Tim McConville is VP, Product Management and Design at Moda Operandi, a luxury multi-brand fashion retailer and marketplace. He started his career as a web designer and tech producer at AAOS before transitioning to product management at Cars.com. From there, Tim became a product manager for flights and vacation packages at ORBITZ and, later, Director and Head of Product Management at Birchbox. Before his current role at Moda Operandi, he served as a staff product manager at Etsy.
In our conversation, Tim talks about leveraging success as a launchpad — rather than viewing a big win as an endpoint, recognizing it as a signal for potential greater success. He also talks about grounding cross-functional teams to a common mission by putting everything in the perspective of customer experience.
The first is grounding discussions. Whenever there are cross-functional teams involved, we have to ground ourselves in customer needs and problems. At Moda, one of our core values is being customer-centric — we want to tie everything back to the customer. Even if we’re approached by someone asking for help solving a business problem, we’ll use a framework like Five Whys — where you encourage all teams to work backward to determine why the item is important — to help us think about how solving that problem will ultimately help or change the customer experience.
Second, I’ve learned that a product management team plays the important role of being a translator. This means working really hard to understand all the key strategies and tactics of the groups involved for something to be successful. This doesn’t just imply individual or group goals, but broader goals of the organization. The PM and their team have to bring those items together, translate them, and create that common ground.
The third thing I’ve found is that there’s a lot of power in cross-functional teams. It’s important that people are dedicated through the entire process. We don’t want people to come in, answer a few questions while a team is in discovery, and then leave from there. Rather, they should be tuned in all along the way from discovery through design, development, testing, deployment, and release. Even if they’re not actively involved, it’s important that people understand the what, why, goals, and metrics. There’s a lot of power in that for aligning and bridging gaps.
Yes, and the holiday season is a great example. This is a very important time in the retail and ecommerce marketplace businesses. We’re just starting to go through this now at Moda. It is wonderful to see a cross-functional team of buyers, marketers, designers, product managers, and developers working nimbly together. They know what our goals are for the holiday season, as well as some of our specific themes and creations.
This is one of those instances where we are bound by time. Competitors start to launch and we will lose ground if we take too long to get things out the door. We had this framework in place early to promote a bit more flexibility. We’ve seen ideas cross-pollinate and have been able to realize a “one plus one equals three” impact just by getting these folks together.
I find that a consistent prioritization framework is really helpful. I like to keep it simple and use the RICE prioritization framework, which is an acronym for reach, impact, confidence, and effort. At Moda, we also add a new layer to it: business alignment. This is more of a qualitative component at the leadership level, but it means that we ask, strategically, “Is this important for us in the long term or is it just a near-term opportunistic initiative?” That helps us weigh whether or not to pursue a project or an initiative.
We use RICE in combination with that business alignment factor for any project that requires six or more development weeks. The business alignment aspect comes from recurring alignment meetings with stakeholders. For example, I lead a regular meeting every 2–3 weeks where we review new and current priorities, as well as any changes. These discussions are wonderful because they keep the leadership team aligned. It provides them with transparency into what’s going on and the rationale behind prioritization decisions for bigger projects.
We also use project management tools to provide transparency, such as Monday.com for roadmaps and project request intake and Jira for development tasks, issue reporting, and bug tracking. These tools are accessible to anybody in the company who might be curious or have an interest in what teams are working on.
I try to create an opportunity within the product management and design disciplines for exploring and envisioning. We pair product managers and product designers who are focused on a specific problem. I encourage collaboration based on creative exploration. This could mean a jam session about long-term outcomes based on some consumer insight or some new technology that seems aligned with our business. I want people to set time aside to visualize or explore new possibilities.
One thing that I really like and hope we can do more of is the press release concept. This involves writing, in a press release format with a future date, a description of how we capitalized on an opportunity that changed our business. Prototyping and experimentation are also great too. We’ve found that A/B testing is also an excellent way to learn if something might work or resonate with customers.
Lastly, at the end of the quarter, we’re planning a two-day hackathon for devs, PMs, and product designers. In my experience, hack days are generally focused on developers building cool things with the latest technologies. I like that we involve product managers and product designers in our hackathons and give them the opportunity to explore and dream big.
