoff between the cell towers. Sure, OK, that was something easily available, um, so what I, what I lost there is if you are within the same cell tower and not doing handoff, I won't get the visibility into that. So that was my, my kind of, you know, uh, trade-off there between speed and accuracy.

Um, we were considering, you know, talking to, to vendor, um, we actually reached out to, um, To, um, uh, I, I personally reach out to MIT as well because MIT was building an application between Bluetooth to Bluetooth to kind of see, you know, how people are moving about and all the things. Um, but I, I think, but they were not even at a point where they could give me anything reliable. So I looked at those things, but they were actually, um, worse than what I had, unfortunately at that time. So I, I couldn't use them. Um, we spoke to a vendor where we use them like for general foot traffic prediction and all that, but they were also at the same point as like, yeah, give us, you know, a couple of weeks and we'll have something for you. But we didn't have a couple of weeks, um, so we had to kind of say, let's use what we have, but we revisited that and we continue with the solution. I can talk about that long, you know, like where we are with that. But, but for that timing, we just made that, that, uh, kind of, you know, I, I made the decision that we

So urgency was not people going into the store, urgency was people doing in-store pickup. Got it. So a lot of people were like, because they, and they were working from home. Um, actually, we, for us, for, for Telecom and for us particularly, we saw, like, you know, such a spike in demand in products and services just because people were setting up maybe they didn't realize they need another phone, they didn't realize they need Bluetooth headset, things like that. And, and so it's not that they were, they were going to the stores to, to do the shopping, but more like Yeah, I ordered this digitally and unfortunately we don't have Amazon kind of shipping model where we can just ship you overnight. That, that was the thing, so that put strain on us to kind of deliver it to some other.

Yeah, I mean, I looked at the alternatives. There's one like we kind of exhausted if we can get anything more granular what I had. Um, so we, we couldn't get to the, uh, to the pings, we couldn't get to the Bluetooth. So the tower handout is is all we had. And I kind of say like if I don't use this data and just use the COVID data, um, versus I complement the COVID data with this, what kind of decisions we'll be making, and I think I was convinced that we'll make a better decision if we combine two or just use one.