Growth During A Pandemic

Jens Dembski at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/gat8oHjSOKc

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.

What CoachHub does

[00:00:00] Rory: Thanks for coming along. I think it's a really interesting topic. For a lot of companies — I'm going to put up my hand, being an events company — a pandemic has not been an ideal situation. But from your perspective we're going to learn about how it actually became an opportunity, and the challenges that also come with that opportunity. First of all, could you give people a quick introduction or an overview of what CoachHub is, just to get some context about what we'll be talking about here?

[00:00:30] Jens: Sure, happy to do so. CoachHub is a digital coaching company, so we basically provide digital coaching, video sessions with coaches, and learning content, to exploit the greater you. We do that worldwide, so we have offices in Berlin, in actually almost every European capital, but also New York, Singapore, etc. Actually our vision is to democratize coaching. So far personal coaching has been only a thing for the big bosses around the world, and we think it has way more effect when you can also bring it down to lower management levels. By easing up the accessibility and the availability of coaching via video chats, of course we can lower prices and therefore make it available also for lower management levels.

Early 2020: convincing people coaching works over video

[00:01:22] Rory: Great. Before we jump into the pandemic, let's go back to early 2020. That's when you joined CoachHub. What were your challenges back then, what was the landscape like then? And then we'll move into the pandemic after that.

[00:01:39] Jens: Yeah, so you mentioned it already. It feels like ages ago, because it was actually shortly before the pandemic. Our product, the platform we are currently using, was four months live at that point of time, so we can say we have been in the minimum viable product stage. Ahead of us there was this scaling phase and bringing it to the next level. We were really focusing on bringing digital coaching to the market, and before the pandemic — and this is why it sounds like ages ago — we needed to convince the people that coaching is possible via video chat. People didn't believe us, and we really needed to do research and also a lot of convincing talks to say, of course you can do almost everything remotely, and you have the same efficiency in coaching via video chat versus in real traditional offline coaching.

[00:02:35] Plus, it's not that long ago, but it was before the pandemic, so most of the especially traditional companies, their employees have not been equipped for video chats and quality. We needed to help them to install the webcams, install the right firewall settings, etc. That basically is absolutely blown away from now. We don't have any of these talks anymore, and this is one of the, for our business, positive effects of the pandemic.

March 2020: reduced hours, then a turn

[00:03:04] Rory: Great. Talk me through then what happened. Everybody had confusion in March last year, didn't know what was happening. Talk us through your journey through that period.

[00:03:15] Jens: Basically roughly two months after I started, the pandemic started. For us, being at that point heading into a Series B — we were aiming to have a Series B roughly in 2021 or something — we needed to establish our business in the market, to get some bigger players, to also show our investors that it is a sustainable business.

[00:03:39] At the same time, nobody knew how the world economic situation would be within and after the pandemic, so basically everybody was super nervous. We're using HR budgets for our business, and usually these kinds of budgets are easily cut out in a crisis, right? Okay, cut the training budget, cut the well-being budget, we don't need that, we now need to focus on keeping our business running. So what we did, and needed to do, is we asked our employees to voluntarily reduce their working hours and accept a smaller salary for a couple of months.

[00:04:17] So it was that situation, but actually shortly after that — and all employees did it — we figured out that something else happens. Especially the Fortune 500 and the big corporate players that have been our main target group recognized that, now that it is such a special moment of the economy that might turn into a crisis, while everybody was facing completely new work environments, working remotely, being forced to work remotely, they have accepted that and invested in helping their employees manage this crisis economically, but also this new stress situation we all felt by working in the middle of our family rooms.

[00:05:05] We figured out pretty fast that after three months of almost no budgets or deals signed, because also our clients were waiting for what happened, we saw a positive trend. So we could put back all our employees into full work mode in August already. And from there, all this education tech, especially the areas of education tech that take care of work-life balance, employee well-being, employee retention, new formats of training, really got momentum, because the standard traditional HR training basically is not existing. It's still not existing really, it slowly ramps up, but it's absolutely blown away.

[00:05:49] So that kind of, by luck somehow, made us one of the companies that have benefited from the pandemic. But actually for a very positive reason, because you should see the user feedback of our users. We really help them manage the crisis and they're super happy, especially the ones that follow our vision of democratized coaching, where people have a touch point with coaching for the very first time of their life. Usually it's life-changing, and that was also a big booster for our business during the pandemic.

From a feature factory to persona teams

[00:06:23] Rory: Right. So you mentioned, kind of at the start, you joined, the product was maybe four months live, it was still, as you described it, still the MVP. So you've now realized that actually this is a great opportunity, you're getting a lot of interest. What happens from a product perspective? How did your system handle this influx?

