Navigating a PM's Thought Process: Suggesting Amazon Features

Suppose you walk into a room and you are told "suggest a new feature for Amazon", how do you approach this?

As a PM, it is important to always have a roadmap when tackling any problem. This will help you stay accountable and make measuring progress easier. The roadmap I will be adopting to tackle this, will be as follows:

1. Clarify the question
2. Review the company's goal
3. Review the product/business goal
4. Identify the users and prioritise a segment
5. Highlight the pain points of the segment and prioritise
6. Highlight likely solution(s) to the pain points and prioritise

Clarify the question

Clarifying the question and understanding the context are critical steps in problem solving and decision making. By doing this, we will remain precise in our understanding of the problem at hand, we have a defined scope, and we can also verify if the problem aligns our goals and objectives.

To give this problem a context, I will ask a number of questions and provide answers below.

• Am I a PM at Amazon? Yes
• Which of Amazon products am I working on? Amazon Prime.
• What is the goal of this new feature suggestion? Is it to solve a problem or an innovation? To solve a problem.
• What exactly is the problem at hand? We have a 5% drop in engagement.
• When did the problem start? 2 weeks ago
• Is the drop recurrent or is it a one time thing? It is recurrent.
• Is this problem peculiar to a country or state or demography? It isn't
• Is it affecting just the web or app front? It is affecting both

The next thing I want to do is review my roadmap and add a step, "root cause analysis". Here, we will look at both the internal and external fronts.

Externally:

Did our competitions do anything new? No

How does their pricing differ from ours? There are no differences in pricing

Was there any negative publication about us in the news? No.

How do they differ from us in advertising? We are currently using the same the social media channels to advertise.

Internally:

Did we change anything recently? No

Then, what could possibly be wrong?

Here, we want to review the necessary goals so as to make sure that whatever new feature I suggest aligns with the broader goal

What is Amazon's goal/vision? Amazon's vision is to be Earth's most customer-centric company.

What is Amazon Prime's vision? To be the world's most customer-centric subscription program.

What is the business vision? Increase customer loyalty and spending by offering exclusive benefits and convenience.

When we've looked at all the necessary information and the data doesn't clearly point to the problem, we then divide our users into three groups: skeptics, rookies, and diehards.

We find this approach valuable because it considers a wide range of user types, including school students and nursing mothers, among others.

• The sceptics are those that are not using Amazon Prime.
• The rookies use Amazon Prime but are not consistent. They are the ones likely dropping off.
• The diehards will use Amazon Prime no matter what.

I will prioritise at this point and go for rookies because they are the ones most likely to drop off.

What problems are they likely facing?

1. The website and app aren't very user-friendly - the design and layout need improvement (UI/UX).
2. The available movies don't match their preferences.
3. The recommendation system isn't very helpful.

So, which of these issues should we focus on fixing?

We will use the "Level of Effort + Impact" approach to decide what to tackle first. This is because it seems that fixing the problems with "movie selection" and the "recommendation engine" will require similar effort and will have the biggest impact.