Yahoo Traffic Quality Product Marketing Surveys - Led by me

Yahoo Search Marketing Traffic Quality Product Marketing Survey - Designed by me

Yahoo Search Marketing Traffic Quality Product Marketing Survey - Design and lead by Ruth Shen

SITUATION

1. At Yahoo! Search Marketing AdTech Platform, I was originally the Sr Product Strategy Manager where my Director's major mission was to improve [Data comprehensiveness]
2. This data is used to support decision making and 
• Getting our BU's requests on the Product Roadmap by proving a certain hypothesis 
• Executive team and 
• Marketplace pricing adjustment to improve revenue
• ex) our BU recognize if we improve Traffic Quality and ROI by lowing merchant's CPC in the short term = in the long run, we see higher spending from merchants 

Our challenge was  :

1. Low adoption rate of Yahoo Adtech Analytics tools by our advertisers/merchants.   (Ease of use of UI was poor and under another BI)
2. The data or reportings we have within Yahoo! adTech  were refuted by many VPs from other BU as not "comprehensive" or "representative" of the whole marketplace

Certain VPs told me specifically, they wanted top advertisers from Insurance, Finance, and etc (AND certain companies like Progressive, XX Banks)

TASKS / POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

So.. My Directors tasks to improve [Data comprehensiveness] were

1. Improve Adoption Rate by improve UI ease of use so we would have more merchant's behavior data.  but that fall under another BU and it's quite slow.  
2. Acquire merchants' behavior data thru outside 3rd party (one was Omniture) but that was costly and slow.  Also, being an actuary, I know the data structure might not match up to our internal structure.
   

MY ACTIONS INSTEAD

1.  I asked my Director and VP who are the stakeholders and decision-makers in other BU that we needed consensus from
2.  I spoke with the Project Managers from those BU and learned about their languages/KPI and how results were achieved
3. I looked at resources and access I had and decided to conduct a [Customer Pain Point] Survey Monkey that included the TOP Advertisers/Merchants our Stakeholders deemed as industry leaders
4. I started with 8 questions about our Adtech tools/features for our merchants to ask how we can improve our BU's KPI: to improve 1) Traffic Quality, 2) ROI and 3) Merchants' trust
5. To gain support and align other BU with our depart, I included other VPs, Directors and Product Managers I interviewed in designing this Survey Money

RESULTs

I had access to Yahoo semi-Annual Merchant Summit and I assisted writing our VP's speech in conferences.  That was one of the tasks I volunteered to take of my Directors hand since it was the few duties I noticed I could help out really quickly when I had no relationships within our BU yet

Context I designed the Survey form to be sent out right after the summit and had continuously pitched this form to top merchants during the summit and inform them how we value their feedback on this form

1) The questionaire increased from 8 questions which only affected our BU , After 6 months, it grew to 28 questions with EDITS from sr Director of Product, Director of Account Managers, SVP of Traffic Quality and 3 Sr Business Managers = 4 different BU (Product, Product Marketing, Engineering and our team)  .  It started to have a life on its own and GREW! and I had change the name of the project report to "customer ""(dis)Satisfaction survey"

2) The survey received 95 responses covering Top advertisers from 85% of the customer bases that was lacking.  It also covered Customer's wishlist of old tools/features updates and new tools design

3) Sr Director of Product team and Sr Business Ops Director asked me for survey results update every day.  Luckily Survey Monkey had a Real Time Link so they can access themselves

4) after 3 months 1 st survey was collected, I was called in by the Sr Business Ops Director to meet Sue Decker/CEO at the time to understand Customers' view points/Net Promoter Score

5) My Director changed my duties to Product Marketing but he wanted to stay within his team.  He felt I had strong collaboration skills and didn't burn bridges like other analyst on our team with we were trying to achieve certain goals within deadline.  He wanted to change my annual review because previously he thought I was too soft and regrettably gave me a bad review.  I said it was alright, we can wait till next year (and then we got laid off).  We're connected on Linkedin, and he said he's available for reference if I ever needed it.                                                

                                               

6) I was requested to continuously hold this survey by the other BU's VPs at each summit and other other conference I was invited.

7) I was invited by other team to be on their recruiting team and help with assessing hiring candidates for our Traffic Quality Analyst

8) My old boss who was now the VP of Product wanted to recruit me back to her team.

How I align with AMAZON's Philosophy of leadership

1) BUILD RELATIONSHIP and TRUST with Other STAKEHOLDERS,

2) CUSTOMER ORIENTED AND OBSESSED with their FEEDBACK,

3)+ 4)  I was RESOURCEFUL and INVENTED solutions. I delivered results with access and tools I had within and outside our organization

5) BIAS FOR ACTION - I'm a Youtuber and I have my own blog.  I like to see results very quickly and I find satifisfaction with I see my impact on paper or video.