Behind Great Products: Pivoting Your Product Roadmap

On August 26th, our team held another Behind a Great Product event. We continued our theme on addressing product management in a Pandemic by talking about pivot. In times like this, where market and customer behaviour changes quickly, it is important to be agile in our product development. Below is the summary of the presentations.

Topic 1 — Tokopedia Salam

By Iman Cinderamata — Head of Product for Tokopedia Salam

What is Tokopedia Salam? Tokopedia Salam is a sharia initiative that allows users to do good deeds and provide Islamic products and services through seamless digital solutions. This includes services such as Umrah, Donation, Zakat, Sharia Mutual Fund, and more.

In 2020, the main focus of Tokopedia Salam is to capture the Umrah market. Tokopedia Umrah service itself was launched in November 2019, but a lot of improvements needed to be made on pre-, during, and post-Umrah to cover the end to end Umrah experience.

However, Arab imposed their country lockdown in February due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which stopped the whole Umrah business. The team morale was low, it was a challenging time for Tokopedia Salam since they have been investing in the Umrah service for nearly a year. This is where Iman, as a product leader, steps up to strategize a pivot on his 2020 strategy and once more brings up the spirit of his team.

Iman mentioned three steps to conduct his pivot: First, is to identify the problems by analyzing market trends and hearing users; second is to validate by testing to understand whether you’re trying to solve the right problem; and lastly evolve to execute your alternative solutions quickly.

Tokopedia Salam quickly pivoted their focus from Umrah to three other services to capture the new market opportunity. In March, they focused on Donation, due to the increase of the Covid-19 donation trend throughout Indonesia. In April, the team chooses Zakat, to prepare for the Ramadan month where Muslims usually present their Zakat. In June, they improved Qurban to capture the Hari Raya momentum of people buying cows and goats.

Iman shared how he uses the three steps to pivot from Umrah to the three individual products and the results Tokopedia Salam able to achieve.

Case 1 — Donation

Identify

Early March, Iman noticed a growing trend of people raising donation funds to fight the Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia.

Validate

On the current donation entry point in Tokopedia checkout page, the Salam team simply changed the donation wording into something related to the Covid-19 pandemic. Turns out, users are responding positively to the change, and find conversion increased compared to the previous wording. This shows a market appetite for donations related to Covid-19 pandemic.

Evolve

Tokopedia Salam created a full-blown webpage and worked with the marketing team to build campaigns around the Covid-19 donation, as well as increasing the donation ticket size from an average of Rp5,000 to around Rp100,000. The result was a staggering increase of 2.8x during March compared to the previous monthly average.

Case 2 — Zakat

Identify

There are predictions from the Muslim community that online Zakat will rise 30% this year because of the pandemic since more people are avoiding offline interactions including giving Zakat.

Validate

Analyzed the traffic of Zakat page compared to last year, and there were indications of healthy growing organic traffic of users trying to find online Zakat information.

Evolve

The team focused on creating more online Zakat education along with features such as Zakat calculator to simplify the user experience of giving Zakat online. The result is a 2.5x increase compared to last year.

Case 3 — Qurban

Identify

Indonesians were not able to conduct their Ibadah Haji due to the pandemic, so a lot of their budget are transitioned into other good deeds, the biggest trend was spending on Qurban.

Validate

Similar to Zakat, there is an increasing traffic of organic users searching for Qurban in Tokopedia.

Evolve

Tokopedia Salam builds an end to end Qurban purchase experience whereas previously they used the physical goods purchase process which is not ideal for doing a Qurban purchase. This decreases the steps for a user to purchase from 16 to 8. The result is a 1.5x increase compared to last year.

In conclusion, market dynamics are changing rapidly especially with the pandemic. As a product manager we need to keep our eyes and ears open to adapt quickly and seize new opportunities as they replace the old ones. Pivot quickly, accurately, and last but not least, make sure you keep your team morale high through these difficult times or else you wouldn’t have the capability to execute all of this.

Change is constant, adapt you must — Yoda

Topic 2 — Product Marketing

By Maisyalina Agustiana — Lead of Product Marketing

In Tokopedia, Product Marketing is responsible for developing effective marketing strategies and plans to communicate the features and benefits of the products to customers. Our Product Marketing team helps Product Managers launch, market, and sell products. Moreover to prepare things such as marketing communications, marketing channels, and marketing goals.

“Adapt, Evolve, and Embrace”. These are the mantras that Lina uses to navigate the Covid-19 pandemic situation. The pandemic brings a lot of sensitivity to the company communication that triggered changes in the planned campaigns the team needed to execute. As market dynamics changed in matters of hours, Lina and the Product Marketing team needed to make adjustments to their processes. She revamped the whole campaign submission process from a month-long to only 3 days workflow.

These are three great pivot examples from the product marketing team from a seller communication plan standpoint.

Case 1 — #JagaEkonomiIndonesia Campaign

March is supposed to be the month where businesses are busy preparing for a big festive season of Ramadan, instead many of them barely survive due to the lockdown imposed throughout Indonesia. The Product Marketing team viewed this as an opportunity to help offline sellers survive the pandemic by moving their sales online.

They deprioritized their initial plan that revolves around existing Tokopedia sellers and pivots to help offline sellers onboard online. They successfully reached 3 million offline businesses to raise awareness of online commerce.

Case 2 — Adjusted Seller Education

As the pandemic situation changed rapidly, there were more and more new regulations being introduced by the government that can be limiting to sellers. The Product Marketing team pivoted their educational content plan to be a quick and reliable source of information for the sellers to navigate the pandemic. Things such as new normal regulations, logistic limitations and also shifting market insights, all of these helped Tokopedia sellers to survive or even thrive.

Case 3 — Introduce Empathy to the Marketing Journey

The Product Marketing team also adjusted their marketing messaging and copy along the seller journey to be more empathetic to the situation. Starting from when a new seller opens a shop up until they fulfill their orders, the team weaved empathy and pandemic context to reflect the new normal situation.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Being alert 24/7 to new information, give extra effort to do quality checks on sensitive messaging, as well as intensive coordination with multiple stakeholders. These adaptations are great for the users but the team needed to work twice as hard to accommodate the changes. As a product leader, Lina reminded us of the importance to not only adapt externally but also internally as a team.