In a recent meeting with another team from my organization, I learnt about something bold they did.
Tony, the guy who built this product from scratch explained in great detail how they went about it. It was a typical publishing system that onboarded writers, evaluated them, accepted their posts and paid them out monthly.
We went about the modules in the same logical manner.
- Onboarding
- Evaluation
- Publishing
- Invoicing
The module where users (writers) obviously spent most of their time was Publishing. This included building RTEs (rich text editors), managing posts states (drafts, published, rejected) and work allocation etc.
If you know a thing or two about Unicode, you’ll understand how tricky it is to build an RTE for Indian languages circa 2013. Fonts were not standardized, cursor calculations were tricky and there were a ton of other problems.
But something Tony said in the process of explaining this really caught my attention. He said they decided to implement a feature that let users simply write an email to our address from their registered email address, and that would automatically publish the post to the system.
When this went live, 90% of writers never logged back into the tool again! They would just login once during onboarding and never after that. But publishing stats remained steady.
Suddenly, all the problems with editing tools vanished. After all, the email builders spent eons building their editors. They’d already solved the problems we wanted to, and in a better way.
As product managers, we are often so attached to people using our products and build everything in our might to get them to do so. But it takes a lot more courage to build a lot of tooling and eventually give users a choice to opt out.
Ultimately, it’s about getting the end metrics right, in this case : posts published per month.
Sometimes that happens with the product and sometimes without it!