During the pandemic, we focused our ecommerce team on optimizing the core shopping experience. We had a momentary slowdown in our business, so we made a large investment in our mobile experience and effectively rebuilt our web application to be faster and fully responsive. Because there was less traffic, it wasn’t a huge risk for us to take. Still, there was a lot of uncertainty in this initiative, but it ultimately led to a substantial increase in mobile website conversion.
At the time, we were really excited about the ROI because it exceeded our expectations in terms of impact. The interesting thing is that, after about a year or so, we fell back into the mode of minimally investing in great mobile experiences. Once it was integrated into our process, we sort of moved on and we were just maintaining it. But, when we dug into the analytics for our mobile app and the success drivers of that initial initiative, we saw favorable trends, so we decided to increase our investment, again, in development, design, and marketing for mobile. After seeing some additional success we developed a cross-functional team around mobile.
In the end, one of the valuable lessons from this initiative was leveraging success as a launchpad. We took a chance and it created a huge success. Rather than viewing that big win as an endpoint, it took us time to recognize it as a signal for potential greater success. That major achievement revealed valuable insights about things that resonate with our luxury customers. It took us a bit of time to recognize and reinvest there, but after we did it continued to pay dividends.
For sure. It flipped things on their head for me. When we have big ideas, I now think about what’s the smallest thing we can start with. Maybe we can design a lightweight prototype or a simple A/B test to give us a signal about the investment. In the case of our mobile app, we decided to make a large investment and it paid off. Just because it was a large investment, that didn’t mean that there wasn’t an even bigger opportunity. That’s the difference for me now — success as a launchpad doesn’t have to mean starting small and going big. Sometimes, you can go big and then go even bigger.
As a luxury fashion retailer and marketplace, we have what we think of as VIP clients. We have a private sales team that provides a white-glove service. Our technology team built an app to support that business. It’s effectively a sales enablement and internal sales tool service that is specific to our VIP-oriented business. When we built it, it was essential to consider how the tool would support the sales team’s effectiveness and also the VIP customer’s experience.
For example, we knew that the UI had to be super fast and user-friendly because the sales associates work with very important clients and have to answer questions very quickly. We needed this tool to integrate with all our customer service and ecommerce systems as well. This enables the sales team to recognize customers and their interactions, and provide a cohesive experience.
The capabilities that we built were mostly around communication, like notifications and follow-up. But, we knew that there was more on the horizon, so we took an iterative approach to building. We worked with the team to create an internal pilot group to test early designs of the UI and what the workflow might need to be. For these early iterations, we used a dedicated Slack channel for feedback. We knew the end result would be more than what we originally envisioned, we just didn’t know exactly what that would look like.
We cater to a luxury clientele, so our clients are extremely busy, time-constrained individuals. We need to respect that. Gathering feedback from this particular customer segment can be challenging. So, we go about this in a few ways. First, we rely on the voice of the customer — a mix of qualitative and quantitative data. One feedback loop is a weekly business meeting that acts as a conversational review of sales. That includes not just metrics and what’s been performing the past week, but also sales and support feedback. It’s crucial that we match up this feedback with performance data.
Second, we do post-purchase surveys, and we can use them to tease out data. We get strong qualitative feedback to understand who it’s coming from. Are they a VIP client? How does that segment differ from others in our business? We also get interesting feedback from our app reviews. As I mentioned, mobile has been an extremely important growth lever for us. We’ve made a lot of strides there, and thousands of mobile reviews have helped guide our decisions around where we might not be meeting expectations and keeping that average 4.9/5 rating up.
Those are some of the ways we harness qualitative data, but it can sometimes be a challenge. We can’t reach out to our customer segment and say, “Hey, can you hop on a Zoom and do a usability study with me?” It’s tricky. This is why diary studies are one of my favorite tools. We did a lot of these during my time at Orbitz, the travel company, when I was a PM there. I found it to be phenomenal. Cars.com did this back in the day as well, and I found it to be such a robust method for painting a picture of customer pain points.
Well, it’s a little tricky to figure out. You’re not always going to have wins, and you want that win percentage to go up, but there will always be competing priorities. Navigating those priorities and knowing when to say, “OK, this is done, we can move on,” can be difficult.
If you knock something out of the park, it’s easy to say, “Hey, we crushed this!” There are so many other opportunities to go after from there. But it’s important to have the discipline to evaluate whether you’ve exploited the full opportunity for the business and the customer. This is something I now question after every win.
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