How to Solve Customer Problems by Farewill Head of Product
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Main takeaways from this presentation include: - Lean techniques for finding real customer problems - How to establish which problems to spend time on - How to measure your successes and failures in the absence of big data
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How to Solve Customer Problems by Farewill Head of Product
- 1. www.productschool.com How to Solve Customer Problems by Farewill Head of Product
- 2. FREE INVITE Join 30,000+ Product Managers on
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- 9. Tam Finlay - Farewill Head of Product @tambuildsthings @farewill
- 10. Agenda 1. Farewill intro 2. How did I get here 3. Books 4. Context sharing 5. Finding problems to solve 6. Problem 1 7. Problem 2 8. Review 9. Your questions
- 11. Change the way the world deals with death At Farewill, we want to...
- 12. Because we all want to take care of the things and people we love. Especially after we’re gone. Why?
- 13. How We make it accessible and affordable with technology and scale, delivering peace of mind with world-class customer service.
- 14. Farewill
- 15. How did I get here?
- 16. Books
- 17. Books
- 18. Books
- 19. Finding Problems to Solve
- 20. Understand your business goals
- 26. Understand you’re in a team
- 27. On to the Examples! Problem 1 is primarily a customer experience risk Problem 2 is primarily a business risk
- 28. First - Some Wills Lingo and Context Will Estate Executor Beneficiary
- 29. Some Context - The Farewill Customer Journey 1. Hear about us 2. Come to our website 3. Answer a few simple qualifying questions 4. Register with email address 5. Fill in a few sections of our online form 6. Pay 7. Wait while we check the will a. Make any necessary changes 8. Download, print and sign the will 9. Have peace of mind
- 30. Problem 1 - Making Estate Decisions Easier
- 31. Making Estate Decisions Easier 1. Hear about us 2. Come to our website 3. Answer a few simple qualifying questions 4. Register with email address 5. Fill in a few sections of our online form 6. Pay 7. Wait while we check the will a. Make any necessary changes 8. Download, print and sign the will 9. Have peace of mind
- 32. Making Estate Decisions Easier
- 33. Making Estate Decisions Easier
- 34. Making Estate Decisions Easier
- 35. Making Estate Decisions Easier
- 36. Making Estate Decisions Easier
- 37. Making Estate Decisions Easier 1. Hear about us 2. Come to our website 3. Answer a few simple qualifying questions 4. Register with email address 5. Fill in a few sections of our online form 6. Pay 7. Wait while we check the will a. Make any necessary changes 8. Download, print and sign the will 9. Have peace of mind
- 38. Making Estate Decisions Easier 1. Hear about us 2. Come to our website 3. Answer a few simple qualifying questions 4. Register with email address 5. Fill in a few sections of our online form 6. Pay 7. Wait while we check the will a. Make any necessary changes 8. Download, print and sign the will 9. Have peace of mind
- 39. Problem 2!
- 40. Prove Farewill can be Executor What are the risks?
- 41. Prove Farewill can be Executor Who is this for?
- 42. Prove Farewill can be Executor
- 43. Prove Farewill can be Executor
- 44. Prove Farewill can be Executor
- 45. Prove Farewill can be Executor
- 46. Prove Farewill can be Executor
- 47. Prove Farewill can be Executor
- 48. Prove Farewill can be Executor Measure and iterate
- 49. Review Understand your risks according to your business goals Understand the context of the problem Start small to test the waters Iterate with incremental gambles & fidelity Hit your goal or decide you have a bigger risk to tackle
- 50. Thanks for Listening What questions do you have? Ps We’ll be hiring PMs in the new year My email address is tam@farewill.com We’re on twitter @farewill
- 51. www.productschool.com Part-time Product Management, Coding, Data, Digital Marketing and Blockchain courses in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, New York, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Austin, Boston, Boulder, Chicago, Denver, Orange County, Seattle, Bellevue, Toronto, London and Online
Editor's Notes
- Hello everyone. My name is Tam and I’m a Product Manager. I’m Head of Product at Farewill I’m going to talk about how we find and solve problems at Farewill. Please ask questions as we go. Let’s have a conversation. Really don’t worry about interrupting me. My name is Tam. Just shout out Tam and wave your hand and we can do questions as we go.
- Here’s what I’ll go through. Some short intros to Farewill and me, some books I’d recommend, how we do things at Farewill currently with a couple of detailed examples And then time for any leftover questions.
