How we got 75% MAU jump with the product strategy and love towards what we build

Looking at this photo you won’t think that this is a successful team, which crashed almost all the possible walls to get to the BIG GOAL. We probably look like a bunch of nerds, who crashed someone's party (By the way, I am the only one really drinking alcohol in here). However, let me tell you a story. A story of the mobile team's success, which got a 75% MAU increase in a year and a half without any marketing and sales support.

Dec 4th, 2017

I, with a new UX designer, stepped foot into the office as a product manager of the mobile team. For you to understand what I and David, the UX, got into, it was a team without a dedicated UX designer, they had a shared product manager, who was also handling a completely different team, so no 100% focus on the product. Also no product roadmap, no strategy, but… they had free breakfast on Mondays and tea time on Thursdays (The last part is no joke by the way). So let’s just say the team was not in the best condition.

Before I move on, let me put this straight. I don’t think it was the previous product managers’ fault, or the upper management’s fault, or the development teams and marketing teams' faults, and so on, of why the mobile team didn’t get any support. To be honest, it still probably does not get as much support as it needs.

Now you are saying: “Stef if that’s so, whose fault it is then?”

Well… It is hard to say, and it is probably better to say no ones’, but one can also say it is the system, the culture, and the business model of the company. Now, you are probably saying: “WTF?”

The system, the culture, and the business model

So ok, let me just describe to you what kind of company that was. Why was? Because it recently got acquired by a bigger company for X billion dollars and I am not sure whether the culture, the system, and even more the business model are going to stay the same.

It was a classic SaaS B2B sales-led company with quarterly release cycles of the web platform as their major product. The product was a work management or project management platform with lots of reporting and customization capabilities.

There were 2 major blockers, which were the reason the mobile was not promoted.

Blocker 1: Sales-led company

So as said above, the company was sales-led, and in one of my previous articles, I already explained what are the main advantages and disadvantages here. Basically, whatever product team does is not much of a value, comparing to what the sales team does. The reason company decided to go sales-led was the product complexity. One needed 6 months of sales rep explaining the pros and cons to finally decide whether to move forward with it or not. Why is this a blocker? Because no one could try the mobile app without a final deal closure, so… This means that whatever the mobile team tries to do, they won’t be able to acquire customers.
It is ok for the sales team to drive the companies revenue if they are going to sell the mobile product as well. However, that was not the case, the sales team was rarely mentioning the mobile and only in case the customers requested it. So as you can see no support from the sales team.

Blocker 2: No support from the upper management

Ok, I shouldn’t say that there was no support at all because we had some moments when the upper management helped us a lot to drive some initiatives, which were vital for the mobile team. However… I guess if we were the team, which the business model depended upon they would have done more. For the upper management, the mobile app was the product, which the company should have for the sack of having it and the possibility to mention those in some deals, but no one cared about the value the mobile product provides or could provide.

So as you can see the mobile product was an outsider and no one cared where it goes and how it progresses. Imagine being a team member of such a product you would feel like Baby Groot. You may be cute and funny, but not useful. You are definitely not motivated to work on such a product.

I mean look at him, he dances and stuff, but …who cares.

The mobile team and the 100 slides of product strategy

Ok, of course, I didn’t understand how the company works at once. It actually took me 3 months to get to the point that we need a product strategy. The only thing we as a product team and the mobile team knew is that we have to focus on Usage Increase.

By the time we were investigating the scenarios and possibilities towards the direction of the product, we were also experimenting here and there to see what we can do to achieve the usage take-off goal.

One of the big things, that helped us increase our WAU by 23% in a single day within a week of development and testing was the Universal links feature. Meaning that whenever a user selected a company link on a mobile device and had an app installed, then one was redirected to the mobile app and not the web page. This is not a big deal and it is one of the basics to have it handled in the current mobile apps, but this can give you an idea of how many things we could add or improve to the app.

Before I move on, I would just like to highlight that those minor improvements to the mobile app, helped the team become motivated and understand, that their work matters. This was one of the key things that our engineering managers helped the team see and understand.

By the time the strategy was complete we already had around a 20% MAU increase in 4 months and somehow motivated the team to execute it. That sounds like a good start, right? Let me just tell you, that… Everything didn’t go as planned from the beginning.

