Balancing the 4 Product Risks in Marketing Measurement

Subscribe | Forward

🛠️ Guided by the 4 Product Risks Framework

Earlier this year, I had the privilege to interview a personal product hero of mine—Marty Cagan—whose “Inspired” framework fundamentally shaped my early product management thinking. Marty’s emphasis on recognizing and balancing the four key product risks—value, usability, feasibility, and viability— guided our product evolution. Over time, this balanced approach enabled us to deliver consistent growth and trust in a rapidly changing environment.

When we started in 2015, deterministic cross-domain user-tracking was the standard of a wild-west approach to consumer data, but this soon became misaligned with emerging privacy standards and rising consumer expectations. We recognized that as a start-up we had the chance to innovate in a way incumbents couldn’t; ensuring that our measurement models provided decision-continuity and integrity without compromising privacy. Instead of stopping at compliance, we positioned our privacy-first stance as a core differentiator and challenged ourselves to deliver a solution that could deliver full-funnel growth without user-level customer journey tracking. We led the change in marketing measurement.

With any true innovation, technical feasibility and business viability are crucial factors. We needed to explore novel modeling approaches that would sustain full-funnel (both demand generation and demand capture) measurement without relying on outdated tracking methodologies. This posed a particular challenge for Ad views, where a deterministic click isn’t present. Probabilistic modeling and privacy-safe aggregation weren’t fallback options; they were forward-thinking methods that allowed us to keep delivering reliable insights regardless of regulatory shifts. This meant validating that our approaches could be implemented at scale as we expanded globally, no matter the local privacy regulation. But we also had to ensure that these innovations aligned with commercial realities. Our customers demanded solutions they could count on to meet their strategic goals at a viable price-point, so we carefully built partnerships, data ingestion & processing infrastructure, and kept a firm eye on unit costs to keep our platform and business stable and resilient.

But no matter how technically feasible or commercially viable, a product wouldn’t earn a lasting place with marketers unless it consistently delivered value and usability. This is quite a challenge, blending sophisticated data science with empathy for how marketers consume and action insights. Rather than overwhelm users with data, we focused on their key jobs-to-be-done, and getting them to desired outcomes. We invested in user experience research, accessible dashboards, and transparent explanations of our modeling. By engaging closely with customers and our customer success team, we worked to ensure our interfaces addressed their real-world challenges and informed better decisions. This work is never done and is a constant focus to improve. Data is nothing without great design.

🏆 The Real Measure of Success: Customer Trust

The real measure of success came from our customers. When they trust our insights to guide strategic marketing mix decisions, when they know that the platform respects their customers’ privacy without sacrificing outcomes, and when they see consistent innovation aligned with a long-term vision, they become more confident in their investments.

Of course, sustaining this balance is not straightforward. We constantly iterate, assessing emerging regulations, market trends, and evolving customer needs. We don’t always get it right, but a resilient, customer-at-the-heart culture and strong growth mindset within Fospha has helped us course-correct when required.

By consistently applying the 4 Product risks to major decisions, we’ve turned disruption into opportunity. We’ve built a platform that supports not just compliance, but genuine continuity in decision-making for Fospha customers. We’ve built a new form of marketing measurement that is both ethical and dependable, accelerating profitable full-funnel growth for our customers.

🌟 Lessons Learned

Looking back, balancing these principles has helped Fospha flourish in an era of rapid, complex change. The lessons we’ve learned are clear: embrace the shifts, anchor towards privacy and transparency, and never lose sight of the customer. As the marketing ecosystem continues to transform, we stand ready to continue to lead the change ahead.