Product design — how to boost user engagement through the product and thereby also drive revenue?
I have been working at a startup for more than a year to solve business problems. Throughout the year, I have been through a lot of structural changes and more importantly, learned to put customers first even when there are different types of users.
In this post, I would like to share how a new feature was created, and how it would impact the business and evolve in the future.
To protect privacy, I will mock it up with Heracules Boxing Gym (“Heracules”) and will alter the background and the problem. I will try my best to make it as interesting as possible!
The business
Heracules has been running since 2020 in Wilmersdorf, Berlin. Other than providing various standard training courses, it has a very decent and spacious stadium nearby where the gym hosts weekly running classes.
In 2022, Heracules signed a 6-month contract with Heiderberger Tank & Wash Inc. (“Heiderberger Inc.”), a gas station cum car wash company which has several branches in the city. Heiderberger Inc. wants to give its 120 employees free boxing classes as employee benefits as well as to promote a healthy style. Since then, it has become the major source of revenue of Heracules.
The plan
Apart from providing boxing training classes to individuals in the neighbourhood, Heracules has an ambitious plan to sell its packages to more companies in the city to expand their business.
Pain point
However, the sales & marketing team of Heracules finds it difficult to convince the HR persons of the clients to renew the contracts due to various reasons (budget concerns, competition with other gyms, and the decision makers are not the users of the gym or just not boxers themselves). In short, the HR persons, who may or may not be the decision makers in signing the contract, are hesitant and reluctant to renew contracts immediately after the existing contracts expired.
WHAT DOES HERCULES WANT?
1) earlier renewal talks with the existing trainees to secure recurrent revenue especially that from the corporations
2) involve the trainees to convince their HR persons that the boxing classes are overall good for them
3) avoid sending mass email since the response rate is low according to data
3) continue to serve the local community sustainably
Heracules has a mobile app allowing trainees to view courses and book sessions, which are the major actions that trainees take in the app.
Hugolino, a super fan of the boxing gym, is a Product Designer. He suggested making use of the app to gather trainees’ thoughts, ideas and wishes so that the gym could use the data to raise renewal talks with the clients.
Solution
- MVP version of an action card which is linked to a wish form outside of the app (we chose Google form, quick and easy) at the home screen to save backend work
- Deployment: product manager + designer + frontend
- Time: ONE sprint
- Purpose: notify the trainees of the remaining sessions, encouraging them to send their training wishes to Heracules with an aim to empower the renewal talks with the clients
How does it work?
- When the trainees opt for sending the wish form, redirect them to wish form to collect their feedback.
- Since we do not want to be pushy or appear to be haunting, the card will disappear once trainees click “Later”. A confirmation that close the card will pop up.
Result
The MVP has successfully caught the attention of the targeted trainees whose sessions will soon be used up. They voiced out through the wish form that they would like to continue with training with Heracules. The sales and marketing team has obtained very powerful user information to enter into the renewal talk with corporate clients. At the same time, Heracules received valuable feedback from the trainees when they filled out the wish form. So far the feature with just one sprint of effort has reaped good results.
A little success …
Future
When the MVP evolves, Heraculas would like to have more control to measure of the success of the wish form by collecting the metrics to the backend.
- fetch survey results from the backend to keep track of important KPIs
- reuse the component whenever we have important messages to share or feedback to collect
To close…
The release was brought by the wonderful engineers since we are all aligned in the objective — drive more revenue. One sprint (2 weeks of time) including brainstorming, iterations with suitable copies, QA and release, is a short period of time.
There were a lot of quick communication and alignment with a number of stakeholders in such a short period of time. There were disconnections at times, but we realised that it would be the line of quick work which will need to have a smoother processes. This piece of work led to a retro between poduct & design where we came up with a better way of work. That’s definitely an evolution in team collaboration.
WE hope that Heraculas’s sales and marketing team can turn the trainees’ wishes into more training sessions, thereby helping Heracules drive more renewals and recurrent revenue in the upcoming quarters!
