| Leading a platform’s MVP build to success
Dugout:
From 0 to 1
How I navigated Centerfield’s industry-leading
platform’s renaissance to become a gold rush.
My Role:
Director of Product Design
Stakeholders:
VP of Product
EVP of Engineering
Timeline:
3 months
Team:
Product Designer, Platform
Sr. Product Manager, Platform
Lead Product Designer, Sites
Product Designer, Sites
Centerfield acquires customers for nationwide brands. Centerfield owns both the websites our users visit and the call centers they speak with, if they do not purchase online.
Dugout is the backend software that manages all of the customer journey points in their entirety on the backend, simplifying coordination and tracking all the touchpoints’ data.
As valuable as this software had been to us and our differentiation in the industry, it was limited in its capabilities for the innovation we were scaling into.
So, now, the problem:
Wait, what exactly is Dugout?
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The VP of Product imagined a new arm of Dugout that would enable powerful personalization.
We just needed to prove out it’s revenue potential to scale the investment, first.
00.
A project of this scale meant I had to structure it to progress between two teams in lock-step.
01.
Dugout’s design system begins to take an early shape, updating the legacy UI:
I unpack and contextualize the what, why, and how of this initiative, planting the seeds for them to prepare for their discovery phase, our roadmap planning, and pragmatic execution.
02.
I introduce our personalization strategy to the sites team.
03.
I then learned Dugout’s backend, in order to understand and consider the constraints of how our platform design solutions will be engineered.
04.
The sites group begins discovery, exploring many different concepts of what could be a “trigger” for personalizing our experiences.
Like, time of day:
This test increased sales by
From the site group’s discovery, we first focused on personalizing for the keyword users searched.
+44.5%.
While it was a huge win, we needed to prove our strategy was scalable to other points of personalization.
06.
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Within Dugout, we rebuilt our experiment set up. This was the foundation of customizing content for testing, which is where triggers would live, provided this flow was intuitive and successful.
I led Miriah through the usability testing.
I then led a working session with Miriah and Aliya, the Senior Product Manager for the platform group, through the organizing of patterns, and their priorities, in each area of the experiment set up.
From our learnings, we reduced the time spent building an experiment by 3 minutes, which gave us confidence we could add the more layered feature of triggers into that sequence.
08.
Invigorated, I led the site designers into testing the next feature in the platform’s roadmap: Geo-targeting.
We would translate our site experiences for locals of San Francisco with two large constraints:
1) The MVP would only allow image and text personalization.
2) We had to get this test out quickly, to have data for our VP of Product to share in an exec summit.
And even with a light reduction in scope for this test, we saw
+47% sales.
And 34% of those sales were for 300+ speeds, customers the client valued most.
To support the VP in securing the platform investment, I presented our winning data in our company All Hands.
A typical test’s sales lift:
Which caught the attention of every executive present and
proved out the value of investing into the continued innovation
of our platform.
