People Design Business
Identifying new high value opportunities in emerging markets
team
A workstream consisting of a UXR manager, a PMM lead and 2 UXRs, including me, to lead the efforts for one country each. Later, we became a product team with 2 assigned Product managers. I was to lead efforts for Winterfell*.
*made up country name to maintain confidentiality.
organisation
A top social media company
problem space
While the US market was getting saturated, there was significant untapped revenue potential in some emerging markets. The goal was to explore and identify potential opportunities in 2 of those markets.
approach
Given the highly exploratory nature of the project, and no guidance on either possible domains or the audience to focus on, I decided to go broad and not restrict myself to options with a clear revenue gain or existing revenue models.
sketching on a blank slate
At the start, we did not know what the possibilities are in our chosen markets, nor a perspective on the type of opportunities we should pursue. Without knowing 'what' to research or 'who' to research with, a typical study design wasn't possible. Additionally, this was the first project of its kind for the business unit, without an established or typical methodology to follow.
external
internal
STEEP framework: A look at the social, technological, economic, environmental and political trends that were significant and may point to some opportunities.
A literature review of studies done by UXRs across the company on any topic in Winterfell. The country had garnered interest since a few years, and it was likely that other researchers had explored it as part of their topics.
Understanding trends in social media in the country, for example, Influencer marketing, Reels.
Log data: I analysed internal data on usage and behavior of Winterfell users on our platform in order to identify unexpected or unique behavior that could potentially lead to opportunities.
Learning from experts: I set up recurring discussions with our key representatives in Winterfell (Sales and PMM leads), that had spent significant time understanding the market, its unique challenges, culture and opportunities.
Verticals: A deep dive into industries that were gaining momentum to understand how they were evolving, considerations to succeed with them, our current presence and gaps in our engagement.
framework for prioritization
From my exploration, I identified 12-15 potentially high value opportunities and needed to narrow them down. The framework I often use to evaluate options - Desirability, Viability and Feasibility - was not ideal in this instance. The opportunities were at different levels of clarity, and would have required additional work to be concrete enough for execution. Hence, it wasn’t possible to accurately rank them on the 3 factors. I worked with the PMM to brainstorm on alternate criteria.
Legal / compliance
Dependencies
Team charters
Change management
Fit with aspirations
Potential Alliances
Clarity
Fit with strengths
Scalability
Need for unique solution
Contradictory guidance and navigating uncertainties
A changing leadership, and repeated changes in guidance on the success measure - whether to go after ‘quick wins to prove value’ or work on ‘long term or market making bets with the biggest upside' was a key challenge while determining prioritization. Given these were executive level debates into which I didnt have visibility, my approach was to be prepared for quick pivots and plan for contingencies and different scenarios.
clarifying opportunities
Given the changing guidance on the type of bets to pursue, I leveraged the framework to narrow down both - quick wins and long term bets. This became even more necessary as the PM assigned to our team kept changing (4 changes in as many months), communication from leadership was inconsistent, leading to high uncertainty and significant thrash.
For 2 shortlisted potential quick wins, I synthesized our knowledge on the subject and audience, noted open questions, and identified potential teams we may partner with for execution.
For 3 shortlisted longer term and unclear bets, I created research plans - questions we’d need to answer to make them more concrete. This included not just user research, but the data science, product growth and product marketing questions.
progressing prioritized opportunities
Once the PM changes settled, our team was assigned 2 PMs, one to focus on big bets, the other on quick wins. I onboarded them by sharing our learnings and connecting them with our Winterfell experts.
In the meanwhile, I also worked with the 2nd PM to further a clearer opportunity, building a relationship with the partner team I’d previously identified. I focused on -
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Cross sharing learnings to align on top challenges
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Understanding previous experiments run by the partner team and their learnings
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Understanding considerations behind not addressing certain known challenges.
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Identifying new experiments we could run and what we would want to learn from them.
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Aligning on resources, collaboration model and timelines.
The PM focused on big bets wanted to explore opportunities afresh. While they could provide no data rationale against exploring the ones already identified, I realized they needed time to assimilate the context we’d built in the previous few months and do their own exploration to feel confident in finalizing a direction. I supported their efforts by finding data for the possibilities they were of interest. There were 2 opportunities we did not agree upon. For one, they were not convinced of the potential, despite the data Winterfell experts and I presented. For that, I decided to disagree and commit. For the second, I found allies amongst leadership, and after multiple reviews, sharing insights from multiple sources, we aligned on pursuing it further.
extended impact
1
2
identified high value concrete opportunities starting from a highly ambiguous ask, amidst people changes and contradictory guidance.
Went beyond the ask, building a perspective and driving alignment on small and big bets to pursue.
Given this project was a first of its kind and there was desire to expand to additional countries, I created a playbook with my manager's and PM input on our approach, challenges, learnings, and ideas for improvement, providing a template to any new member joining the team.
Built relationships with partner teams and got projects prioritized on their roadmaps.