✦ After the briefing
These are not ratings. They are what people remembered after they had to defend the briefing to their own team.
They caught that our RM 19.90 ‘annual starter’ was still using the weekly introductory price in the lapsed paywall. I had signed that screen off in a hurry before Hari Raya. Finance had been calling it churn; it was a discount we were offering to people who already knew the trick.
Mei Ling Cho · Publisher, puzzle app, Penang
Subscription renewal briefing
The SKU memo was drier than I wanted. Daniel would not pick a ‘hero price’. He retired two gem packs I liked and left the ugly RM 4.90 coin sitting there because it actually restored cleanly. I still think the memo could have been shorter, and I told him so on the call.
Arun Krishnan · Studio lead, casual game, Kuala Lumpur
SKU and price ladder review
Aisha made us sit with the refund CSV by country. The spike was not ‘Asia’. It was Malaysia on the day Play processed a bank that had been failing all afternoon. We had been about to rewrite the paywall. We changed the retry copy instead.
Sofia Hartono · Operations, education subscription
In-app purchase performance audit
The listing markup showed our Bahasa subtitle promising ‘lifetime’ while the English one sold a year. That had been in production for eleven months. Nobody on the content team had compared the two lines on one page before.
Farid Ismail · Editor, news app, Shah Alam
Store listing and paywall copy review
A Klang Valley game studio came in after a mid-autumn sale. The gem pack sold. Restore failed for anyone who had also bought the battle pass. Their engineer blamed Apple; Apple’s report blamed a missing product ID that had been rotated during the sale and never added back to the restore list.
We did not write code. We put the old product ID, the new product ID, and the restore list on one page and walked the session until someone in the room said the quiet part: the sale SKU had been treated as temporary, so nobody owned it after the banner came down.
They left with an order: restore the old ID for ninety days, stop rotating sale SKUs, and put a named person on the festival catalogue. The audit fee did not include watching them do it. A month later they wrote to say the restore tickets had dropped. That is as much sequel as this desk collects.
A language app with a strong Malaysian school-holiday spike asked for a renewal briefing. Trials converted. The first paid month did not. The paywall after lapse offered the same seven-day trial again.
The briefing was uncomfortable because the growth lead liked that trial. We did not forbid it. We showed that the people who lapsed in month one were the same cohort who had already used the trial twice in six months. They changed the lapse screen to a monthly price with no extra week, and kept the trial only for first-time buyers. We were not in the room when they argued with marketing. We were told it took two meetings.