Superday Series: Activate Tribe
Introduction
Hello 👋, I’m Steve, a Software Engineering Manager working in the Rockets team at Gousto. I’m pleased to be sharing my reflections and takeaways from an action packed Activate Superday.
At the end of every quarter at Gousto, we have a series of presentations from each tribe which collectively we refer to as ‘Superday’. The whole company comes together to demonstrate all of the great work and achievements of the last three months and to look ahead to future goals. We celebrate our successes, recognise individuals who have had a particular impact, and have a few drinks to round off the quarter!
Gousto is currently structured into three main tribes, Activate, Choice, and Unbox, which are responsible for the core parts of the customer journey: joining Gousto, choosing recipes, and receiving a Gousto box. We also have a Tech Foundations tribe which is responsible for our Technology and Data platforms, IT, Security, and much more. This Superday, we also received a presentation on Customer Scene Setting which focused on Gousto’s mission and the impact we have on our customers. Finally, we had our first ever presentation from Bento, Gousto’s B2B business, where they told us about the amazing work they’ve been doing this year.
All about Activate
Activate exists to:
“Help people fully realise the value of Gousto and turn it into a habit they love”.
The Activate vision is
“The Digital and Customer Care experience of Gousto become key reasons for signing-up and staying with us, because it’s effortless, inspiring and rewarding.”
The Activate Superday presentation focused on 3 squads — Beetroots, Rockets and Turnips. As with all squads at Gousto, we focus on the strength of autonomous cross functional teams blending the talents of Product Designers, Product Managers, Data Scientists, Data Analysts, Engineers and Marketing/Growth SMEs to deliver value for our customers.
Acquisition / Beetroots
Beetroots form part of our ‘Acquisition Team’. Alongside their efforts on designing and running effective marketing campaigns, they design and run experiments to improve conversion of prospects into happy customers.
During this quarter Beetroots piloted a Curated Boxes experiment. The hypothesis they set to test was:
“We believe that by introducing menu plans with relevant pre-selected meals as an option for prospective customers, we will reduce choice overwhelm and decrease the time taken to sign up leading to an increase in sign up conversion rate.”
So what are curated boxes?
“Curated boxes are customised Gousto Boxes filled with thoughtfully selected recipes. These boxes cater to specific themes, preferences or occasions providing a delightful and personalised experience. We aim to offer them in a way that differentiates us in the market and offers unique value to our customers.”
To deliver this experiment, Beetroots ran a Design Sprint to foster user centricity, encourage collaborative team work and ideation and get rapid customer feedback. Their aim was to get an idea out into the market as quickly as possible to drive learning and iterate with improvements.
What did Beetroots learn during this Design Sprint from a technical perspective? Building a curated boxes experiment required Beetroots to delve into parts of our codebase they wouldn’t normally touch and would thus normally avoid. In this instance, they learnt that although there was some up-skilling required, they were able to effectively make changes and bring to market an idea that would otherwise require wide coordination between multiple teams. Equally, the team embraced an ‘acceptable tech debt’ mindset, consciously and deliberately incurring tech debt on experimental short lived code, learning quickly, then doubling down on technical quality where it mattered most — long lived code that was showing promise in terms of customer value.
Retention / Rockets
Rockets form part of our Retention team. The Rockets vision is:
“Through our digital experience we help our customers to fully realise the value of Gousto and turn it into a habit they love.”
In Rockets, we love the Gousto product and know that the more customers we can introduce to it, the more impact we can have on people and the planet, with carbon emission savings, less food waste and more nutritionally balanced meals eaten. One area we enjoy experimenting with is our ‘Refer a Friend’ offer — with organic referrals and word of mouth being a great way to introduce new customers to our amazing product.
In the previous quarter Rockets ran experiments to increase the prominence of our Refer a Friend offer on our most visited touchpoints. Whilst these experiments were ultimately successful/winning, they learnt that there were interesting side effects — specifically that whilst Refer a Friend actions went up this distracted customers from their order flow and thus pushed order related metrics down. Through experience, they’ve learnt that lessons from experiments that have unexpected effects are just as useful and valuable than those that are clear winners.
This quarter Rockets took these lessons and made use of Braze Content Cards and Micro-targeting opportunities to develop their previous experiments further. For these new experiments, they increased the prominence of Refer a Friend touch-points for customers who had already completed order related journeys for that menu week, thus mitigating the downside risk on order metrics whilst still getting the benefit of increased RAF prominence for customers likely to refer.
Rockets further explored Micro-Targeting by optimising what they show for customers who have previously given a recipe a high rating or have shared their meal range preferences. In both instances, bringing prominence to these indicators through imagery and enticing messaging.
Finally, Rockets really highlighted their cross functional by default nature by sharing the work they’d done to productionize a previous winning experiment that sought to increase the frequency of orders in a customers early life whilst developing the Gousto habit. This experiment was originally built natively within our iOS app, but through some clever cross functional collaboration and ideation, they were able to recreate this experience using features built in our Braze/CRM platform, thus delivering the same experience to customers but with a far lower time to market. This was an interesting opportunity for Rockets as it meant really pushing the boundaries of how they leverage our digital product to CRM integrations and highlighted the value that can be realised from cross functional collaboration.
Menu / Turnips
Turnips form part of our menu team.
“Turnips exist to make it simple to choose the most relevant and exciting recipes”.
One metric Turnips use to gauge their success is ‘first recipe adds per user’. That is — how many users add a recipe to their basket upon visiting our menu. Gousto is rightly proud of the variety and choice available on our menu, but Turnips are here to make sure that our amazing menu choice doesn’t lead to overwhelm by ensuring we highlight the most relevant recipes for our customers unique and individual tastes.
Turnips shared some fantastic design work they’d done this quarter to improve the menu experience for our customers by giving our recipe tiles a much needed refresh. If you’d like to read more about this, our Product Designer Kelly has written a whole post about this experiment and the thought process that went into it here.
Turnips also spoke about the work they’d put into their Rouxcommender engine which drives the recipe recommendations Gousto presents to each of our customers. Gousto’s CEO Timo Boldt recently blogged about how Gousto is using AI to drive personalisation. You can read about that here.
In the wake of the Activate Superday, it’s clear the teams are laser focused on experimentation and enhancing the Gousto experience to meet our customer needs. Their Superday presentation was full to the brim with examples of innovation, learning and with a strong focus on bringing the best from the cross functional team that makes up the Activate Tribe.