[00:06:44] Jens: First of all, you get super nervous. Actually we had two development teams, two product managers at that point of time, and they have been organized basically in some feature queue. We have been in the middle of groundwork, where we needed to fix basic things, getting down the video error rates, enabling the right time zones in the calendar bookings, all that super basic stuff that doesn't earn you more money but delivers a minimum viable product experience.

[00:07:13] At that point of time I decided, first of all, we need solid workload[?] planning, and we need solid ownership of the different artifacts in the platform. So far the development teams and the product managers had jumped from feature to feature: okay, we now fix the calendar thingy, then we might implement dial-in numbers — these kinds of feature factory nightmares. So what we did is we created persona teams. We then had a dedicated product management team for coachees, for coaches and for companies, which are our three main user groups.

[00:07:47] Why? Of course you can slice and dice product and tech teams differently: in user journey — acquisition, activation, retention — or technical artifacts — search results, checkout flow, order flow, or whatever. We decided to do it by persona because digital coaching is to a big extent somehow a green field when it comes to digital solutions. So what I wanted my team to become is real experts in the pain points of the users, because we have been then on a journey from an MVP to something we call the MLP, the minimum lovable product. What is a product that makes us proud and makes our clients recommend us to others?

[00:08:33] Because we wanted to expand our business, and for that, especially when having only three teams at that point of time — so we added one for company — you need to heavily focus. That's why you need to understand what are the key pain points you need to cross out first to improve the satisfaction with your product. When I started, the net promoter score had been at 23, because we have been in this MVP and not much more than that mode. Now, last month, we are at 72. So we really invested in actually two work streams: one was do the right things, and the other one was do the things right.

Paying down tech debt while fixing what doesn't scale

[00:09:17] Rory: Great. There's a couple of different things there that I want to jump into. You mentioned your tech debt at the start there, your calendar things not working and a few of those kinds of bugs and problems with your MVP. And then you mentioned, okay, so you went with this structure of different teams. How did you balance the two? You have to pay down this technical debt, but you want that vision of, like, what can we do for our different personas. How did the teams manage that, and how did you as the chief product officer make sure the teams weren't going too far in one direction?

[00:09:57] Jens: First of all, on the tech side, and also to manage tech debt, we moved the platform from a monolithic environment to microservice architectures, to be more able to react flexibly on different use cases. Because when we analyzed the pain points within the different persona teams, we actually had one principle from a business reason, which was: fix first what does not scale. And the other one was: fix what makes our users unhappy.

[00:10:32] By building these two feature streams, actually on every feature or new functionality we wanted to build, we needed to take a build-or-buy decision. What is really our core value proposition, our core DNA as a digital coaching company, and what is maybe better being bought from a third-party vendor? For example, of course we want to provide chat functionalities between coaches and coachees, but we are a coaching company, and there are hundreds of companies out there that provide awesome chat functionalities in a white-label format, things like that.

[00:11:07] And on this technical setup, as I said, switching to this microservice architecture enabled us to get rid of monolithic legacy code and replace it by maybe new ones, or bought ones.

How the persona teams were staffed

[00:11:28] Rory: Great, so that was on the tech side. On the other side, those product teams that are now empowered around delivering for a particular persona — very impressive NPS improvement — how were they structured in order to be able to, as you say, identify what's making the customers angry, or rather identifying what will make the customers happy?

[00:11:54] Jens: First of all, our product is more than our platform. We have an awesome services and operations team, dedicated service managers for coachees and coaches, and there we have business partners. We basically made the product manager and the business partner in the coaching success team, or in the coaching section, be coupled somehow. They have been closely aligned, because this service team is talking to coaches or coachees every day, eight hours, so they know the customer, they extremely understand the problem space of them.

[00:12:28] Then we hired additional functionalities, UX research, to really create structured data of these numerous client contacts. Basically we have been doubling down on analyzing the key problems in using our current platform, to identify the things we need to fix first to create the biggest effect on customer satisfaction. So we added two UX researchers, and we added a dedicated UX designer to each team, to really significantly improve the user experience.

[00:13:05] Next to it, we doubled down on user tracking. When it came to NPS, we had an NPS survey, and we established a couple of other metrics like a company health score, collecting engagement metrics but also satisfaction metrics. We implemented more feedback cycles in the product. So for example, after every session we are asking the coachee, on different levels, about the satisfaction with the coach, with the relationship, with the coaching content. So at least for an MVP to MLP phase, we have gained a pretty good knowledge of what we need to improve.

Growing the team, and the teams that take the pressure off

[00:13:48] Rory: Excellent. And because you mentioned hiring and recruiting, and that's a lot of growth, and you yourselves were probably working remotely as well — talk me through how much have you grown, and then how have you managed that growth?

[00:14:04] Jens: As I said, we started to have two teams, we added another one for the third persona, company. But very soon we figured out that's even not enough. We are growing so fast, these teams have been, and sometimes still are, fully booked with business enablement. Sometimes as a product manager you then have to make these hard trade-off decisions between business growth and strategic feature development. And we're a startup, right, so we need to make the money to pay our employees next quarter. So often enough we needed to make business decisions instead of strategic decisions.

