W29 - Several Insights from the B-Side Payment Planning Meeting

Recently I attended the H2 planning meeting for the B-side checkout with product colleagues. Some guidance from Yuan got me thinking. It deepened my perspective on making mid-to-long-term plans and on how to participate more thoroughly in business creation.

Put the user first, with non-damaging user experience as the baseline. Take checkout defaults as an example: the goal is to steer users toward the payment method we prefer. There are two product-logical implementations: a forward conversion logic that nudges users toward our desired option through visuals, marketing, and other guidance; and a reverse-forcing logic that initially forces users into the expected option and then observes how many switch away.

These two approaches differ at the user-experience level. Imagine a user who has a credit card using Alipay: if Huabei were selected by default every time, frequent payments would seriously harm the user experience, which is why Huabei doesn’t do that.

Looking at outcomes, the former approach can be more effective. Using flood control as an analogy: Gun, Dayu’s father, tried to stop floods by blocking and damming. After nine years of costly effort he failed and floods worsened. Learning from that, Dayu changed tactics to open channels and guide water to the sea, bringing long-term stability.

Be value-driven, not capability-driven. In hindsight, our short-term strategy choices can be distorted by current capabilities or implementation costs. Two cases illustrate this. First, in marketing capability building we started with campaigns for already-linked cards and only later addressed acquisition for new cards — effectively trying to re-engage before having driven acquisition. Second, the B-side fast-card-linking product assumes about 60% of C-side users already have linked cards, so it should be highly leverageable. Yet daily new acquisition from that channel numbered only in the dozens because the fast-link exposure wasn’t placed at the highest-traffic checkout; it was shown only after users chose to add a new card, losing a large portion of traffic.

The cases mentioned may reflect decisions where product teams already weighed trade-offs and would make the same choice again. My point is that there was a missing link in the thinking process: after receiving a requirement and understanding the situation, moving from strategy selection to task definition lacked critical and benchmarking thinking. Teams didn’t proactively initiate discussions about the optimal strategic path. You need to read the macro, look at the big numbers, and rise out of the details.