I once was a product manager for an app which included an inbox (mostly for promotional stuff). That app also included banner ads here and there. Consistent fee

I once was a product manager for an app which included an inbox (mostly for promotional stuff). That app also included banner ads here and there. Consistent feedback from our users was that they missed that there was a new unread item in said inbox. About half a year after I started managing that product I decided to fix this, seemed like an easy win. The inbox was a bit hidden, so a red dot on its icon wasn’t going to cut it - so I sat down with one of the devs to brainstorm for a quick solution. „What do you mean“, he said. „It’s already there!“ And he pointed at something at the front page of the app. And sure enough: it was an area highlighted in yellow, saying something along the lines of „you have x items in your inbox“. I swear I have not seen it before. It didn’t even look like an ad, but it used similar attention-grabbing mechanisms as an ad, which was probably why everyone filtered it out. Turned out it was a manager decision: partners had complained that people missed out on their valuable promos in the inbox, and the boss decided a big box right at the front and center of the app would fix it. He then sent screenshots to partners and their complaints stopped. Ironically we never fully fixed this, as the boss thought that it was already prominent enough and feared that changing it would mean partners would complain again.