Sometimes I feel that, as a product manager, my job is to consistently fight good ideas. You see, I’m surrounded by creative people: game designers, producers, other PMs, and management usually has a solid background as well. We all see examples of great UX and think: wow! People really cared about users here — and we dream of doing the same.
And it’s not just some abstract “majority.” My former manager Sasha — the person who shaped my product worldview — once came in with a beautiful idea. “What if we sell a food pack by showing the dragon the player just bought, both in its baby and adult forms?!” The idea is good: the player just spent money, that dragon is more valuable to them than others — surely this will work better than a default banner. Twice as well!
And yes, it does work better. But you know what works even better — like ten times better? Selling the food pack to all users without waiting for them to buy a dragon first. The idea itself is good, but it works only on visuals, and to set up the right triggers and automate the process (in the test, of course, everything was wired in a dendro-fecal way), you’d need a couple of months of work from the entire team.
And in the end, we’d increase revenue from those packs by 10% compared to selling them to everyone without fancy visuals. That’s roughly 0.03% of total revenue. My best pricing optimization test brought us +5% revenue — and no developer was harmed in the process.
Do you see the irony? A product manager — and dozens of people around them — may have great vision, attention to detail, and care about users like a beloved aunt. And yet some simpleton with the formula “Users. Together. A lot of money.” will outperform them. Because when you’re hammering nails, you don’t need the most precise hammer — you need a wider sledgehammer to drive in ten nails at once. A couple will bend along the way — no big deal.
At the same time, you can’t just kill that vision inside yourself. Sometimes good vision leads to real change: once I redesigned the battle pass UX and we earned +4% from it. Yes, not as impressive as 5% from a pricing change, but it more than paid for its development. And that’s how I work: I come up with ten ideas and kill them evenly. Simply because ideas don’t scale well, and I’m not paid for beauty — I’m paid for efficiency. But when beauty becomes efficient — that’s the best feeling of all.