Could you tell me about a time when you had to convince someone of an idea and how you did it?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

This goes back to the time when I was a product manager at Company XYZ, which
provides online therapy to students worldwide. At that time, the process of
matching practitioners with students was being handled manually by a
cross-functional internal team. I identified this as an opportunity for
automation.
However, the Therapist Success team was concerned about the additional workload
this automation might place on therapists. They were worried that therapists
might not respond to requests or resolve conflicts, especially in cases where
multiple therapists were working with the same school and might want to take on
the same students simultaneously, potentially leaving other therapists with
fewer students.
To address these concerns, I connected with the internal team and presented my
proposal. The proposal involved giving each practitioner opportunities based on
their current capacity, ensuring they would act by sending timely notifications,
and improving the matching time, which previously took three weeks. This would
help our schools start the service more efficiently and with fewer delays.
I conducted a survey and several interviews with groups of practitioners to
assess the desirability of this feature. Collaborating with our designers and
engineers, we developed an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to validate this idea
quickly. I then ran an experiment with a small group of practitioners and
tracked their behavior in a controlled environment. The results showed a quick
response time of 2.7 business days and a reduced service start timeline,
dropping from three weeks to just six days overall.
I presented this data to the leadership team and the Therapist Success team, who
were initially concerned about retention rates. After reviewing the positive
results, we received the green light to launch this feature for all our
practitioners.
After the feature's launch, we observed a drastic reduction in the time required
to match therapists and students, from three weeks to just three days on
average. Customer satisfaction increased by 25%, as they could start their
service faster with minimal involvement. Additionally, therapist retention
increased by 50% year-over-year, as therapists were able to manage their
caseloads independently.

Robert · Answer

Was working at Careem as a Product Manager. I was responsible for improving the
driver app.

I really wanted there to be a "money estimator" feature for drivers. My
hypothesis was that this would improve retention meaningfully, if drivers could
see how much they could earn in a day or week.

I got a lot of push back from our legal team about this idea. They had multiple
concerns - first that it would set potetially false expectations and create a
risk of claims if drivers didn't earn the amount, second that it could also
create a situation where drivers behaved in unhealthy ways to hit what could
come across as targets

I reassured them that I would monitor this sort of action once I implemented the
change, and that I would launch it as an AB test so that we could be confident
there were no negative effects.

They however didn't agree, and therefore I also created a business case to
estimate how much revenue we could generate through better retention of our
drivers. Although this was quite high level and based on a lot of assumptions,
it helped me to convince my own leadership to support me. And with their help, I
managed to also convince our legal team to allow this experiment.

Anonymous · Answer

Situation:
I was leading the development of a unified Lakehouse architecture, leveraging
Databricks and Delta Lake. However, some stakeholders were initially hesitant
about the shift due to concerns about the complexity of the migration and the
potential disruption to ongoing projects. The team had been relying on a
traditional data warehouse, and some key members believed that migrating to a
new system would be risky and resource-intensive.
Task:
My task was to convince stakeholders that adopting the Lakehouse architecture
would significantly improve data consistency, scalability, and reduce long-term
operational costs while making the transition as seamless as possible.
Action:
I organized a series of meetings with both technical and non-technical
stakeholders, breaking down the benefits into digestible parts. I provided
detailed comparisons between our current architecture and the proposed solution,
highlighting how Databricks would enhance data accessibility and consistency by
over 80%. I also addressed concerns about downtime and complexity by presenting
a phased migration plan, ensuring minimal disruption to current operations. To
further gain trust, I ran a proof-of-concept (POC) demonstrating real-time data
ingestion and showcasing how the new architecture would improve data accuracy
and speed.
Result:
After the POC and multiple discussions, the stakeholders were convinced of the
benefits, and the migration to the Lakehouse was approved. Post-implementation,
the team saw a 90% increase in data adoption and a substantial improvement in
data quality. Additionally, the migration reduced storage and processing costs
by $300,000 annually, further validating the decision.

Anonymous · Answer

At hyperface we got requirement from product team to build a nudge engine, this
will be a configuration driven engine and when a condition is met based on the
configured communication pattern it is going to send the communication. Example
: If user have done 5 transaction is flikart and an offer is going on to do 10
transactions to get a reward we will nudge user based on the communication
channel and rules that nudge him on whatsapp this much time and send him the
push notification.
When this product requirement came , product wanted to build each and everything
as a single engine, but at that time I realized that having a separate
notification service which will take care of all notification related stuff and
we will be able to efficiently scale that system and prevent having a tight
coupling  will be very helpful , but when I proposed this product did not agreed
as they thought right now there is no usecase for making nudge engine and
notification engine a separate component.
At that time I dicsucces this with my fellow EM and came to know that they are
scenarios where they need to send notification for example otps , push
notification and everyone is handling this in a custom way in there own code
based . With all this data I went back to product team ann pitched them that
having this notification engine all this custom handling will be gone we will
have better mechanism to control notification  track metricies and and improve
the experience by handling failure scenarios .
with this data I was able to convenience the product team to build to different
systems.

Could you tell me about a time when you had to convince someone of an idea and how you did it?

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