Transcript: Sigalit Sadeh | Lusha | Takhles Episode: How Do You Know What Will Drive the Most Impact?

The three sizing questions: reach, pain and frequency

Eyal David: [00:01] So, takhles, how do you know which problem or opportunity is most worth focusing on to drive the most impact? Here's a short clip from the full interview with Sigalit from Lusha.

Sigalit Sadeh: [00:14] Okay, that sizing is basically about answering three main questions. One is quantitative: how many people does it affect, who is the segment I'm going after, how many people does it affect, is it inside my customer base, do I need to go and do acquisition for it, what's the business value, is it a feature I can monetize. Then I get into the level of pain, like I said before: is it a nice to have or a must have, how painful is it, how much are they trying to solve it themselves today and failing. And then, finally, the third lever is what's the frequency, how often do they encounter the pain. Because say I found a terribly, terribly painful problem, but it only happens to very niche customers, or terribly, terribly, terribly large ones that don't represent my customer base, or even, it's a terribly painful problem, but people deal with it once every six months, then we probably shouldn't solve it.

Eyal David: [01:03] There are exceptions.

Sigalit Sadeh: [01:03] There are exceptions, yes, there always are, but you need to be very mindful of all the measures, of basically all these measures, to understand whether this is a problem that should be solved. After you answer all these questions, I think you have like a solid answer in hand,

Initiatives without a dollar sign or outside the metrics

Eyal David: [01:15] and the PM can already answer it himself. You know, no, that's very true, there are also real exceptions, you know, it's enough that your power user just needs this dashboard to take a screenshot of it for the quarterly presentation, so probably, I don't know if that's painful enough, but there's always the aspect of, okay, I really have a few initiatives, I probably researched them very well, now go compare between them, and then always, if there's no dollar sign, which isn't always, not in every product is it a given, that's a point that really interests me. So we wanted to go methodically, let's go methodically, but in my view that's the place I'm most curious about. So say you work with the PMs at your company, there are the company metrics, which are the most important at that moment. Right. So basically you look at that once a quarter and derive the initiatives from there. If I now come and think of something else that hits the dollar sign, but probably isn't connected to what matters to the company right now, does that also carry weight in the prioritization, how does that look?

Sigalit Sadeh: [02:21] Absolutely. I think at Lusha we give, not everywhere, I have to admit I've seen this, but at Lusha if there's a dollar sign and if we manage to attach value to the feature, even if it's not within the company's metrics, the group's, we do allow the ability to move forward and have impact, because in the end product managers are here to bring business value. And even if it's not in the ways we as management thought of, I think it's really important to let them do it.

Eyal David: [02:47] Yes, say all those that... there are technical features in general that would save the company money. Right. So those are actually usually easier to quantify, I think.

Sigalit Sadeh: [02:47] Right, because then you really know how much money you saved, but any feature can be quantified too. If your assumptions and your ballpark are good enough, you know what the business value is, you know how many customers you'll bring back, and then you can quantify their subscription. You can look at conversion and sign-ups and see how many new customers you brought in, or how many customers did upsells following features you launched. In the end you really can use the same framework to understand how much business value you brought to the organization, also in hindsight,

Eyal David: [03:27] both before and after.

Sigalit Sadeh: [03:36] Yes, after is always possible.

Eyal David: [03:36] So okay, so I went, I went, and along the way I basically understood the problem really well, I have a list of problems, I understand who they affect. We probably gave them some kind of measure so we can compare between... what are the measures you work with, how does that look?

Scoring problems and ICE for solutions

Sigalit Sadeh: [03:54] Now there are two measures. There's one at the opportunity level, like I said: how painful is it, how often does it hit me, and quantitatively, meaning who's the segment and how much of it there is. It really is a mathematical formula that at the end produces, produces some score, and then we chose the problems. Now each problem has one solution, sorry, two solutions or three. Now you need to rank the solutions within it, and that's where we get into ICE methods, meaning you need to compare the impact versus the effort.

Eyal David: [04:28] That was a Takhles episode, from Product Builder. Want to hear the full conversation? Look for it in the feed, and don't forget to follow us.