Product Manager Intern In Kuaishou

Kwai

It is a short video application with over 60 million active users in Latin America. Our team’s goal is to boost user growth with monetary incentives. Also, Tik Tok’s rising has posed a challenge.

My role

During my internship in summer 2021, I served as a user growth product manager, mainly responsible for the payment and withdrawal business.

My Contributions and Achievements

1. Cleared the overdue balance of more than 80 million users, and recycled millions of dollars. Meanwhile, minimized the risk of public relations and customer experience to a certain extent.
2. Increased the payment success rate of Ecuador and Chile by 20%
3. Connected with four payment providers from three countries and cooperated with them to jointly optimize our users’ withdrawal experience
4. Participated in the Stickers Collection which involved 40 million users during Copa American 2021

Selected Problem

The million balance of nearly 80 million users has expired and needed to be recycled.

Objectives
1. Recall the money
2. Make inactive users active again

Challenge
1. A huge group of users is involved
2. Up to six countries will be affected
3. PR risk needed to be reduced to the lowest
4. the execution time met the time of CONMEBOL America’s Cup, a Kwai
5. sponsored worldwide event

Methodology

Step by step

80 million was a scarily big figure. The number not only was too big for our sever colleagues to do the recycling at one time, but the estimated PR risk was also too high to endure. So the first technic is to break down the number into 10 equally divided pieces. Each week, we would execute only 10% of all the inactive users.

At the same time, Brazil had the largest percent users among all the countries and it would be holding the Copa 2021 when the cleaning began. As Copa’s sponsor, Kwai needed to be extremely careful about all the moves in Brazil. So just to test the water, I initiated that we can start the cleaning in countries rather than Brazil so that their feedback could be used to adjust the plan before digesting users in Brazil. This suggestion was supported by my product team, law team, and PR team in Brazil.

Customer First

No one wants their money to be taken back. Even though recycling money was permitted in our condition terms with the users, but inevitably it would cause users’ complaints. So before the recycling day, I have designed several ways to remind users, such as in-app messages, push-up messages, and texts. What’s more, by inserting a link for users to log in with one click in the messages, I helped users to simplify the process to log in and remain active.

In addition, since it can be assumed that users with higher balances are more likely to react fiercely towards the recycling, these special groups of users are carefully chosen from the database and I planned extra-strong reminders from them at less than 7 days before the implementation. Also, what I always bore in mind was that our ultimate goal was not to punish users for not logging in but to encourage users to use Kwai and enjoy interesting short videos. To practice this vision, I chose kind and persuasive language when writing those messages and also planned extra incentives when users watch videos again.

Planning for the future

What to do with inactive users that accumulate every day. The solution that I gave here is a one-time thing, but the situation we were facing is a long-time challenge. Every day, tens of thousands of users will be identified as inactive due to their over 30 days un-logged status. So the ultimate problem is to set up a system that could detect these users, remind them and recycle their balance when necessary.

Take-Aways

How is a corporation like in a large team?

The team that I have worked with Kwai is by far the largest team that I have ever gotten involved with. Being part of the user growth product team in the Latin American business, I not only need to work with data, client, sever, translation, UI, and operation colleagues in our team, but also need help from the integrated recovers within the company, local teams in Latin American and third-party payment providers across the world.

The biggest challenge that I faced was to understand how the system works. Since the norm and the rules in such a giant team cannot be illustrated by my mentor in a few words, I needed to figure everything out by proactive efforts. What I have done is to learn by doing. Starting by doing easy tasks in the beginning, I gradually have identified different team members’ roles. Meanwhile, actively consulting experienced colleagues has given me a clear picture of the structure. Even though every time I was facing different challenges with different people, I knew who or which group of people that I can turn to.

PM is to be in everyone’s shoes.

Product Managers are probably the ones who need to communicate most with others. To launch a feature, PMs need to connect different team members with different expertise. Even the purpose of communication is to realize one particular proposal, different languages are needed when talking to people with different roles. In this case, PMs need to think about their points of view. What information would a tech pal need to do this? What do operation staffs want to know before the launch? How to make a brief to the boss? How to help translators understand my intentions better?

When I first started in Kwai, I made the mistake of assuming everyone knows exactly how to do it. After all, they are the old staff while I was someone new here. But later I realized that not everything can be easily tackled by stealing previous experience, and every corporation needs someone to connect the teammates and watch out for progress. And that is exactly what a PM does. To integrate all the resources, PMs are supposed to think over all the potential problems from every different teammate's perspective.