The product strategy was NOT approved

After 3 months of experiments and 1 month of product strategy preparation, working 16 hours a day (I know 1 month sounds crazy and if someone tells me that the product strategy was prepared in a month, I would laugh too, but trust me… This is a real story), We finally went to present it to the upper management. Everyone was there, CTO, product directors, and other white-collar big title company representatives. Obviously, the paragraph title speaks for itself, the presentation was not well received and it was probably my fault that we couldn’t convince the leadership team to approve the strategy. We thought that the presentation will end up us being motivated to execute it, but we felt like Frodo - we had a ring, but we couldn’t use it.

What we did next

Despite, Frodo not being able to use the ring and had to throw it in the volcano, we actually decided to rebel and move forward by using all the power of the ring (the designed roadmap and the strategy).

To put it short the product strategy plan was the following:

Step 1: Improve the application UX for it to become sexy
Objective 1: Help users explore the already available features and increase MAU by 10 to 15%

Step 2: Create a beta users community for them to promote the new app versions, before the actual release
Objective 2: Have 2% of all the MAU as beta testers

Step 3: Release features to find and organize the items
Objective 3: Increase Number of sessions by 10% and Retention on Day 7 by 5%

Step 4: Release iPad app targeting the management
Objective 4: Increase the overall MAU by 5% and iPad MAU to be 10% of the overall MAU

Step 5: Release reports and dashboards for the management
Objective 5: Increase MAU by 20%

I will just remind you that we still have 2 blockers and we had huge dependencies to implement some of the features.

As you can clearly see, we wanted for the mobile app to become noticeable and then we targeted users with management or lead titles.

May 2019

It took us a year and a half to increase our MAU by 75% and our average DAU by 145%. We implemented all the items in the strategy apart from the last one, because we really needed lots of things to change in the company to get that one.

What we did instead? We released the Virtual Assistant as a workaround for reports and dashboards. You could say something like: “Show me my late items for today” and get the results. (By the time the feature was released to production I already left the company and the whole story of VA is worth a separate article.)

Also as you can see all our planned success metrics were underestimated and our most active customers were super-duper awesome Fortune 500 companies such as WebMD, Amazon, Nvidia, ESPN, State Farm, and many more.

You could say: “But if you didn’t have sales support, how did you get usage increase?”

Well, it turns out that only 5 to 8% of all the web users were actually using the mobile app, so the strategy was to get to 15% in year one and 20% in year two. We actually got to 12% to 13% (So didn’t hit the metric here, but the strategy was not fully complete either).

You could also ask: “How is it possible for the upper management not to stop you by implementing the not approved product strategy?”

Do you remember blocker number 2? The thing is that they didn’t care that much and as a result, they were ok, as long as we deliver some outcomes. What can be better than 75% in MAU for the team without any support from other teams? For some managers, that’s a dream come true. You have a team with great results, which does not bother you and all you have to do is NOTHING.

Success formula

So some of you may ask: “What is the success formula here?”

Well, it looks like this:

Product Direction + Great Execution + Love Towards Product + PS 4

PS 4? Yeah, PS 4. It was one of these things that helped us be relaxed when working on something tough or… whenever we had a moment to avoid work.

As for the rest of the items, I will try to be short. You need a good direction to deliver results, but if you don’t have great execution by all the team members, meaning the dev team, QAs and UXs, the direction is useless. However, even if you have the direction and execution you still need love to achieve greatness. You have to have that one developer who hears about the customer’s pain and stays till late at night to fix a bug and deploy it. Imagine what you can achieve if that’s the whole team.

Finally, the mobile team was kind of a “small startup” within the big B2B SaaS company, therefore the duration of some items and tasks to be accomplished was much shorter compared to the same items for the web platform.

What happened next

To be honest, it would be cool to show the profiles of every single team member and show an awesome story of someone graduating from Harvard, or someone changing their gender, or someone investing in sending small labrador puppies to Mars, but… that’s just my dirty imagination. One thing I can say is, that after implementing the product strategy, the mobile team was already visible on the company roadmap. We still had lots of challenges after, but I would keep those stories for other articles.

P.S.

Although I am not part of the mobile team anymore, I know that the guys are doing great and still have lots of things to accomplish.
As for me, I am in a great startup environment.