A marketing technology orchestration platform that lets marketers send meaningful messages to their customers. Marketing teams used this technology to measure and optimize conversion rate through the customer lifecycle.
My role
Discovery trio leader. Led product discovery activities including customer interviews, design sprints, and opportunity solution map creation and maintenance.
Product owner. Created solution assets including user stories and scenarios, ran delivery kick-off sessions, and built demos and training to support launch activities.
Strategic planner of the roadmap. Determined what phases of product work should happen when, and worked with leadership to gain ongoing investment in the roadmap.
Execution
As of fall 2018, the number one reason Airship was losing new business deals was the lack of a journey-builder type solution. Airship kicked off the “Cassiopeia” project to leapfrog the competition using product discovery techniques.
I led a product team to discover opportunities for an improved cross-channel orchestration platform. We interviewed 80+ customers, tested prototypes, reviewed competitor journey assets, and uncovered two opportunities for innovation:
Separate and automate key lifecycle transitions. Legacy journey builders force marketers to build all messaging into a single graph. We took a different approach, letting the marketer focus on each lifecycle step individually and map goals together for automated lifecycle transitions.
Simplify journey construction, optimization, and review. Traditional journey builders force marketers to create a new branch for every A/B test, control group, or QA test. We developed intuitive UX to contain message logic within the message itself, decluttering the graph while giving marketers a simple interface to create with.
With a solid basis in customer and market discovery, we built and launched Airship Journeys in November 2019.
I worked with leadership to build a now/next/later roadmap to keep delivering on customer value. Over the following year we released sales-leading, customer-loved expansions including an experimentation platform and out-of-the-box quickstart templates and guides.
Challenges
Sales wants to sell what they know, not something new. Led the marketing team in building sales decks and materials to help sales sell the vision and value.
Do we really need to keep investing after the first launch? Convinced leadership that further investment in Journeys meant investing in a vision for the entire platform.
Too much new — how do we demo? Created demo videos with synthesized data to aid pipeline capture and help success teams drive adoption, and led Gartner and Forrester demos.
Achievements
Cemented leadership position in the 2020 Gartner and Forrester rankings for mobile marketing platforms.
Fast, growing product adoption. 4x adoption of Journeys year over year, with 86 customers running at least one live journey as of March 2021.
From sales killer to sales leader. Cross-channel orchestration went from being the number one deal impediment to the feature that led all sales demos.
Journeys improved the conversion rates marketers care about. Early adoption of Journeys Experimentation drove customer success stories including 40% higher purchase rates for abandoned-cart retail journeys and a 2x retention rate with inactivity journeys.