Alex Mitchell - From idea to launch: The product development journey - Productized16
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•1,745 views
An in-depth exploration of the challenges, learnings, and successes of bringing Vistaprint’s latest Website Builder, code-named “Tower”, from idea to prototype to launch. Alex is passionate about creating and growing powerful web and mobile products that make a significant impact in millions of people’s lives. He also enjoys building and managing the development teams that help achieve that mission. Over the course of Alex’s career, he has observed many different types of Product Owners across various sizes and types of companies across several industries. From this experience, and the experience of his Product Owner peers at Webs, Pagemodo, and Vistaprint he has gained valuable know-how of the industry, and the product development process.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
More from Productized
More from Productized (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (14)
Alex Mitchell - From idea to launch: The product development journey - Productized16
- 1. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL Building Tower Alex Mitchell
- 2. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL Let’s Go Back to 2014 Customer Sites The Launch KPIs Customer Feedback The Prototype Historic Website Builders
- 11. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL Transitioning from Prototype to Build Out Customer Sites The Launch KPIs Customer Feedback The Prototype Historic Website Builders
- 12. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL PM’s Best Friend Customer Sites The Launch KPIs Customer Feedback The Prototype Historic Website Builders
- 13. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL PM’s Best Friend Customer Sites The Launch KPIs Customer Feedback The Prototype Historic Website Builders
- 14. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL PM’s Best Friend Customer Sites The Launch KPIs Customer Feedback The Prototype Historic Website Builders
- 15. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL Listening to Customers Customer Sites The Launch KPIs Customer Feedback The Prototype Historic Website Builders
- 16. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL Reacting to Customer Feedback Do We Need Multipage? Do we need full-featured eComm? Do We Need More Templates? Does Onboarding Make an Impact? Yes! Yes! No! Yes! Customer Sites The Launch KPIs Customer Feedback The Prototype Historic Website Builders
- 17. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL Improving Metrics Publish Rate Churn Net Promoter Score 25% 60% 50% 30% 25 55 $75 $175 Lifetime Value Customer Sites The Launch KPIs Customer Feedback The Prototype Historic Website Builders
- 18. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL The Launch 10% 20% 50% 100% Dec-15 Jan-16 Feb-16 Mar-16 Apr-16 May-16 Jun-16 Jul-16 Aug-16 Sep-16 Percent Getting New Website Builder Customer Sites The Launch KPIs Customer Feedback The Prototype Historic Website Builders
- 19. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL The Final Product
- 20. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL What Did Customers Build with Tower?
- 24. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL Give Tower a Try! bit.ly/TowerWebsite Username: [anything] Password: vpswift @amitch5903 AlexMitchell.co Feedback? Customer Sites The Launch KPIs Customer Feedback The Prototype Historic Website Builders
Editor's Notes
- Alex Mitchell from Vistaprint Digital. Vistaprint Digital is the Digital products business of Vistaprint, the leader in customized print products for small businesses. I want to tell you a story about the journey to build our latest website builder. Who has built a website before? Who used a website builder to build that website? Was it an enjoyable experience? A delightful one?
- Video Links: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByvDHeygnMuwREp1Yk94NUVYS1U/view?usp=sharing Youtube (Backup; lower quality): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWL7SXGoAUE&feature=youtu.be This is how pretty much every website builder worked in late 2014. You would drag and drop individual elements onto the page and you were forced to be the designer of how these elements fit together As you can see its pretty difficult and time consuming to drag each of these elements and position them on the canvas But…This is what almost everyone was doing in 2014!
