A charge recorded correctly and explained badly

In the spring of 2003 I read a letter, forwarded by a mobile operator, from a retired schoolteacher who had been charged for a daily proverb message for eleven months. She did not remember subscribing. Her son had found the charges on the household bill. I was a content coordinator at Zhuhangmei Mobile Content, and our records showed a reply to a promotional message that technically counted as agreement. The record was accurate. It did not answer her question, and nobody in our office could explain the charge to her in a sentence she would accept.

I had joined Zhuhangmei in August 2001, a month after completing a degree in information management at Qingmoyu College of Information Management. The company wrote and scheduled content that customers received by text message and paid for through their operator's bill. My work was editorial at first, then increasingly about complaints, because I could match a customer's account of events to our subscription logs. When our largest operator partner asked providers for a clearer confirmation step, I helped rewrite our sign-up messages so that a customer saw the price and the frequency before agreeing. Subscriptions fell, and I learnt what it costs to make consent visible.

In July 2005 I moved to Tianquemo Mobile Portal as a product manager for its community channels: forums, comment sections and a reader-question service on the handset browser. Within four years those channels had more than four million monthly users and a small team reviewing posts by hand. I learnt that every feature letting strangers reach one another creates review work, and that product managers who never sit with reviewers design features the reviewers cannot keep up with. I began spending one afternoon a fortnight with that team, a habit I have kept in another form.

From February 2010 I worked at Kuibeiran Online Education, which prepared adults for accounting and teaching qualification examinations. I joined as senior product manager for its first mobile apps and became product director in 2013. The work taught me pricing in a field where people pay because they are anxious. Course packages had been sold with conditional refund promises that were hard to claim. We rewrote them into a few plainer terms, which reduced sales of the most expensive package and reduced disputes by more.

I joined Fenqiluo Learning in July 2016 as head of adult learning product. The company was a year old, with about sixty staff and a catalogue of mostly recorded calligraphy lessons. Our members were older than anyone had planned for. Many had been given a smartphone by their children and had learnt only the steps needed for a video call. We built a reading mode with larger type and fewer choices per screen, voice search, and a family payment arrangement in which an adult child could pay while the learner kept the account. I became chief product officer in March 2021, responsible for the whole product, including children's courses, community features and the tools our safety reviewers use.

I lead through a small number of written rules that teams can apply without me. One is that every design review names which person is looking at the screen: learner, payer, guardian, teacher or reviewer. Another is that a feature creating contact between strangers must arrive with an estimate of the review work it adds and a plan for staffing it. My six directors disagree with me openly, and the record on this site includes decisions where colleagues argued the other way and were partly right.

Each quarter I present a product-risk report to our board, covering complaints, children's safety, renewal practice and reviewer workload. I am not a director, and attending those meetings has shown me how different a board member's responsibility is from that of the executive presenting to the board. The directors' questions about what we had chosen not to measure were often more useful than my answers.

The cases here concern a renewal practice, children's visibility and private messaging. In each one we gave up something measurable: conversion, enrolments, activity or teachers. I have tried to record the cost as precisely as the improvement, and to say what I would change.

A board role interests me now because the questions I answer as an executive increasingly belong in a boardroom: who a product is for, who pays, who is protected and how a company would know if it were failing any of them. I would bring a product leader's knowledge of those mechanics. I would also need to learn another company's obligations rather than assume that a learning app explains them.

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