Growth design & experimentation to reduce churn in a flourishing start-up

Senior product designer and researcher

Permanent (2020-2021)

Background

BuzzSumo is a SaaS start-up that was acquired by Brandwatch to become part of their content and consumer intelligence product suite. It measures and tracks a catalogue of 8bn+ pieces of online content and their social engagement. It enables marketers and PR professionals to plan and research content marketing strategies and measure the success and coverage of their content.

Problem

As a start-up, the feature-set of BuzzSumo had grown in a reactive way to serve several customer personas (and use-cases) who subscribed. Due to this it suffered from common discoverability issues and had become ‘a jack of all and master of none’. It desperately needed to target itself to a more specific market so that our small team could focus it’s valuable resource in fewer directions. During this confused period it had been superseded by several competitors and was losing customers.

Who I worked with

Product, engineering and marketing directors
Marketing and content teams
Customer success teams
Front and back end engineers
Analytics

Solution

I carried out an internal research study to uncover the team’s goals, barriers and opportunities so we could agree on our target market and a roadmap to appeal to them. I elicited research studies to uncover and present the personas' needs to the team. Using these insights I facilitated ideation sessions with the whole team so that we could agree on the best holistic solutions.

Outcome

We agreed on the 2 key target personas for me to undertake generative research studies on so we could understand them better. In research we found that our trial period bounce rate was over 50% so I initiated a project to uncover the issues, and designed a new feature to target appropriate tools to these persona’s use-cases. Instead of adding new features and tools we made the tough call to drop those which were underperforming and didn’t fit our target market. Once we stopped trying to appeal to everyone, we were able to be explicit about what and whom each tool was for; making it easier to navigate and market. We measured variants of a solution against several metrics using Mixpanel:

200% increase in search quality (search result click through rates)
30% more people came back and an additional search in the tool in the first 3 weeks of usage - a leading indicator of conversion
30% increase in pricing page views - a leading indicator of conversion
The winning variant improved trial-to-paid conversion by 12%

"Ben transformed our work at BuzzSumo. Before he arrived we'd been depending on project-by-project design services and the chaos showed. Ben took us from that state to a lean process, educated and involved the entire team, and through this process created inspired work for our customers. His ability to produce - from user research to high-res screens - is breathtaking.

The excitement, sense of purpose and bottom-line beautiful designs Ben brought to our team left a permanent impact. Take every chance you can get to work with him."

Nate Walton, Product Director

Of the best solution ideas, higher fidelity concepts were produced to test with users. This one guided them to the best features they should use for their use-case

Of the best solution ideas, higher fidelity concepts were produced to test with users. This concept allowed users to build a content brief wherever they were in the app

Generative research study report which uncovered the issues causing first time users to drop-off

Mapping the various registration journeys

Mapping conversion metrics to the funnel stages to visualise the problem areas

Summarising key insights which came up through qualitative and quantitative methods

Presenting the high level user problems/needs to the team

Detailed problem statements that further explained the user needs

Problem statements end with 'How might we?' statements which were the springboard to start ideating from

An example of ideation sketching sessions. Basic sketches can be done by anyone and allow us to quickly share and understand solutions

Our team voting on the different solutions we came up with in our workshop

Key activities & projects

Defining a UX strategy & Product roadmap informed by stakeholder and team interviews

I carried out an internal research study to uncover the team’s goals, barriers and opportunities. I also spoke with product and marketing directors to understand the business’ strategy and their vision of BuzzSumo’s fit within that. I presented my findings which helped them see the bird’s eye view so they could agree on our roadmap and focus.

A stakeholder/internal research report to help explain our product and team's goals and barriers

A stakeholder/internal research report to help explain our product and team's goals and barriers

Conveying our business and product strategy to show where our product sits in the wider organisation (and therefore it's objective)

Explaining the key user-type's user journey and how are product had gaps supporting that

Illustrating gaps in the user journey and where we felt our new features could fill the gaps

Emphasising the importance of designing for use-cases in relation to our business and product strategy

Using Jared Spool's explanation of the Kano model to explain the need for innovation

Using Jared Spool's presentation explaining the natural tendency for feature bloat and redundancy

Competitor analysis study

To help us understand our place in the market and with whom we were competing I undertook a competitor analysis study. Reviewing 15 competitor’s features and pricing we were able to see where we were losing out in capabilities and how much we were being undercut. This led us to change our packaging structure and fees to make them more competitive. We also introduced an Enterprise option that unlocked the potential revenue from Brandwatch’s huge client base who we directed our sales efforts towards.

Research canvas showing each competitor and a rating of the features they have to support each use-case

Displaying us and our competitors capabilities against cost to understand our market position

Our pricing position for Enterprise customers. We realised a huge opportunity to sell BuzzSumo to our Brandwatch client base

Our pricing position for a single user account

Displaying our feature restrictions for single user accounts against our main competitors

Introduction of a user centred design process

As their product designer and researcher I took the opportunity to introduce a user centred design process to ensure we were not only delivering the right work; but were working in the right way. After giving the team insights and problem statements from generative research, we ideated concepts to test with users. I then iterated the preferred solution into prototypes and beta launches, inviting users to feedback at every stage. I also endorsed a fortnightly agile/scrum sprint methodology so that we could have visibility of everyone’s work and ensure our small team was aligned.

Presenting a research and design process I've been curating over the past 4 years

Mapping out the process formally: the discovery and exploration phase

Mapping out the process formally: technical feasibility assessment and prototyping the solution

Mapping out the process formally: design supporting throughout development then researching in beta and live

Lessons learned

Don’t run too many test variants unless you have enough volume/traffic or you won’t get decent numbers through for a long time!
Product design isn’t just about adding new features. The more you add the harder it becomes to find the right one and the more you need to support them.
When you join a team, spend time speaking to them and the stakeholder’s to fully understand their ambitions and the context (Plus it’s nice to say ‘hi’ to everyone…)