- Change the way the world deals with death
- Because we all want to take care of the things and people we love. Especially after we’re gone.
- We make it accessible and affordable with technology and scale, delivering peace of mind with world-class customer service.
- This is most of our team. We’re based in Haggerston up the road. We’re currently 16 people, product, engineering, legal, design, growth, marketing, partnerships, customer service, ops Things are going pretty well. Dan and Tom started the business about 2 years ago. We’re the number 1 will writer in the UK by market share. We have a 9.6 out of 10 score on Trustpilot. We have customers as young as 18 and as old as 96. We’ve help some of the UK’s biggest charities raise about £80M. We’re currently raising our Series A.
- I studied creative web design, then computer game arts. I started my career as a game artist, then moved into game design and production for 3 years. Mainly teams of 10 or less. I then left the games industry to move into Product Management and worked in e-commerce for 3 years. I wanted to go back to small teams and solve impactful problems. I've been working in startups for almost 3 years. I joined Farewill about a year ago.
- Show your working
- Inspired Foundations of product management. His blog svpg is great too. User story mapping I use the core technique explained in this book a lot. Really great to break down any journey into its ingredient steps so you and your team can talk about and see the same context. Build better products This is like a grown up activity book for product teams. The whole book is broken down into short technique explainers, what you can use it for and an activity to try with your team.
- Lean analytics This book is really great at breaking down how to use analytics to work out of you're going in the right direction and how to keep yourself in check when things don't move. Content design Great to the point short book about understanding what people want from your service and delivering it. Eg one double page of this book just says in large font “Not more content. Smarter content” Rocket Surgery Made Easy This again is a really easy to read book which is supe to the point and almost an activity book. Read this if you want to learn how to do research and talk to customers the right way. Or there’s also a book called The Mom Test which is similar and also really great.
- Moving on now to how we find and solve problems at Farewill DRINK SOME WATER
- Understand your business goals - At Farewill we use OKRs to focus our efforts on particular areas of the business. That's a whole talk in itself but essentially you set metrics that are important to the company and a goal of where you want to get to. We set these goals every 3 months. An example of one for this quarter is we want to improve our will checking efficiency by 40%.
- Understand your risks - I like to arrange things as highest risk assumptions and highest risk cost of time. As a startup you have finite time to prove you have a viable business. What’s the most important number? / What’s the scariest number? / What’s the biggest unknown? You need to juggle this against building your fountains well. Especially as you start to find traction. Steve Butterfield quote - “don’t scale the pain” Tech debt and operational debt will kill you.
- Understand what data you have, what data you need, and what is feasible - A lot of advice says you simply come up with ideas, a/b test them and the data will tell you which ideas were the best and you move on to the next thing. Unfortunately this isn't the reality you're in in a startup. Growth experiments mean data will be spikey and a/b tests will take a long time to validate And you need quite a bit of infrastructure to do advanced experimentation well. You need to get very specific about what number you are trying to move, understand how to monitor it and aim for real needle movers Against the risks you’ve identified.
- Understand your reality - On top of all this you need to be nimble and able to change your plans as your reality changes. I think this Wallace and Gromit clip is a good summary of what it feels like. But sometimes you suddenly need to build a bridge instead or you’re actually on two trains at the same time or you find out you're not actually on even on a train
- Understand your reality - On top of all this you need to be nimble and able to change your plans as your reality changes. I think this Wallace and Gromit clip is a good summary of what it feels like. But sometimes you suddenly need to build a bridge instead or you’re actually on two trains at the same time or you find out you're not actually on even on a train
- Understand your reality - On top of all this you need to be nimble and able to change your plans as your reality changes. I think this Wallace and Gromit gif is a good summary of what it feels like. But sometimes you suddenly need to build a bridge instead or you’re actually on two trains at the same time or you find out you're not actually on even on a train you’re on a plane or a boat Embrace this - be nimble all the time
- Understand you’re in a team - Open up the research process to everyone in your team. Motivation, collaboration, buy-in. Engineers want to solve problems. Focus them on user problems and they'll innovate with you.
- Now I can get into some real examples DRINK SOME WATER
- Will - a will is a document in which a person can express their wishes as to what they'd like to happen to all their stuff after they die. Estate - All your stuff. Money, property, possessions. Executor - Person or professional who will be in charge of figuring out what's in your estate, and then sharing it out according to your wishes in your will. Beneficiary - a person or charity that is to receive some or all of another person's estate. Any questions on this stuff?
