I’m working on developing a new service that will provide value for consumers. We’ve launched a pilot internally and we’re planning the next release for early next year to extend the pilot to a small group of external consumers.
However, even though we’re focusing on consumers first, my LOB mostly cares about businesses as that’s where we get our money, and this service for consumers will be creating a new audience platform that will allow businesses to advertise to the consumers using it.
While I know this, I strongly feel that we need to focus on consumer first, make sure we have the adoption and retention that we need and understand how they feel about the core value of the service before starting to add the components that will allow businesses to advertise to the users.
The executives have decided to include ad stuff as part of the first release to the external audience (our MVP). I think this is the biggest mistake ever, I’ve voiced my opinion numerous times but it doesn’t matter, we’re going ahead with it anyway.
This is the first product I ever launch (I’m a relatively new PM) and my name is tied to this and I feel sick that we’re going forward with something I strongly disagree with. I feel the only question we should be asking is “does this add value to consumers” and if the answer is no, it shouldn’t be part of the first release.
How do you handle this? I feel like my hands are tied.