Business Insights at a Glance

Product:

Reporting dashboard, optimized for mobile on responsive web

Problem the product addresses:

Skincare consultants want to easily understand the next action to take in order to retain customers or boost revenue from existing customers

Why this problem?

• New skincare consultants were struggling to sustain financial success because it wasn't clear what to do in order to sustain an independent skincare business and the current reporting tools made it hard to understand the health of their businesses
• "Power users" were able to tap into resources without relying on the reporting tools because they hit professional milestones to get access to personalized advice from dedicated in-house teams, but this left behind new consultants who also wanted to reach those professional milestones and didn't know how to get there

Role in the project:

Product manager overseeing new reporting application for the skincare consultants from conception to launch

Context:

• Company to reach billion-dollar valuation within 2 years from start of project
• No in-house product designers yet
• Waterfall software development
• High volume of customer complaints about downtime across all digital applications has negatively impacted executive and senior staff morale
• The existing reporting tools had different, mutually exclusive products for the web and mobile experiences and we wanted to unify this experience

Approach:

Participatory Design

• Facilitated brown bag sessions with senior management to discuss how the human-centered design approach can improve the customer experience for reporting tools and address customer complaints, meeting one-on-one to follow up on individual questions and concerns
• Facilitated participatory design sessions led by the designer, meeting with executives to get buy-in for their attendance and involvement and navigating difficult conversations with cynical stakeholders in order to encourage their participation and ideas

Product Strategy

• Hosted concept review meetings with stakeholders to identify, prioritize and refine business requirements
• Planned and executed on a product roadmap with milestones for preliminary user research, concept validation with customers during the low-fidelity and high fidelity stages of each major release, and usability testing after each major release

Software Development

• Supported engineering manager's push for a dedicated full-stack product team
• Transitioned the team to agile software development by structuring sprints, user stories, and product roadmap in small, easy-to-ship increments so that new features can get to customers sooner
• Wrote user stories and worked with designers, engineers, marketers to get major releases shipped

Go-to-Market

• Defined the product positioning for the product and demoed the prototype at at the annual customer conference, with thousands of attendees signing up for the pilot program to get early access to the product
• Defined the strategy for scaling up customer access to the new product, including the engineering and product milestones required in order to add more users

Infrastructure Support for Scale

• Scaled access to product by 30,000 users, shifting the engineering strategy to prioritize collaboration with the new DevOps team in order to scale the infrastructure of the product

Results:

• Rodan + Fields continues to execute on the initial product roadmap milestones
• The new product design accounts for infrastructure to localize in different geographical regions, important because the company recently expanded to Australia
• The product serves as a successful internal case study for applying human centered design thinking and working with product designers to validate concepts or proposed features
• Established a preliminary go-to-market playbook for launching a beta product