Research saves $6M of budget

Mastercard planned a self-serve security product for small and mid-size businesses, with a $6M build attached. It came through the desirability review I ran. The research found little demand at a price that covered the build, and most of the scope overlapped with what our middle-market buyers already expected. I recommended stopping, and leadership did.

Situation

The offering was a self-serve version of our security products for small and mid-size businesses, sponsored by an EVP. It was still in definition and discovery. Nothing had been built, and engineering, legal, marketing and support had only done a feasibility review. The build was estimated at $6M.

What I did

I led the week-long workshop, with VPs from every group, that set up the first hypotheses. Then I took it through the desirability review. We ran three kinds of research with 250 participants from the target market: willingness to pay, a general market study, and generative research.

Engineering sized each feature on the matrix in t-shirt sizes, so cost was a rough check. The stronger evidence came from the research. The buyers we’d been calling enterprise were really middle-market, and the SMB scope the research produced overlapped heavily with what those buyers already expected. We had two buyer hypotheses, and they turned out to be one.

The recommendation was to kill the SMB offering.

What changed

I reported the findings and the recommendation to the SVP, and the direction changed the following week. The $6M wasn’t spent. Leadership then folded the enterprise and SMB plans into one middle-market offering with professional services. That was their call, and I didn’t own it.

What’s still hard

The cost side was a t-shirt sizing from engineering, so the call rested mostly on the research. It held up here, and it put a lot of weight on one study.