Empowering Teams To Create Impactful Products

Audrey Tsang at UXDX Community: Central Europe. Video: https://youtu.be/h6VJjQ5j52k

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introduction and context on Clue

[00:00:00] Empowering teams to build impactful products. Hello, future audience out there on the internet. I'm Audrey Tsang, I'm the chief product officer at Clue. We're a Berlin-based menstrual tracking app helping over 12 million monthly active users globally live healthier lives. Speaking of menstruation, fun fact or overshare: at the time of this recording I'm in my follicular phase, that's between period and ovulation, and almost actually at estimated ovulation. I often experience this time as a more energetic, more social, and hopefully for you and this talk, more engaging phase of my cycle.

[00:00:39] Some background about me. I've been building consumer tech products for over 15 years now, mostly in Silicon Valley. Before coming to Clue a year and a half ago, I led products and teams at Pinterest, so until tonight[?], Yelp, and my own startup. I've seen startups through many different stages and challenges, but what's been true throughout my career is that I've always been drawn to diverse teams and products that improve lives, and that's largely what drew me to Clue, and what I'll be talking about today.

[00:01:08] I'm going to tell you a story about how a values-driven team, Clue, began delivering performance-oriented results. In other words, this is a story about doing good for our users and making money while doing it. I'm going to go over the lessons we learned while relaunching our subscription product. But first I'll take 60 seconds to give you some context about Clue.

[00:01:32] What user problem are we solving? Question number one, always. Well, there remains today still a lack of information and access to essential care in female health globally, and there is still so much we don't know. There is missing scientific research, it's underfunded, and there's cultural stigma, and all of this contributes to a lot of suffering and lost economic opportunity for everyone. We want to change this. So no matter where they are from or how they identify, our vision is for women and people with cycles to live full lives in tune with their biology, not in spite of it.

[00:02:13] Our mission is to empower users with the science, data and technology needed to make informed choices about their lives. We value trust, care and science. We've tried to build these into a period tracking app that is science-based, data-driven and emotionally intelligent. Clue was founded about 10 years ago and has since grown to a 70-person, as of late all-remote team, and as CPO I manage product, design, data science and monetization.

Clue Plus v1 and v2

[00:02:41] On to the lessons learned. I'm going to go over three lessons today about what we've learned from relaunching our subscription product twice, about how to empower a team to deliver results while living our values. Clue Plus is our subscription product that launched in its first rendition almost two years ago. It was priced at 99 cents per month to make it affordable to as many people as possible, and it included premium features like cycle alerts, which for example would alert you of irregularities in your cycle.

[00:03:18] As with many newly launched products, Clue Plus v1 saw some initial success because of buzz and our loyal users subscribing. As can sometimes happen with early success, product and engineering teams moved right on to build other things, and marketing efforts were pulled off to focus on user growth instead. So a few months later revenue growth and conversion of course slowed.

[00:03:43] This continued until August of 2019, when as a business, revenue emerged as a much more important proof point than user growth, and we refocused our efforts on Clue Plus. We formed a revenue team consisting of CRM, content, BI[?] and product, and they could pull in matrixed resources from science, brand, partnerships and growth.

[00:04:05] The team set out to tackle three main problems. The first was low awareness: most users didn't even know there was a premium offering. The second was poor economics: at 99 cents per month, that was much too low to make this a sustaining business. And the third was an unsatisfying feature set. We knew from our translation services[?] feedback that many subscribers didn't understand or benefit from the premium functionality offered in v1, and on top of that, what differentiated Clue and made users love it was not at all linked to the subscription offering. The team was clear on the problems that needed to be solved, but because we were working on other things, they didn't have access to engineering resources or product design resources in solving these problems. That's something that we'll come back to later.

[00:04:51] In September 2019 we relaunched Clue Plus as a contribution model, with the hypothesis that an altruistic angle would bring in revenue, highlight Clue's differentiating features, and make all of Clue freely accessible to the most people. We removed most of the premium features from behind the paywall, we changed our messaging to reflect this, and we increased the price, all in an effort to prove out this hypothesis.

