When Product and Marketing Become One

The Essential Mindset for 10x: Producting

Last summer, the marketing group and product group collaborated and achieved some decent results.

As I shared in the post Producting: I Finally Tried It and It Lives Up to the Hype, the biggest regret of that experience was the lack of unified ownership. Rather than collaborating as a single team right from the problem definition stage, one team defined the problem and handed over the product spec to the other team to execute.

Looking back, producting isn't a relay race where you pass the baton; it's a three-legged race where you run together from the starting line. If marketing and product had discussed goals and strategies and divided roles from the very planning stage, there wouldn't have been any communication mix-ups. We would have been better motivated toward our goals, and the user journey for the in-app features would have been designed much more smoothly. [Excerpt from "Producting: I Finally Tried It"]

It's been about half a year since I had that realization, but I didn't know exactly how to resolve that shortcoming. Not only had I never done it properly, but it was also hard to find people around me who had that experience.

Then, at the end of last year, a new leader with extensive producting experience joined us, bringing a massive wave of change. Before I knew it, every team was executing the producting we had so desired, and we are now truly feeling its effectiveness. What exactly changed, and how? Let me describe this shift from the product team's perspective.

1. The Mindset for 10x

It was really awkward at first, and it still is a bit, but when deriving strategies to achieve the goal of our squad, we began to broaden the scope of our strategy to include the "user acquisition stage." Once we did that, thinking in terms of 10x rather than a 10% increment became much easier.

Closer to Decision-Making for 10x

Take the subscription squad as an example: even if we optimize the subscription conversion rate in Indonesia and increase it by 5x, the revenue increment would only be in the hundreds of dollars. This is because the influx of new users is very low. So, we kept building strategies focused on the US and Korea, where new user acquisition is already high. This might seem like a rational approach, but if you widen the scope of your strategy to the "user acquisition stage," a completely different strategy emerges—one capable of delivering a much bigger impact.

If we increase the subscription conversion rate in Indonesia by 5x so that the LTV (Life Time Value) exceeds the CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), we create a structure that yields a profit per user acquired, allowing us to increase the Paid marketing budget. Moreover, the CAC in Indonesia is so low that we could spend 10 times our previous budget without a hitch. This leads to the conclusion that we can increase new subscription revenue not by 5x, but by 50x. If we look at other countries in a similar way, the sum of the total impact (in the hundreds of thousands of dollars) becomes much larger than just increasing the conversion rate in the US.

If a PO's role is to derive the best strategy to achieve a specific goal, this perfectly illustrates why it is essential to look for opportunities right from the user acquisition stage.

Closer to the Mindset for 10x

When you make decisions like this, you gradually start thinking about infinite possibilities with an open upside. Why is that? When we only looked at the in-app funnel, we had to come up with the best product specs under constraints like the pre-existing context and journey within the product, as well as the stability and usability that must be fundamentally provided. Furthermore, the upside for expected increments was pretty capped. For example, if D1 retention is currently 60%, then 1.66x is the maximum possible impact. In terms of ways to increase our ultimate goal metric of DAU, there is a hard ceiling.

On the other hand, thinking from the acquisition stage leads to ideas that open up new horizons(?), and I realized that if we can just guarantee "LTV > CAC", the size of that impact can be increased infinitely. As in the example above, just improving the ringtone within the app won't increase DAU enough, but if we use that improved ringtone to target user acquisition, the DAU increment becomes massive. As we plan bolder experiments, I often find myself getting blown away by the potential impact these plans can generate. I get so ahead of myself that I sometimes think I need to tone it down... a bit.

Anyway, in the past, I would get excited thinking, "If we do this well, we might increase it by 2–3x?!"

But these days, one of the biggest changes is getting thrilled by the thought, "This is going to be absolutely huge!"

2. Unpredictable Surprises = Great Opportunities

When running a product team, you frequently end up playing a balancing game between "speed" and "stability." They aren't inherently opposing concepts, but coexisting them is incredibly difficult.

As we started producting, the key difference in attributes I felt between product and marketing was "speed." Marketing is highly sensitive to "seasonality" and "trends," so speed is absolutely crucial. If you try to parody "Culinary Class Wars," which took Korea by storm last fall, now, there's no way you'll create viral content. You have to ride rising trends at exactly the right time to land a massive hit, which meant we had to accelerate our "speed" much more than before.

Speed and stability—when you zoom out, they are both just means for creating impact. Back when we only looked at the product, we placed ample value on stability because the impact that development speed within the product could yield wasn't large enough to sacrifice stability. Rooted in "stability," we used to consider minimizing unpredictable surprises as a virtue in order to increase "speed." Now that the product team considers the user acquisition stage, the importance of speed has grown, and the upside of the impact that can be achieved through that speed has been unblocked. Because speed can deliver a "massive hit," the balance point between speed and stability has shifted. These days, I actually think riding unpredictable surprises well, enjoying them, and leveraging them should be considered a virtue. From a marketing perspective, a surprise simply means a great opportunity has arisen. I feel the entire team is gradually going through this shift in perspective.

Now, I have a strong feeling that we are finally doing producting right. (Even though it's only been one sprint.) To be honest, at the beginning of the quarter, my mind was very convoluted. Personally, marketing is an unfamiliar domain, the overall funnel we had to look at had expanded, and since it's characterized by lower predictability, my thoughts wouldn't easily fall into place. Looking back now, producting wasn't so much about learning a new set of tasks, but rather acquiring a new perspective and mindset, and ultimately creating a new collaborative culture.

My cluttered mind was sorted out just one week into actual execution. (It was that intense of a week...)

We still have a long way to go, but,

Through producting. I've gained the unbound confidence that we can absolutely achieve 10x or more, and

The unpredictable opportunities that could come at any time are translating into excitement.

This is a fantastic start to 2025.

Riding this momentum, we'll keep creating amazing results.