Hyphen Group, CompareEuropeGroup – the largest financial comparison group with a presence in 13 markets across South East Asia and Europe. Through local platforms helping millions of customers every month to easily compare rates and services of insurance, banking, telco and other home services providers. In year 2016 saved users over $100 million. Brands include MoneyHero.com.hk, Samlino.dk, Coru.com. Raised over US$150million, investors including Goldman Sachs, Alibaba, IFC (The World Bank), Jardine Pacific, Peter Thiel (Co-Founder of PayPal) among others.
My role
- Led a team of four to develop the Learning Center product from ideation to launch
- Carried out A/B tests and measured the performance to iterate and improve product features.
- The driving force for site-wide SEO and new user acquisition in organic and affiliate channels.
Results
- Increased performance by 30% comparing to legacy version.
Although there are various areas to share, I would like to bring out some of the key problems I faced as a Product Manager, along with the learnings and decisions made along the way.
Product evolution
I joined a team of four to create a product within the recently built platform that could improve the company’s marketing efforts.
The markets which we operated in got their largest incoming traffic from content written on blogs. As the websites evolved with expanding feature sets, so did the SEO strategy which required a new marketing product to support the vision. At that moment the blog could operate only outside of the main website.
Goal: Improve the blog content performance (measured by speed and conversions).
Kick-off
To develop this product we followed the earlier re-platforming project‘s approach – develop an MVP, prove the concept in one market, and later scale up to others.
The largest challenge here was to manage the expectations of all markets. Since our small team had a number of products under its belt with a large daily maintenance overhead I set out to consolidate the active projects and align with stakeholders on key priorities.
Later this meant saying “no” to a large number of requests which came in from many channels. When aligning on priorities I find it as important to talk about what you will not deliver along with what you will deliver. This set us on a path to focus on delivering this major product.
Development
This project presented us a large number of opportunities, all of which were attractive but at a different scale. Two deciding factors for me were the following: “is it aligned with our long-term vision?” and “is this the highest value project for the least amount of effort?”.
Here I decided not to continue developing on top of products and code which we saw fading out in short/mid term, and to focus on building a product which works both in long term and that gives us the highest amount of value for the least amount of work. That’s where we went forward with a plan to create a scalable and flexible blog that can integrate with any part of the site.
In terms of technical implementation, together with the CTO we had to consider the company’s future vision, analyse from technological and business aspect, and search for available technological options. It became more and more clear that the right direction would be to go for a custom made WordPress platform. This ensured consistency from the perspective of the user experience, our technology, as well as existing processes within the marketing teams.
Following our research and customer/stakeholder interviews I painted the following low-fidelity wireframes. The Head of UX, Chi, played a big role in formulating all research and ideas into designs which represented the envisioned direction.
Since a large percentage of traffic comes from mobile and that those articles long, we had to think of the best ways for the user to consume the content. One of those UX enhancing features I saw being very valuable was the Navigation. It provides a list of all subtitles written by the content writer, and upon a click will drag down to the respective location.
Developing a marketing product required a long term plan. This product was a collaborative effort between local market content writers and our product team. For this to come together I created a comprehensive plan which involved the best practices and strategies to make the most out of this product, from content planning and platform usage perspective.
Here the overall problem I faced was that some of the markets were low on resources, thus the timeline had to be adjusted accordingly. Nevertheless, as with anything in business, it may have been simply about priorities, thus when proven to be successful in selected markets the rest would implement necessary changes and follow. So we set a target to create the superstar example for the rest.
Thanks to our great team we finally released the product! It proved to increase performance 30% and proceeded with implementation in the next markets.
Even though few markets did not pursue this product, we can surely be proud over the deliverable. It created more flexibility for local markets and enabled users to get a great experience reading from the Learning Center.