[00:05:18] Without dedicated engineering resources, the team still managed to meaningfully increase revenue and learn, running over 50 experiments in three months. You can see our most successful campaign on the left as an example of what we did. It's titled "We're not like other period trackers", which we aren't. And some of the new premium features are on the right, like period product discounts and special content like puppies for PMS. These were repositioned more as a thank you for the contribution, as opposed to a premium feature.

[00:05:51] While we were learning and making progress, revenue growth again slowed in February 2020, after the typical holiday surge in new devices and the new-year-new-you seasonal high that most health apps see. On top of that the monetization team was burnt out. CRM was stumbling on deliverability issues, they were blocked on launching much-needed subscription tooling quickly enough, and fundamentally they were unable to hit the aggressive targets.

Lesson one: a dedicated full-stack cross-functional team

[00:06:17] In March of this year we were under even greater pressure to grow revenue and conserve cash. As you all are experiencing, I'm sure, globally businesses were and are still coping with COVID-19 and the consequences. So we assembled a new revenue task force. This time we approached things differently. We've now had two record months of revenue and the team is confident that we'll continue to hit our aggressive targets. While it's still early in our journey, I'll share what we've done differently and what we've learned about how to empower teams to achieve these results while staying true to values.

[00:06:54] So what's different this time? First thing, we dedicated a full-stack, cross-functional team on revenue and nothing else. Here is our lovely team. In contrast to v2, we have added engineering and design to the revenue task force, and this team coordinates the efforts of three of our four cross-functional product teams, all also dedicated to revenue initiatives.

[00:07:22] This full-stack, focused setup is empowering because it allows the team to broaden the solution space by drawing from more diverse perspectives. They can quickly scope potential solutions and make informed prioritization decisions based on actual data around impact, effort and risk, and they can go agilely from hypothesis to design to test iteration. All of this also means that the team can have more fun, because they're all working together towards an exciting goal. As a result of all this, the team has launched something new every sprint for the past few sprints, and revenue has grown 35% or more month over month for the last two months.

[00:08:01] You may be thinking that the need for a cross-functional team is obvious, and I agree, but so often teams don't choose to make this happen. The setup takes ruthless prioritization and consciously not doing some things, all of which will also seem very important. In our case, while it wasn't easy, it really did pay off.

Lesson two: top-down vision instead of top-down solutions

[00:08:22] The second learning is to provide top-down vision instead of top-down solutions. Most of us have at some point been given a management directive, from a founder, from the board, from a manager, spanning everything from hit X, Y, Z metrics to build X, Y, Z feature. As I've learned, starting with solutions like this instead of the problem almost always results in worse solutions and less motivated teams. Providing a top-down vision instead means that management provides the why, the constraints and the principles, that allow the team then the autonomy to set the what, the targets and the roadmap.

[00:09:04] So let's talk about targets first. Empowering the team to set good metrics targets starts with communicating the why. In this case the why was about helping Clue make enough money so that we could sustainably continue to make a difference in female health, something that's really important to everyone that works at Clue. For the first time I shared our monthly burn with the team, and the impact revenue would have in offsetting that burn. I provided a high-level 2020 revenue number as guidance, and more importantly, I tied that back meaningfully to our runway.

[00:09:39] While this amount of transparency can and did feel scary, the team responded to it with resilience. They set their own aggressive monthly targets, shown here in absolute and percent growth. And this was also an important motivator for the team, because they could now see real progress towards challenging goals that they had control over, and then celebrate when they hit that goal. They also felt confident that what they were doing made a difference, both to our business and to our users.

[00:10:10] So that was goal-setting. The second piece is roadmap setting. Empowering the team to set a good roadmap is about communicating clear constraints and clear principles. In this case the constraint was time. I shared a clear time horizon tied to business needs. And the principles were around risk and user values, primarily how aggressive should we be in asking our users to subscribe?

