Storymapping Products People Love - A case study
Product distribution is King. However, a compelling story owns the palace.
As you will agree with me, most product teams across verticals work with fresh data daily.
However, the best product teams I know use data as a narrative to tie, troubleshoot, tweak and perfect a compelling story to customers, repeatedly.
Story-mapping is a favorite Product Management epic I take it really personally and as a PM leader, it has saved my teams Millions of USD in customization / R&D costs than any other effort.
Using this case where my team designed the customer journey in collaboration with our customers, you will discover key secrets to implementing story-mapping correctly and mistakes we made, to help save execution time on your product[s].
Story-Mapping Case Study - A running App for Millenials.
Our product, a running app targeted at Gen-Z and pre-millennials, was built to address an under-served market segment. We had validated with clear evidence that we had to solve the problem and how our product had several moats over competition.
After beta tests, potential-customer interviews and analysis, we discovered a broken funnel with drop-off at critical points.
This was because people encountered a story that read :
Discovery: The prospective user is interested in getting fit or is a people trainer.
Trigger Event: User sees the “begin training” button and gets started.
Adoption:
User enters username and password. (About 19% of people dropped off here, 81% completed this step.)
Potential user signified by “following” topics, like running and soccer. This user simply wants to train for a sprint, not follow interests. (35% of the first major drop-off occurred here.)
Dilemma: User is then asked to “follow” contact list, preceded by the compulsory sensitive Gmail or Facebook log-in credentials to do this. Trust issues sets in. Why follow my friends? To compare progress ? The value is not clear. The sign-up flow suffers another 12% drop-off.
End: User drops-off. Back to Homepage at the mercy of “Search” functionality. User is lost and refuses to search any video or workout routine. In the end, the user didn’t meet the goal of getting fit and the business doesn’t achieve its goal of acquiring a new user.
Critical Questions.
1. Why was it so critical for us to get people to complete this flow during their first session?
2. Why did we not push this to GTM using a fancy landing page or email campaign?
The Plan
We shared two high level goals -
New users need to complete the sign-up flow.
Get “high-quality” users who will return and use the product consistently.
This funnel of ours did not immediately prioritize revenue through subscriptions. Our goal was to drive value, stability and solve pain before monetization kicks in.
Our confidence doubled because in shaping our stories, we spoke to real paying customers who enjoyed the product. We had also been testing our assumptions and knew that we were on the right track.
Our “Why”
As product managers, analytics will tell you the “what” (that people were dropping off during our sign-up funnel), but cannot tell you the “why.”
We discovered our “Why”, using story structure to figure out why people might drop off when they did. This helped us better isolate, diagnose, and troubleshoot the problem.
With clear narratives written out, we outlined a set of hypotheses that could prove why there was this dead-end.
For instance, if people dropped off when we asked them to discover their friends,
Was Trust an issue?
Did they not want to add their friends?
We just needed to figure out why this step was a hurdle.
Majorly, 70% of users felt this step broke their mental model of how to use this product whilst 30% refused to add their friends due to trust issues.
We discovered two unique behaviors – people tend to train alone half the time and with others half the time. Training alone or with others depended on a series of factors:
Team vs Solo routines.
Time Schedules.
Location [gym vs home]
Varying Goals
That said, after our customer interviews, we were convinced of the value of keeping the product social and giving people the opportunity to train with others early on. Yes, the business wanted new users to invite their friends so that the product could acquire new users. And, yes, I could have convinced the business to remove this step in the sign-up process so that we could remove the crisis and more successfully convert new users. However, when people behave in a certain way 50% of the time, you typically want to build a product that helps them continue to behave that way, especially if it can help the business grow its user base.
So instead of removing this troublesome cliffhanger-inducing step in the sign-up flow, we did what any good filmmaker or screenwriter would do: we used that crisis to our advantage and built a story with tension and conflict. A story that we hoped would be more compelling than what we had.
Our Story
To design the mechanics for our new sign-up flow, we mapped it out onto a narration board.
I Remember the lead designer and engineer were about to jump straight to screen UI sketches and flow charts and I desperately wanted to see a fully clickable prototype. However, I zoomed out and prioritized the story diagram.
As a team, we plotted out a revamped sign-up flow on a whiteboard as a hypothesis, brick by brick.
For a new customer, this was the journey –
Discovery: Customer is interested in getting fit or training others. (Same as before.)
Trigger: Customer sees the “start training” button and gets started. (Same as before.)
Call to Action:
Customer enters username and password. (This step performed remarkably, so we maintained it).
Build a training plan.
As opposed to “following” topics, customer answers a series of questions, to enable Machine Learning build a personalized plan.
We ensured the questions got more engaging, screen by screen. The questions begin broad and get more focused as they progress, feeling more and more relatable and personal. This kept them engaged and felt like they were building the product how they wanted.
She sees a graph of what her progress will look like if she sticks with the training plan she just got.
Value: Customer gets training plan, progress bar and sees what happens when they train according to the plan.
End: We built repeatable actions into the next steps to help customers actually train. Our hope was that this ending would work as a guide for her next action with the product, when she continued to train. We built a string of stories from one story. Then we continued to tweak.
Once we mapped out this usage story, we ran a sequence of sessions to brainstorm and prioritize requirements, as well as plan a tactical roadmap. After we had our requirements fleshed out, we then sketched out screens, storyboards, and role-played the flow internally and directly with potential customers.
These activities helped us ideate, prototype, and test everything every step of the way to minimize our risk and know if and when we were on the right path.
Success Metrics.
Maintaining our org tradition – we tested everything.
As much as we were quite confident of the work we did before we conceived our new usage story for the sign-up flow, we still tested that.
We knew that we were on the right path during design and user testing because at the right point in the flow, we started getting reactions that sounded something like: “Oh, cool. I see how this could be helpful.”
Once we heard that from the third, fourth, and then fifth person during our in-person tests, we knew we had an MVP that we were learning from.
And now, with a usage story, we actually had a product that people not only could use, but wanted to use.
More Customers started training
More Customers completed their sign-up flows. [4X compared to previous numbers]
More people shared workout plans with their friends.
We hoped that by creating a sign-up flow that functioned like a story, the result would be more engagement among new users, and it worked. We not only had a product that helped users meet their goals, but it also helped the business meet its goals of engaging new users.
It is now a profitable business and recently closed yet another successful round of financing to drive growth.
Thank you, It's always a great experience reading your letters.
Thank you for sharing. I always look forward to your Newsletters.