Prioritizing Opportunities is Product Management

Charles Battle, Senior Director of Product Management at LendingTree, shares how he evaluates new opportunities, conducts business case analysis, and runs split tests on live products.

At LendingTree, ideas are everywhere. Ideas come from user interviews, data analysis, and various stakeholders, Charles says.

However, engineering time, the most previous resourse of most product teams, is scarce.

That’s why Charles is so strategic about evaluating ideas. He shares his playbook for evaluating ideas and prioritizing them. Charles begins his analysis by asking:

• Does it solve a user problem and do we have data that proves it?
• How will it impact the business?
• Is it feasible from a technology and operations standpoint?

While many product teams rely on dense PowerPoint presentations to make major decisions, Charles and his teams run small, low-risk experiments to learn what users actually want. He says that the teams that get their ideas in front of users the fastest are usually the most successful.

Charles shares how he runs experiments throughout the product life cycle. The techniques that he discusses include:

• Prototyping ideas and getting feedback from users
• Conducting analysis to determine how the idea will impact product and business metrics
• Split testing new features on live products
• Using an on-site voice of the customer tool

Charles and his colleagues at LendingTree run over 400 tests per year! “Data wins arguments here”, he says.

You’ll learn a lot from this episode about prioritization, culture, and data-driven product management.

Here are the highlights:

• Charles’ approach to prioritization (7:52)
• How Charles and his team conduct business case analysis (11:14)
• The research techniques that Charles and his team use to test new ideas (13:20)
• Charles describes how his team runs tests throughout the product lifecycle (17:52)
• Charles shares how he reinforces LendingTree’s experiment-driven culture (20:12)