[00:10:34] You can see how this plays out with the prioritization and scoping of our newly launched premium content feature. At first, swept up in a desire to move fast, I confess I told the team, build a content tab. This would turn out to overestimate impact, underestimate effort, and lose sight of the user problem. By resetting and framing this instead in terms of constraints, i.e. build something that is logical in two months, and principles, in other words understand the user problem, start there, and then apply science, care and empathy, which include our values, to solving the problem, the team came up with a much more nuanced solution as a result, called Science Says[?]. This plays to Clue's strengths, its scientific expertise, and its values, being emotionally intelligent and caring, while addressing user needs of not wanting to be overwhelmed or distrusting of information that they find about their health.

Lesson three: empower the team with boundaries

[00:11:30] Learning three. In v3 of Clue Plus, one of the biggest differences in how we were operating was how aggressive we were being with asking users to subscribe. We have many more entry points to subscribe, and we have paywalled some of our previously free features, in addition to adding new ones. But while being more aggressive, we've still managed to uphold our user-centric values. One way we're able to walk this line is by finding boundaries for being aggressive and then walking right up to those boundaries.

[00:12:04] How do we do this? First, by challenging existing assumptions about what we think is too aggressive or too annoying to the user. And second, by having a measurable boundary for negative feedback that we'll allow. In our case it was a decrease of more than 0.1 in average app store rating.

[00:12:21] You can see on the left that we've added entry points to subscribe on all our main screens. Pretty aggressive, especially compared to before. As we were working on this, the team debated how much this might anger or annoy our users. But instead of dwelling on discussion, the team quickly launched an experiment, and what made this possible was a commitment to not only look at conversion but also carefully monitor app store reviews and support requests, and base decisions on data rather than debate. In this case we ended up adding an entry point to our cycle view, and adding and then removing the entry point from our calendar view based on feedback, all while increasing conversion and staying under acceptable decreases in our average app store rating.

[00:13:09] In order to move fast, one of the things that we considered doing was to take away existing free functionality and put it behind a paywall. In considering which features to experiment with, the team completed what we called a subscriber feature segmentation. This analysis revealed that certain features were disproportionately more used by subscribers than non-subscribers. These features were a good place to start experimenting with taking away previously free features, without risking angering all of our users. We're currently experimenting with putting our symptom details feature behind the paywall, because it's 61 percent more likely to be used by subscribers than non-subscribers, and early results of this experiment are actually showing a good 40 percent increase in conversion with minimal negative feedback.

Communication, a mistake, and the takeaways

[00:14:00] When you have a values-driven team, the secret to being aggressive is honestly clear communication. Communicate early and often to the broader team to keep everyone bought in. Here's an example of how this plays out for us, where we actually made a mistake and then had to go back and learn from it. One of our most successful campaigns has been to change a button from "Choose your contribution" to "Next". While we landed in a good place ultimately, the path there was pretty bumpy, forcing us to learn as a team and rebuild trust as a team.

[00:14:30] First, between iteration one and iteration two of this experiment, the team wanted to try driving more traffic to the purchase page. Natural hypothesis. Reusing code from a previous experiment in order to move fast, we ended up introducing a dark design pattern where users could not dismiss the in-app message leading to the purchase screen. We had removed the X. Our UX researcher and one of our Android engineers pointed out this dark design pattern, and they were really upset that we would mislead our users in such a way.

[00:15:02] So what started out as a time-saving, let's reuse some code experiment ended up turning into a divisive team moment. This was only resolved once the revenue team had a chance to communicate to the broader team the background, the intention of the iteration, and the principles for decision-making and how we would move forward. With this shared understanding and a greater trust for each other, together the team defined new iterations to test. And ultimately, honestly, it didn't matter whether the X was there or not. Simply renaming the button "Next" delivered the largest conversion gains.

[00:15:40] So we've learned a lot by doing things differently this time around. Here are the three takeaways. First, empower the team with diversity and focus, so they can make better, quicker, cross-functional, data-driven decisions. Second, empower the team with the autonomy to define their own targets, roadmaps and solutions. And third, empower the team with boundaries, so they can experiment quickly instead of debate, and experiment with conviction and its difficult trade-offs. As I'm sure it's been for you, these are challenging times to say the least, but the silver lining is that it has forced us to approach things differently, and thus learn as a team and grow. Thank you.