[00:14:37] That's why we added additional teams to the setup that take off this business growth pressure from the bandwidth. For example, a client solutions team, so a team that does nothing else than adjusting or adapting our platform functionalities to the needs of our clients.

[00:14:55] We added an additional learning solutions team that takes care of the time in between the coaching sessions. Seventy-five percent of the knowledge you learn new is forgotten after five days if you don't utilize it, so we created our own team that takes care of — I think in other verticals you would call it engagement features — which is important for the next maturity level of a product, to create environments that keep your users using you more.

[00:15:30] And next to that we also established an additional platform team that is doing nothing else than microservice architectures, so basically keeping off this monolithic legacy pain from the core development teams.

Onboarding and aligning a fast-growing remote company

[00:15:50] Rory: Great. And so, a huge number of people. When companies go through that hyper growth phase it can be very difficult to stay aligned, and particularly if you're trying to onboard that many people, get them up to speed. How did you manage that as a company?

[00:16:09] Jens: First of all, as a company that sells video coaching, our people team really doubled down on having awesome remote onboarding processes, with a lot of webinars, with a lot of teachable courses to get into the game. So we onboard our employees very, very well. Next to it, as you mentioned already, we are a remote-first company, so in my team the people can work wherever they want to work. I don't care, they just need to have solid wi-fi and should be available within European working hours. That made us also very attractive as an employer, not only because we have an awesome product that delivers purpose to employees worldwide, but also due to this flexibility.

[00:16:57] How do we do that? As I said at the beginning, we had two main work streams. One was doing the right things, I mentioned that a little bit, and the other one was doing the things right. What we did is, of course, we used our own technology, so every one of our employees has their own coach, but also other psychometrics to identify the team strengths and team weaknesses, and train us not as individuals but also as a team in there.

[00:17:24] Additionally, I decided to hire a completely new role. Actually I'm working with it for the first time in my career, but I love it: a product operations manager, that is doing nothing else than having a supportive role in all the processes, the ceremonies, the plannings, to keep more bandwidth for the creative part of being a product manager, for the product managers, and being a supporting role when it comes to design sprint workshops, preparing these kinds of things, reviewing these kinds of things, supporting with roadmap planning templates, etc. So the supporting role really makes a difference, because it lets the product manager focus on their craft.

[00:18:09] Rory: Great. I love the use of using your own products, it's great to see. And I love that because everybody in your organization has a coach, they're dogfooding their own products, so they can feel the pain as well.

[00:18:22] Jens: Absolutely, so they all test our product every day. But honestly, that is not our main intention. We pay our coaches also for the sessions with our employees, so it's a significant investment of company money into our employees. But of course, yes, therefore we get our bugs maybe faster. Our employees see our bugs earlier than our clients usually, which is a nice side effect of it.

Client solutions: customizing without becoming an agency

[00:18:51] Rory: Great. I want to jump back to two different teams you mentioned, the client solutions and the learning solutions. So client solutions: as you said, you're kind of customizing your platform for the needs of different companies. This is a problem I hear from a lot of startups, that they've got a couple of big clients and then the clients start demanding particular features, but there's a risk associated with that, that you become too specific to particular main clients. So how do you balance that as a product officer, to make sure that you're meeting the needs of those big clients but also making sure that you're still focusing on your main product and not building a custom solution?

[00:19:32] Jens: Very good question. First of all, this was one of the items when I said we needed to fix first what does not scale. Rolling out a customized program, so a program that is customized to the company values of a big client, had taken eight weeks per client at the beginning. That means basically I can do two customization programs per quarter with one team. That is not enough. So we invested in streamlining this process, in building dedicated modules, so it really significantly simplified the way and the need for developer and product manager attention in rolling out customization products. It was a very unpopular decision to invest in that in Q1, but now we are down to four days per customization program, which is significantly less.

[00:20:24] And we created that dedicated team because this context switch of "hey, there is this one new big client, we need to win them, please drop your roadmap and do this" is an absolute nightmare for every development and product team. That's why we created a dedicated team that is actually working more in an agency mode than our standard core development teams.

Learning solutions: unique goals, common categories

[00:20:50] Rory: Great, it's great insight. And the other one was around the learning solution. I love the point, and I'm a big advocate of that kind of spaced repetition in order to learn something, but is every coaching session not in a way unique? So how do you tackle that challenge from a product perspective, where you want this solution that's generic enough that you can roll out for everybody, but on the other hand all of their coaching sessions are unique in ways?