- Hear about us Come to our website Answer a few simple qualifying questions Register with email address Fill in a few sections of our online form Pay Wait while we check the will Make any necessary changes Download, print and sign the will Have peace of mind
- Problem 1 - Making Estate Decisions Easier
- As part of our service we have quite a strict check that every will written goes through. If we have any doubts at all we’ll get in touch with the customer to help them understand. This ensures we write high quality wills which reflect our customer’s wishes.
- We have a tool for tracking all the will checking process, which is essentially a trello kanban board on steroids. As a result, we collect a huge amount of data around the common reasons for wills to not pass those checks. This data gives us key insights to the problems people are having and where we can make our process and the customer experience better. We identified that the biggest single reason wills were failing our checks was due to customers dividing their estate between their partner and their children. Splitting an estate this way could be a problem if the person creating the will shares a home, or finances, with their partner. For example it may mean having to sell a family home to split the estate.
- This is the journey we had. Naturally - some users were selecting their whole immediate family to inherit their estate.
- By doing our checks and talking with these customers We learned that actually what most actually want is for everything to go to their partner in the first instance - With their children only inheriting if their partner has died before them. We were failing our customers And it is our job as a product team to deliver a product experience so that customers are making the right decision for them first time.
- We mapped out the current user journey to determine where we could solve the estate split issue within the product flow, Rather than flagging it to the customer when we check the will. Mapping out the journey also helped us to decide on the logic to follow. We agreed that an ‘explainer page’ shown to users who had picked both their partner and their children would be the best solution.
- In this new flow we start with the same state - I’ve selected my wife and two children to inherit my estate However now we have this explainer page making it clearer on the choice I’m making I have two options laid out to me, so I can still choose to split across the 3 people if I want. We pre-select the children to inherit after the wife as we know most people will want this.
- So this is where we started
- And this is where we got to Results - We’ve moved the solution up the funnel to solve it earlier We’ve made the decision clearer and easier for both instances We halved the number of fails, and significantly reduced the number of live chat questions on this issue We’ve saved the business and the customer time on having to go through the fail check loop Any questions on that process before I move on?
- On to problem 2 DRINK SOME WATER
- Change the way the world deals with death - more than sell wills Business risk - can we actually do more than sell wills? As I explained earlier - Executor can be a person or a professional. We wanted to have that option. We had the assumption that we’d be able to do this We had some indication that customers would want it We felt like we had permission to offer it to our customers I should say - to provide this service we did also need to create essentially a law firm within Farewill. Loz our Lawyer and Dan CEO were concurrently working on that which was another risk to overcome.
- We did some analysis and research and we defined our target segment for the Executor service to be will customers who are over 65. We felt that group were the people most likely to want this service, the most likely to use it, and therefore the people who’d get the most value out of it. This specific segmentation means we could find and talk to people in that segment for our research as well as measure our progress against that specific segment.
- The first thing we did was talk to people in that 65+ segment We sent an email out to a group of our recent will customers asking to talk on the phone for 10 minutes. Specific script Feedback on the service Leading to questions about Executor Learn your target customers reality Understand what they know Find patterns
- That research resulted in this initial MVP This is an intercom pop up on what was our existing Executor page. We’re using language we’ve taken from the phone calls. This took me about an hour to make and we ran it for a week. At this stage this is all that exists. The experiment here was to see if people would press the button and schedule the call. And they did!
- Another script, this time with more specific but still open questions. From these calls we’re getting closer to understanding what people want from this service, what questions they have and what sort of demand there is. We had people already saying sign me up - good sign!
- We took all our findings so far and did a workshop to figure out some potential user journey maps. We did 2 or 3 of these before settling on an iteration we were all happy with.
- This is Figma which is a UI creation tool like Sketch We put together these designs based on our existing design patterns and what we’d learned so far. We had clear direction for the copy, we had keywords our target segment used and understood, We knew the questions people would have on pricing. Interactive prototype Took this to a Pret and tested it for a day Important to see people’s faces Learned - Popular selections More questions - trust, how do I contact you Too much copy Built it
- Will checking - Separate checking journey We talked to each person over the phone to ensure they understand our service and offer Validation we’d got things right
- The red line here is what we’d established to be best in class for the industry The blue line here is our performance over time So by following this process, understanding our risks and our customer we’ve built an experience that outperforms the existing industry.