Advocate Off-Roadmap Retention Opportunity

Company Context

Streamly is a mid-stage subscription video streaming platform with 25M monthly active users across mobile, web, and connected TV. It competes on content discovery and personalized viewing, but leadership is currently focused on an ad-supported tier launch and international expansion.

Problem

You are a Product Manager for Streamly's consumer app. While reviewing usage data with engineering, you identify a technical opportunity: reducing video start latency and improving resume-play reliability on mobile by rebuilding parts of the playback session layer. Internal analysis suggests users who experience fewer than 2 playback failures in their first 14 days have 18% higher 90-day retention than users who experience 3 or more failures. The work is not on the current 2-quarter roadmap because the roadmap is already committed to visible user-facing features.

Engineering estimates the opportunity would require 6 weeks from 3 senior engineers and would likely delay one planned roadmap item. The impact is promising but not fully proven: the team has correlational evidence, some support-ticket data, and anecdotal feedback from app store reviews, but no completed experiment. Leadership is skeptical of infrastructure-heavy work that is hard to market externally.

Deliverables

1. Explain how you would validate whether this technical opportunity is worth pursuing.
2. Describe how you would build the case and influence stakeholders to prioritize it despite it being off-roadmap.
3. Define which users or segments you would focus on first and why.
4. Propose a recommendation for scope: full rebuild, MVP, or limited pilot.
5. Define success metrics and how you would decide whether to proceed, pause, or expand.

Constraints

• No additional headcount this half
• Only one major roadmap item can be delayed
• You have 2 weeks to make a recommendation for quarterly planning
• Instrumentation for playback quality is incomplete on older Android devices
• Leadership expects a clear business case, not just a technical argument