A couple of years ago we inherited a product that was used by millions of people. Both the technology stack and the user experience were incredibly dated, the page itself was not even mobile responsive. Externally, we have both quantitative and qualitative feedback telling us users are quite frustrated with the experience. Internally, very few engineers knew how to work the tech stack either, making it hard for us to recruit new talents.

We had the choice of simply redesigning the user interface and leaving it at that, or updating the technology stack so we can make further functional enhancements down the road, and make it easier for our company to recruit new talents. The second choice takes more time and does not give us immediate rewards, but paves the road for long-term gains.

As the PM for that product, I holistically evaluated the situation, considered inputs from many teams with different vested interests in the product, and decided we should update the tech stack. I socialized my rationale behind it, communicated my vision for the future of this product widely and got everyone’s buy-in into my decision.

Fast forward, we made many more functional enhancements to the product, all of which were not possible on the old tech stack. We also have much-improved team satisfaction and many happy engineers working with technology they love. We also documented and learned every step along the way while updating the tech stack, created many guidelines and best practices that are adopted by other teams facing similar situations.

• Strategic Context:
  • Company Mission: Instant Book’s mission is to be the 10x better sales generators for SMB service providers, more jobs / less cancellations / save time
  • Team Mission: My team’s mission is to help service providers setup their book a service flow easily / correctly
• **Situation / What the change is:**Quarters into this job, I was gathering insights from launch reviews and sat in various interviews understood the state of business, state of affairs at my product area and adjacent product areas as well as business team Qual: I’ve gathered both the quanl data about who these supplier are and what they need Quant: And Quant data only 10% of our service providers have adopted IB These data points led me to believe we need to prioritize an experiment to validate if this 10% is representative of the mainstream providers’ needs or not, to determine the validity of our long-term product roadmap.
• **Why it’s important:**The risk is if they are not mainstream, then we are basing our bets on extreme group not the mainstream group, that led to low-to-no impact The proposal is to do a service provider-side booking auto-enrollment experiment to validate / invalidate our must have product gaps If we don’t do this, risk at building towards the extreme group, low ROI, missing important opportunity window in the market, it doesn’t accomplish our mission
• **Action / Style:**I immediately shared a quick update in Slack to drive action and thinking on this new direction Followed by a product brief to bring stakeholders on the same page, drive diverse thinking, to assess the impact of this change This helped to co-create a robust go-forward plan with less blindspots. I incorporate feedbacks, made the why behind proposal super clear use that to drove ultimately drive consensus I communicated the change by formality meeting, documented in Change Management Log For my team’s action plan I simplified by using the keep do, start do, stop do framework to communicate changes on the team-level activities So that team has clarity and can start working towards the new direction immediately
• **Deliver results:**I orchestrated 3 products team united as 1 team to shipped this experiment within 6 weeks start-to-live We hit our success metric, enabled 100% service provider in the experiment market accepts booking The facts we gather from this experiment helped to eliminate a number of features as we found out that those aren’t really must-haves, ultimately helped to reach our booking mission much sooner.
• Learnings & Growth: Customers/user:The early-adopters are always so different than the mainstream customers, so need to recruit/learn from a broader perspective audience pool not just the early-adopters’ pool

PMing Skills:Get at the results of No: what’s the risk of no doing something to help stakeholder see the trade-off involved to drive alignment Use both internal and external factors to drive ownership and accountabilities

• Challenges:
  • People who you are trying to influence is way beyond your control: Leverage manager, skip level manager who has the relationship with that org to get things going fast and drive alignment for you
  • Create throwaway work for engineering: find ways to repurpose that work, or show that if we make progress towards this work it likely means creating even more wasted work.