Product management in the e-commerce domain

Product management as a role has gained quite a bit of popularity in the last couple of years. Every industry, every company seems to now need Product Managers. The domains may be different but the core job stays the same, identifying and prioritizing the problems that create the most value for the users and the business. This doesn’t diminish the domain knowledge a person needs to be successful at the role, but it is not imperative to getting the role. Of the different industries like FinTech, travel, food, e-commerce, etc, I’d like to go over the skills that you need as a PM for an E-commerce company, some tips to enter into a PM role from a non-tech background, and the next big trends in E-commerce. I am sure each of us shop online and therefore have been customers ourselves. This solves for having consumer empathy, innately.

Now, let’s cover specific skills that you will need as a PM in the E-Commerce domain:

There are so many different components in E-commerce, search, PDP, checkout, payment, notifications, chat, etc. and most certainly you will be owning one or two of those. Some are more challenging than others. I find payments complex, because it deals with different vendors and users are quite sensitive to it. Similarly, search is quite difficult to master. Your skills may vary slightly based on which features you are leading.

• Positioning and core offering: You need to know or define the current positioning and markets you cater to. Do you sell luxe products or do you sell the lowest price items? Do you market yourself as a two day delivery giant or do you offer niche brands? What is the pricing strategy? Are you a subscription based product or do you offer free delivery above a certain amount? Once you understand/define your current position and your USP, your decisions revolve around the mission and the constraints.
  

• Timing: There are so many campaigns running during the key events of a year, Diwali sale, Black Friday, Cyber Monday etc. You need to be in sync with the marketing team and ensure that your website/app or the operations is ready for those upcoming campaigns. Your system has to be resilient to the peak traffic, the discounts/promos should function accurately, so on and so forth. You need to have a sense how long something will take to build and test, along with other dependencies, so you can work backwards from the launch date.
  

• Optimization and Experimentation: From great UX to sales to retention, you will constantly need to optimize the funnel to achieve your north star metric. The market is very competitive and calls for constant experimentation. You will have several  hypotheses for improving the page load time, SEO optimization, improving the conversion rate etc. for which you will have to run several experiments or A/B tests.
  

• Data analysis wizardry:  You need to watch your metrics like a hawk specially before a crucial campaign. Session durations, dropouts, conversions should not have any unexplained deviations. If they do, get to the bottom of it to find a quick resolve. Understanding which experiments to run, on which cohort, when is the data statistically significant etc. will be a part of your day to day job. Some of the most important metrics are, Average Order Value( AOV), number of repeat orders and overall unit economics.
  

• Personalization: This will never get old. Customers love a brand that is personalized to them. I guess it feeds the ego. Contextual messages, interventions, and providing people with options of what they are looking for, will keep bringing them back and wanting for more. A lot of the data crunching will fuel your recommendation algorithms to show users exactly the products they like when they land on your website or open the app. Did you know your Amazon landing page is tailored to you?
  

• Knowing the different ecosystem and market changes: The ecosystem keeps evolving, for example ad algorithms, social commerce, trends, new competitors etc and you need to be on top of these trends so your product strategy can evolve accordingly.
  

Note: The above list doesn’t account for the core skills of a product manager that are paramount to being successful. Therefore, I have included them in the appendix section.

Though every company calls itself a tech company, it is far from the truth. Myntra is a tech-enabled fashion e-commerce giant. This means the core business is people purchasing clothes/shoes on Myntra through a mobile app or website. The app/website is just the facilitator. If you don’t get your order or the product is bad, I am sure a well-functioning app/website feels very irrelevant there. The bright side though is that the app/website can alleviate some of the pains caused by the other moving parts of the business. For example, delayed delivery notification or the ability to seamlessly return an item can drastically improve the customer experience.

The tech side of the business does induce distress in PM aspirants from a non-tech background. First things first, you don’t need to code to be great at your job. Do you need to understand technology, YES! Understanding how tech decisions are made and being able to define non-functional requirements is key to building a successful tech-enabled product.

A few tips on how to get better:

• A great way to do this is to learn by analogy. Knowing the concepts and trying to understand them through things you already know. For example: How would you understand what an API(Application programming interface) does? Think of it like this, you go to a restaurant, look at the predefined menu, and call a waiter. The waiter takes your request, goes to the kitchen, the chef makes the dishes and the waiter brings them to you. In this analogy, the waiter is the API, you are the client and the chef is the server. A client makes a request to an API that is in a standard format ( the restaurant sets the menu and you know what it sells - i.e. there is an agreement) and your requests adhere to that agreement. The API then takes your request to the server and you get the response back without having to understand how it got done.
  

• Make friends who are engineers - It is easy to have conversations and to clarify your doubts without feeling embarrassed. Your curiosity will make way for the learning path above. Have regular 1:1s with your tech lead or engineering manager to get a better understanding of the architecture, high level design decisions, tech debt and challenges.
  

