GTM Sauce

Microsoft 365 · office apps suite

Rank every idea by how many users it affects; fix failed purchases first

Found 5-6% of purchases failing; simplest fixes often turn out biggest

Unknownteam-processpayments-checkoutproduct-activation

What they did

The VP requires an estimated-impact figure for every idea, vendor or optimization. A large idea list from many sources is triaged; at double/triple-digit million MAU, work must affect tens of millions of users, not 1 million, because team size does not grow with MAU. The biggest wins are often simple: purchase flow, first-run experience, performance, reliability, file-open speed, app size, and 100% transaction completion (5-6% of transactions were failing at one point, fixed first).

What happened

Surfaced a 5-6% purchase transaction failure rate to fix first; the fix's impact is not given.
Stage
scale
26:35
“So our framework, our VP is very, very strict about this, like estimated impact. Any kind of vendor we have to bring in, or anything that we have to do, any kind of optimization, he's like, okay, give me the estimated impact.”
Ramit Arora
26:58
“Like, okay, let's do something on purchase, or let's do something on the first-run experience, because if you have an app that big, then sometimes the simplest things like performance, reliability, file open speed, size of the app, those things matter, start to matter a lot.”
Ramit Arora

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