'Why This Product Manager's Bold Decision to Eliminate a Long-Standing Promotion Changed the Game'

Um, so this is totally a fresh question, right, nothing to do with the previous one. So fresh behavioral question. Yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah,

Um, well, you know, we had lots of, anyway, it doesn't matter. Uh, so, uh, going, going down mobile. So in, uh, in 2007, um, we started making the decision to get rid of paper-based invoicing with, uh, freely, carbon copy, do metrics type paper, um, which I'm sure you remember that as well. And, uh, there was fundamentally an issue we had if if we wanted our devices to be able to work offline, even though they would be connected most of the time over GPRS, um, the slow connection. There was one thing we couldn't do, and it was a scenario of, um, you can imagine a buy, uh, buy two, get one free deal, where like, you buy 2 cases of Coca-Cola and you get washing up liquid for free, for example. And our drivers would go and deliver, and if the washing up liquid wasn't there, they wouldn't accept that that was actually free. They'd want, like, some discount off the, off the Coke, cause it's really a combination deal. They wouldn't accept, oh, it wasn't free, I'm not gonna pay for it because you're paying for an inflated price on a Coca-Cola. So we, our drivers normally manually calculate all this and, uh, we just couldn't do that calculation on the mobile device offline without porting all of the, the pricing logic to the mobile device and it was just like, you know, our pricing engine was ridiculous. So we had to basically say we're going to get rid of Bogov's deals. And like we had other pricing deals and combinations, but we had to say, there's no way for us to do this technology and work offline. and keep the bug off realistically. And we went back to the business and said we need to get rid of, you know, this promotion deal that we've had since the beginning of the company. And then obviously, you know, as a retailer or any organization that's that's quite a big deal type of promotion and and that mindset and You know, I struggled a lot with it. I struggled like when I should go to tell the business, um, you know, there's a lot of internal. Uh, debate about it, how much sales we were gonna lose possibly a lot of feelings. Um, I said we need to do this, we want to move forward. I couldn't see another solution if we want to get our drivers to be modernized and, and cut down their time, their massive cost to us, our delivery drivers and the cost of doing delivery in the trucks. Um, and, um, and, uh, it was, it was basically up to me at the end. The, the, the management team says, you know, you're cool on it. Um, if we know we want to do the driver thing, and if there's no, if there's no way to do it, then, then so be it. And, you know, that they would accept, uh, if there was any losses. They didn't feel like there would be, but there's a lot of emotion there. But, uh, the, the, the responsibility was put on my shoulders to make the call if that was the only way to move forwards. OK. But we, we did have other promotional deal systems though, right? Like we had other 6 other types of promotions we could have, but you know, the psychology of the company was like, oh we're gonna lose this amazing, you know, type of tactic, sales type of deal, deal.

Well, the, the decision was made that we're going to modernize the drivers, and the device needs to be able to work offline, right? You're in the basement of a restaurant, and you need to be able to, if an item is missing, you need to be able to readjust the, the order and then invoice, we invoice on delivery because we do accept cash on delivery. And so the device can't go back and ask the RP system for, uh, fresh pricing. And we couldn't realistically move all the logic to the device. With all the, the, the pricing data. So I, I got stuck on that from a technology point of view, and the business knew that it wanted to do the driver thing. So, uh, the, the thing I've never, which I've probably never done before, is say, we need to get rid of something that it feels like it's fundamental to our business. Um, is that, is that what we was trying to ask the,

the the

Um, that are, are the. You know, as a business actor did invoice on delivery, you know, the, the amount of corrections, the, the, the third ply paper coming back to an office and, uh, not tracking the drivers, not being able to give live updates, um, you know, the amount of small one penny differences when the drivers are manual credits at the bottom of the document. All this stuff and, and the drivers and their driver make and those huge trucks being so expensive, like we needed to as a business if we wanted to. Be profitable and continue with that profit journey and, you know, uh, we needed to find a way to make the drivers more efficient and, you know, it, it fell to us, we couldn't be doing this offline paper and then paper coming back and then having all these operators updating systems manually and having a massive lag, right? And, um, so that, that. that path, we went down really a long way down that technology route and testing out mobile data replication and all sorts of other things. And then we got stuck on this, this one point. And I, I didn't, I didn't see canceling the project as a reality. We needed to make these drivers more efficient. They're our biggest costs with them and the trucks. Um, and, um, it, it felt like, yeah, we have other pricing discount options and, you know, Maybe, you know, I'm sure no one likes change and everyone's gonna say the customers are gonna revolt, but, I, I didn't have that. I had a, I had a bit, I was worried, scared, um, but I, I knew we had to do the driver thing somehow.

the, the, the metrics right crazy afterwards, uh, you know, we, we, we used to generate hundreds of thousands of credits a year, 99.9% of them disappeared. All the people that had to update disappeared, all the small pricing errors or small credit notes, like 2P credit notes all disappeared, you know, less customer complaints, and then we got into the real time, real time delivery stuff, um, you know, giving our customers, you know, a heads up 10 minutes before the drivers getting there. That's, you know, all that sort of stuff, um, you know, accelerate the business.

Yeah, so you would, we're invoicing on delivery. The customers are gonna give you cash, they want to invoice, so if you preprint. Well, we, we re-invoice on delivery when it was the mobile app. We would invoice in the morning, like 6 in the morning, the drivers would go out all these invoices, and if, like, the customer would be like, I've only got, you know, $99.98 right? The driver's just gonna like, OK, well, I'm not gonna like take all the goods back because of 2 cents. I'm gonna just right at the bottom, you pay me 2 cents, and then the customer will dispute it and then, you know, or there's something over the tax, or there's something with, oh, I want to return this item from last time or something like 1 can and the 24 cans is damaged. Yeah, you know, endless. When you do it with cash and not prepaid. You know, and it's B2B, uh, the customers take a big liability, um, not liability, a big, uh, they, they push their luck as much as they can.

Yeah, I can only imagine Amazon trying to get cash, cash out of the customer's hands on their, on their deliveries, so. All right.