• Talk to your engineers in terms of problem statements and outcomes you want to achieve. That’s when you will be utilizing the full potential of one of the greatest assets on your team. They will come up with the best solutions to achieve the outcome and will be vested in the mission because they feel a sense of ownership.
  

I do have some resources to get better at understanding tech:

• Tech Simplified is an amazing book written by Deepak Singh, who is a lead PM in Flipkart. The book is written in plain English, at an 8th-grade level, making it an easy to understand one. It covers a breadth of tech topics from databases, caches to data streaming. Here is a summary that I have written for a lot of the tech concepts that are important to consider as non-functional requirements while building your product
• ‍Technically is good too, sometimes it gets into a lot of depth which you can skip
• This youtube channel explains tech concepts in 100 seconds, which is my cup of tea. A great PM knows how the industry is shaping up, many of them are thought leaders. To be on the leading edge, you will need to know where the industry is going and sometimes even define those directions.
  

Here are some upcoming trends in the e-commerce domain:

1. Social Commerce: It is the use of social networks in the context of e-commerce. I am sure you guys have seen youtube promoting a creator's merchandise whilst you are watching their video. Instagram has let small businesses create their pages and consumers can shop directly from there. This is just going to grow. How you promote your products with influencers, how you show contextual ads and market yourselves on these platforms will play a huge role in how people perceive your brand. I’d add image searches to this as well. Giving users a way to shop for similar products by uploading a picture of an item is getting popularized by companies like Meesho.
   

2. Metaverse: Mark Zuckerburg calls it a time and not some space. It is a virtual world that can be a digital twin of the physical world. I don’t mean it will be the same world but you will be able to do a lot of the things you do in the physical world, in the metaverse. You can shop, meet people, get coffee, attend meetings, so on and so forth. A lot of the brands have started creating virtual stores, like Nike, H&M has stores on Sandbox. Nike even acquired a virtual sneaker designer. As people spend time in the digital world, they will likely need digital items like clothes, shoes to use.
   

3. Creative Commerce: This is an extension of the above. Since people will play different roles in the metaverse and do different things, they will need different outfits, backgrounds and spaces.  An AI can recommend a wardrobe for the user based on user preferences, circumstances, and occasions.
   

4. AR/VR shopping: So many brands already have this incorporated. Flipkart acquired Scapic to publish 3D and AR content on their website for products like clothes, furniture etc. You can see a product image in 3D or place that furniture in your space before you buy it. The conversion rates are much higher and the rate of return is much lower.

5. Buy Now Pay Later: I know Affirm’s stock just plunged but these schemes do encourage users to buy more. Integrations with such platforms can give a huge boost to your sales. Flipkart, also recently started providing this service.
   

6. Reverse logistics: The biggest problem E-commerce companies face is the number of returns they need to handle. I am sure you would have heard the number of returns that happen after Christmas and Black Friday sales and companies lose a lot of money. This also affects the climate. Therefore, firms will have to start innovating in this area without compromising the customer experience.
   

What are some other trends that you guys are seeing? Let us know in the comments below.

Appendix:

• Communication: PMs move from chaos to clarity and clear communication plays a huge role in facilitating that. They bring structure not only to roadmaps but also to what happens day to day
  

• Knowing the most important problems to solve: This has a lot to unpack. It is crucial to identify and prioritize problems that are aligned to the company’s mission, add value to the consumers and the business. This includes knowing the users, the market and your competitors
  

• Influence: Since nobody reports to you, the only way you get things done is through influence. Making a compelling case for why something should be picked over the other is how you will see those problems getting solved. You need to be a master storyteller not only for your CPO but also for your engineers
  

• Critical thinking: A PM's day is filled with numerous decisions. Therefore, a person who can analyze the available facts, arguments, constraints and the n-order effects of their decisions, is truly an asset
  

• Curiosity: The zeal to learn, go deeper, and ask the right questions will take you far in any career. The moment you stop learning is the moment you stall in your growth path. A genuine curiosity opens the door to a plethora of insights that inevitably expand your thinking
  

• User therapist: Reading between the lines of what your customers tell you and don’t tell you is crucial in knowing what to build for whom. This is one area everyone considers you to be an expert on
  

• Attention to detail: The beauty lies in the details. Be it understanding the nuances or going into the little details of UI or identifying hidden discrepancies, all of them help in building a great product
  

• Thriving in ambiguity: This skill is an amalgamation of a few mentioned above. Product managers have to make a lot of decisions, sometimes with very little information. The key is to consider everything known at that moment in time so that later the outcome doesn’t haunt you. By that, I don’t mean that you will always be right, but you will be at peace as you utilized everything known at the time of making the decision. Most decisions are reversible, so you almost always just learn. The goal is to fail and learn fast.
  

There are numerous resources for you to learn and acquire these skills, though most of them you will learn on the job or through experience. A weekly reflection comes in handy to identify which areas you need to move the needle on. To get mentored by Product managers in the e-commerce industry, apply for the PM School Training.