Product Considerations
Quick Wins — from the lens of a Product Manager
Over the years, I have been a part of several ‘Quick Win’ conversations as a Product Manager. Stakeholders across various businesses or organizations I have worked with, often come up with requests like:
- Let’s change the button colour
- How about we add this or remove that
- Let’s change the image size
- We should add this section on the homepage
In the early days of my PM career I was always quick to respond that ‘It does not look complex’ or ‘It’s fairly easy and simple, I’ll get going with this’. However, over the years I have learned the art of asking my own set of questions to any such requests. Let’s just dive straight in.
Quick wins can be defined as solutions which are easy, fast and economical to implement, easily reversible and deliver a positive impact to the business following the core vision. Let’s break each and every element of this definition now:
- Fast and economical to implement: an idea would be considered a quick win when it is simple and yet cost effective to implement so that it does not interrupt your long term plans and committed items. If it does hamper the long term goals, then you’re venturing into a whole new universe where you could end up be chasing and reacting instead of envisioning & pro-acting. And anything that takes you away from this, ends up making your domain futile, since its core purpose is to solve problems in the first place.
- Easily reversed: Let’s admit we cannot always be right with whatever we do for a product. Whether it is an internal idea or an external one, things may and at times tend to go downhill. It’s crucial to evaluate that when such ‘wins’ are rolled out, they can be easily rolled back as well without hampering the product overall.
- Deliver a positive impact to the business following it’s core vision: every idea which is brought to the table is brought assuming that this will positively impact the business or business metrics. However, the key element which is sometimes overlooked is that most of these ideas can result in the product deviating from the core vision for the business.
Now once you have established the answers to these 3 key elements, the next step is to finalize - understanding the why and the how’s. It is not always about the difficulty & estimates of the ask but the background and the immediate anticipated results from the same. The questions (rightly to be answered) here are:
- How big this change will be
- Will there be an impact on the revenue or metrics
Don’t hesitate to reach out to your stakeholders for these questions and help them figure out these answers as well
Our product backlog will always consist of tasks big and or small. My two cents regarding this is that we should not be against the idea of a Quick Win till we can ascertain how impactful it would be and how much it aligns with the organizational vision.