[00:21:20] Jens: Absolutely. Our core belief is that the coachee is defining the coaching goal, so you're absolutely right, the individual goals are very unique. But usually these goals, especially if it's embedded in a business coaching environment, follow some categories. We work together with a couple of universities and do really intense research. For example, our senior vice president coaching, Jonathan Passmore, is actually one of the superstars and authors of coaching books, and director of the Henley Business School, and they do science on coaching. We have other science board members that do science on the coach-coachee relationship. So we think a science-backed environment helps us being very specific while being able to work in categories.

[00:22:12] We have a strengths assessment in our platform that lets you identify what could be the areas you can be coached on, and you can select focus areas within. We come with our own coaching framework, developed together with our science board members, and you'll find categories like stress resilience, emotional regulation, time management. So you have two main categories, grow as a person and inspire as a leader, and that actually fits most of the learning and development cases, with its 19 subcategories. And I can tell you, especially during the pandemic, the two most selected focus areas are exactly that: emotional regulation and time management.

[00:22:58] So these are then the buckets you can design learning content on, and you can also design our content recommendation engine on. We read the goal settings within our product and we see what kind of content is used to overcome these goals. Our coaches can recommend learning content to coachees, and we measure in a self-rating the progress on, for example, time management: I rate myself at a seven and two months later I rate myself at a nine. And we use this data to recommend content that was used within that journey to other coachees of your kind.

[00:23:37] Rory: Great. And so is there a bit of machine learning going on in the background to crunch all of that data?

[00:23:43] Jens: Exactly. We have two teams that tackle that. One is our BI team that is working on two main algorithms. The one is the algorithm which I sometimes oversimplify with coach dating: what questions do we need to ask to find the best matching coach for you? And the other algorithm is exactly what learning content can we provide by knowing your learning goals. We have our own content team that is writing this content, but we also work with content partners like Harvard Business Review, to provide qualitative learning content to them based on their learning goals.

Acquiring MoovOne

[00:24:24] Rory: Great. I'm just going to shift back now to a little bit about growth. Because we're talking about growth during the pandemic, you did raise a bit of funding, and you were saying you've now started moving into the acquisition space as well as just organic growth. How did you decide to go down that route, and then how has that been for you as a company?

[00:24:47] Jens: Thanks for asking. After the pandemic, or due to the momentum of the pandemic, our Series B became way faster and way higher than we actually were hoping for. That was already good, and that gave us a little bit of money to also react on the momentum. There are a lot of players around us that are trying to participate in that momentum, and we figured out a couple of players, in a very analytical way again, that we always pitch against. We always have been in competitive pitches with a couple of companies, one of them has been MoovOne from France.

[00:25:23] At some point we said, why compete, why can't we collaborate? These folks do this business for six years, which is almost four years more than we do. So they do something right and they own the French market. We can make our lives hard, or we collaborate. So at some point we used the money then to acquire them. Of course, before we acquired them we did a due diligence, and in this due diligence we figured out that actually our products are very complementary. While we have been investing heavily in the scalability and the global footprint of our product, they have been, while being a French player, investing in the user experience for HR business partners, in the user experience and functionalities for coaches. Therefore it made absolute sense: the weaknesses of us have been their strengths, and vice versa. That's why we decided that actually we can be stronger together.

[00:26:25] Maybe anticipating your next question, what do we do now? What we currently do is we create customer journeys per persona with jobs to be done, and compare the different feature sets. What is great in the MoovOne user experience, what is great in the CoachHub user experience, and what might be the blind spots where there are jobs to be done in the personas that neither of the two platforms serve well enough? From that we kind of find some user journey heat map, where to invest first, and merging these two environments into something better.

[00:27:08] Rory: And from a cultural point of view, the individuals in those companies, how have you found that cultural melding of the two companies?

[00:27:18] Jens: First of all, we are in the very beginning, we just acquired them. But what we did actually is we demoed our products to each other. The product managers of MoovOne demoed to our product managers and vice versa, and you could see the momentum within these sessions, where, oh wow, that's actually a great idea, why have we never talked about that that way? And that happened on both sides. That's why we have also chosen this user journey mapping now, to compare the functionalities of the platforms, and not just the plain spreadsheet where we say okay, CoachHub can download PDFs, MoovOne can download PDFs. It's not about who's better or weaker at some point, it's about who is serving our users better on the specific job to be done. Because with that, our employees recognize what we have recognized in the due diligence already: the complementarity of the products. That was very visible, and that's why we had a very good cultural start, actually.

[00:27:58] Rory: Excellent. Well, we are just at time. I could keep chatting for ages. Thank you for sharing all of your insights on growth during a pandemic, and I hope everybody out there enjoyed the conversation as well. So thank you once again, Jens.

[00:28:36] Jens: Thanks Rory for inviting me, I'm happy to chat again.

[00:28:39] Rory: Yeah, if anybody has any more questions, please put them into Slack and Jens will be there to be able to answer them as well.