Tell me about a time you screwed up or failed as a product manager. What did you learn from it?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

I was leading an online store platform for SMBS and noticed that the many of the
small sellers were struggling to complete all the steps required to get the
online store launched. This hurt the plan subscription and hence our SaaS
revenue.

So, I proposed to streamline the online store setup by incorporating the best
practices of eCommerce and default enabling certain features including 'Free
Shipping' rule on all orders. The shortned setup process would lead to more
stores launched quickly. We made this change and included a notification in the
onboarding step.  We assumed that sellers would turn off the Free Shipping'
option, if they were not planning to offer. 
After we launched the change, the online store setup rate indeed moved up and we
were happy about it.  But, we started to hear from few sellers that they were
surprised about "Free Shipping' being turned on and now they are loosing money
on orders.
I realized the mistake we made with our assumption. We were quickly turned off
default enablement of the 'Free Shipping' , but made it super easy for sellers
to discover this option during store setup process and turn it on with a single
click.
I learnt a lesson to do further user research or A/B testing to mitigate such
issues in the future.

Anonymous · Answer

At the beginning of my career when I began as a Product Owner, I was asked to
make the case as to why we should/should not build a mobile banking watch app
(we were working on a full Front End redesign and a full BE restructuring, we
were keeping scope and timelines pretty tight). It was my first time presenting
to the leadership team, I  quickly prepared a spreadsheet looking at what would
have to be scoped out, specific feature list for the watch app, and sizing for
each feature. I had my math wrong in my excel sheet calc and leadership noticed.
I definitely learned to check my work, share it with 1 or 2 people who helped me
gather the data to double check my numbers. Now even when I pull my own data, I
like to discuss with either my manager or prefereably someone from the analytics
team.

Tell me about a time you screwed up or failed as a product manager. What did you learn from it?

Answers