- It was incredibly difficult for our customers to build a good looking website in this way Our customers average 35-50 years old and very lower technical experience They wanted to build a good looking website and we were giving them the wrong tool to accomplish that goal
- It was incredibly difficult for our customers to build a good looking website in this way Our customers average 35-50 years old and very lower technical experience They wanted to build a good looking website and we were giving them the wrong tool to accomplish that goal
- On mobile, results were even worse We had a “mobile website builder” but required lot of extra work for the customer to get something that looked good Even if a customer figured out how to build a good looking desktop site… the chance that they could also build a great looking mobile site was close to 0
- With that understanding of our customers, we set out over a year and a half ago to change the way websites get built We knew what was wrong and we had an idea that we wanted to test of what was right Idea centered around the idea of “blocks”, pre-built designer made sections of a website that could be stacked on top of each-other to quickly build a website Best of all, this framework would make the site instantly responsive, working on all devices. Because of how this new builder worked, we code-named the new builder “Tower”
- A prototype was built in 5 weeks with a team of 3 developers We wanted to test if the “blocks” concept resonated with our users
- In 5 weeks, we stood up a builder prototype that could be used completely separate from the rest of our infrastructure. It had most of the major features needed to build a website and put our hypothesis front and center for testing We wanted to compare this prototype to best-in-class website builders in the market
- What Did We Do? We conducted in person testing with 10 individuals asking them to use both Wix’s latest builder and the Tower prototype Remember, at this point, Wix’s builder had years of engineering effort invested in it, while this prototype had only been built in 5 weeks! The results? Tower won in Net Promoter Score (likely to recommend), Ease of Use, Build speed and tied in Preference and Professionalism. This was a MAJOR WIN for such a new concept, we knew we were onto something. It was time to dedicate more resources to building this website builder!
- What Did We Do? We conducted in person testing with 10 individuals asking them to use both Wix’s latest builder and the Tower prototype Remember, at this point, Wix’s builder had years of engineering effort invested in it, while this prototype had only been built in 5 weeks! The results? Tower won in Net Promoter Score (likely to recommend), Ease of Use, Build speed and tied in Preference and Professionalism. This was a MAJOR WIN for such a new concept, we knew we were onto something. It was time to dedicate more resources to building this website builder!
- Now that we had proven the prototype, it was time to start the build out of this new builder.
- Introducing Intercom Now that we were ready to build, we looked at what tools we wanted to embed in Tower to keep the flow of customer feedback constant Although it was still a new company at the time, we decided to implement Intercom as a chat, email, and engagement platform Intercom allows a product manager, marketer, or anyone to easily target and message customers Also lets us support customers with help inside of an application
- Interaction with Customers Here is a small sample of questions we get about our builder through Intercom chat and email responses. While we have traditional help documentation through Zendesk, we find that the additional layer of Intercom helps customers find help even easier
- Depth of Data Another great benefit about Intercom is the depth of data available on each user. You can track any descriptive information you want about a customer, group like customers together, and target them easily for messaging. Intercom serves as a fun and easy to use database for product managers
- But Intercom wasn’t the only channel we used to gather feedback. We layered on many other sources of customer feedback as we built and iterated on our product. Listening to customers in all channels: Cancellation Calls Intercom Detractor Surveys In-office testing Usertesting.com Personal Emails Hotjar
- Customer Feedback Only Matters if You Use It What did we learn from customer feedback? A LOT Here is just a small sample of decisions that we made directly informed by customer feedback Go through 4 examples
- As important as what customers say is, what they actually do is even more important What metrics did we measure, what did we measure against? How did we choose these metrics? We chose to track 4 key metrics that either correlated or tracked the experience we were delivering and the value of our customers. Publish Rate Churn Net Promoter Score Lifetime Value
- The Launch From December – June, we tracked these improvements in our KPIs against our legacy website builder. Once we had beat our legacy product in all metrics, we started funneling more new customers to our builder to test its’ reliability Once reliability was confirmed, we ramped to 50% and then 100% in August and September.
- Video Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByvDHeygnMuwVDBPTVZtVmhoZHM/view?usp=sharing Youtube (backup, low quality): https://youtu.be/UgHo0ZnXEc4 https://fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/urfmrykxvm
- But the real proof is in the customer websites
- http://www.explorethelowcountry.com/
- http://www.whetstonesantiques.com/
- http://blacktimepieces.vpweb.com/
- Takeaways: Give Tower a Try Building a great New Product requires: A vision Constant testing/refinement/feedback from customers An amazing development team