Category: quack

Pick a card, any card

Rakesh Agrawal

Something many sites get wrong: not letting you store a description of a credit card. This is too often what stored credit cards look like:

From that list, a consumer doesn’t know what each card is for. It’s common for customers to use a corporate card, spouse’s card, FSA or a card for a specific purpose, e.g. to get free checked bags on an airline credit card.

A better approach is to let the customer label the cards.

Some people won’t care, so you can have the card description (e.g. “Amex … 1004”) prefilled in the label field. This approach doesn’t add friction for those who don’t need it, but removes friction for those who do.

Solving the problem vs. meeting the ask

Rakesh Agrawal

An oft-repeated phrase in product management is to ask the customer what they want. The best product managers know that the best approach is to understand what they need.

One example:

In my condo complex, there is a heavy fire door between the garage and the entryway. It’s common for people to bring heavy items from their car into the building. The ask was to add an automatic door opener.

After some research, we discovered that because of the construction of the building, adding an automatic door opener would cost about $25,000.

But when we looked at the need, it was to get easier access from the garage to the entry. The old system required that people had to turn a handle to open the door. We found that by adding an automatic unlock solved the problem. People didn’t have to put down what they were carrying, the door would unlock and they could easily push it while holding their packages.

We solved the need, without the expense.

The best PMs find the annoyances in everyday life and think about how to fix them, even it’s not something they can fix. Learning the thought process is key.

Dropping down, adding friction

Rakesh Agrawal

This is a relatively common problem. The “Card Type” is completely unnecessary. Payment processors automatically route the transaction to the appropriate network.

Even worse are the implementations that will reject the form if you don’t select a type – adding friction at the exact moment someone wants to buy from you.

Incidentally ChatGPT doesn’t know the credit card numbering scheme. (Visa card numbers begin with 4; 3 is primarily American Express cards; Mastercard is 5.)

Bingo! you lose with Marriott

Rakesh Agrawal

The Marriott mobile app has one of the worst search features out that. Marriott has 30 brands that run the gamut from Fairfield Inn to St. Regis. There are some that I will stay at, some that I won’t.

By default, it shows you all 30. When I do a search for NYC, it returns 199 hotels. If I filter it to just the hotels I would consider staying at it drops to a more manageable 44.

The problem is that it resets when you do a search. I have to go back in every time and select the brands.

They’re not even grouped logically, making choice even harder.

Marriott app filter tool

At least they do the grouping correctly on Web site.

Random

Rakesh Agrawal

Sometimes when you do survey research, you want to randomize the order of things to make sure that results aren’t biased by whatever shows up first.

Selecting a home country is not one of those times. I don’t know what Amazon was thinking.

The right way to present a list like this is alphabetical, with the most common countries (and geo located countries) at the top.

Not commonly done, but better: repeat countries at the top in the alphabetical section.