Let the Product Owner Cook

“File:Blue Apron meal kit ingredients.jpg” by Timtempleton is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

You are a Product Owner at a subscription based meal kit company that delivers pre-portioned ingredients and recipes to customers on a schedule of their choosing. Your marketing approach has primarily targeted busy couples, so the meal portions are made for two people. The key things you emphasize are that the meals are healthy, taste great, and are convenient. The company has been growing steadily over the past year and has benefitted from a consistently loyal customer base.

Couples are able to set a variety of preferences around the types of dishes and ingredients they both like, the things that they each don’t like, and then receive suggestions on the site for meals that they might also enjoy. The recipes and meal prep directions are written to be easy enough for one person to follow, but they also make allusions to involving each other in making meals together.

“Pizza pie couple.” by JodyDigger is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Customers can cancel their subscription at any time, while also having the options to skip a week here and there or pause their subscription indefinitely. That last action is where issues are starting to form. The Product Manager at the company has been working through some analytics around retention rates and discovered that a worrying amount of the Paused Subscriptions very seldom come back.

In a 12-month time frame for Paused Subscriptions:

• 67% linger in the Paused status
• 21% end up discontinuing their subscription entirely
• 12% return to an active meal plan

You already have some feature- and epic-level Product Backlog items roughly sketched out that deal a bit more with overall customer retention. The customer research that went into that work suggested that while you’re targeting couples as your customer audience, on the customer account level your UX only involves one person. Put it another way, this situation is like a couple that shares one Netflix login.

The Product Manager said she will be looking at more data points to see if there are any other trends. Meanwhile, she wants you and the rest of the team to start thinking up solutions to bring the on Pause customers back to the table.

What is your decision?

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