This is one of the questions I use when teach my PM classes and interview PM candidates.
Question
You are the PM responsible for Roku’s remote. On the remote, you have hard buttons that route to various streaming services.
- How do you decide which services you put on the buttons?
- How many buttons do you put on the remote?
- Do you allow the user to reprogram buttons for services that they don’t use?
Answer
This question is about optimizing the combination of user benefit, brand and marketing revenue.
There has to be a Netflix button, even if they don’t pay you a dime. (If I’m negotiating a distribution deal on behalf of Netflix, I might even start with the position that you have to pay me to use the Netflix logo.) Without a Netflix button, your product will look defective and it would discourage purchases. From a usability perspective, it would also make the experience for the most popular streaming service much worse.
After that, if you’re part of a conglomerate, you add a button for your service. If it’s a Fire device, add a button for Prime Video. If it’s a Chromecast, add a button for YouTube. (Trust me on this. If you ship without it, you might get fired.)
Beyond that, there are so many services out there. Disney+, Apple TV+, Hulu, Paramount+, Max, tubi, Peacock, Spotify, Crackle, Zee TV, etc. You can’t and shouldn’t put a button for everything on it. The fewer buttons, the more you can charge for those buttons; it essentially becomes an auction. I’d probably cap it at 4.
I’d price based on two components: a price just to have the custom button (a slotting fee) and an acquisition fee, a dollar amount for each subscription I sell to that service.
The second part is trickier. You don’t want the highest revenue for each subscription, you also want the ones most likely to convert. A Disney+ subscription is more likely to convert than a subscription for Fubo.
That’s just one way to do it. There are all sorts of variations: guaranteed minimum, percentage of ongoing subscription revenue, rev share on ads, etc. You don’t have to do the same thing with every partner. Probe to see what are possibilities. E.g. some services might not have the technical capability to do
You should always take into account consumer value. Having a hard button for CuriosityStream is going to make your product look defective. (No offense to CuriosityStream, they have great content. It’s just not a mass product.) I once had a Roku remote with a Blockbuster button. I don’t know if they put it on ironically.
Don’t forget localization! (Known to us product nerds as l10n.) If you’re selling the product in multiple countries, find the optimal set of services for that market. For example, in India, Hotstar is an important service. Hulu, which might make sense for the U.S. market, isn’t available in India.
I would let people customize unused buttons. There’s no point having consumers get annoyed by a service that they will never install. There are various ways to implement this: bury it in settings, have a counter that after they push the button 5 times and don’t convert, offer to switch it for them.
Update: Google actively prompts you to change the pre-configured YouTube button if you don’t use enough. (I primarily use Hulu and Netflix.)
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