W29 - Some Insights from the B-side Payment Planning Workshop

Recently I attended the H2 planning meeting for the B-side checkout with product colleagues. Yuan's guidance was enlightening. It prompted deeper reflection on my judgments about mid-to-long-term planning and on how to participate more substantively in creating business value.

Put the user at the center, and use non-damaging user experience as the baseline. Take the checkout default selection as an example: the goal is to steer users toward the payment method we prefer. There are two product logics to achieve this. One is a forward conversion logic: use visual cues, marketing, and similar methods to guide users to willingly move toward the preferred option. The other is a reverse forced-selection logic: first yank users into the preferred option, then observe how many switch away.

These two logics differ at the user-experience level. Imagine someone with a credit card using Alipay—if Huabei were auto-selected every time for frequent payments, the user experience would be severely harmed, so Huabei does not operate that way.

Judging by outcomes, the former approach is likely more effective. Using flood control as an analogy: Gun, Dayu's father, relied on blocking and damming to contain the floods. After nine years his efforts exhausted people and resources and failed to stop the floods, which only worsened. Learning from that, Dayu switched to channeling and dredging rivers, directing floodwaters to the sea and achieving lasting stability.

Value-driven, not capability-driven. Looking backward, our short-term strategic choices can be distorted by current capability constraints or implementation costs, producing counterintuitive decisions. Two cases illustrate this. First, in marketing capability building, we launched campaigns targeting already-linked cards before launching campaigns targeting new cards—effectively trying to reactivate users before acquiring them. Second, on the B-side we used a product pattern that links C-side already-linked cards to speed up card linking. About 60% of B-side users already had cards linked on the C-side, which should have been a high-leverage strategy, yet the channel only acquired dozens of new users per day. The reason: the quick-link flow was not exposed at the highest-traffic checkout touchpoints but placed after users chose to add a new card, causing significant leakage.

The cases above may reflect deliberate trade-offs made during product decisions; repeating those decisions might lead to the same paths. What I emphasize is a missing link in my own thought process: after receiving requirements and understanding the situation, the transition from choosing a strategy to defining tasks lacked critical and benchmarking thinking. We did not proactively initiate discussions about the optimal strategic path. We need to read the macro, look at large numbers, and step back from details.