Context
Olo was facing higher churn from its core product (“Serve”), with customers moving from our self-service ordering platform to custom front-ends powered by Olo APIs. This threatened the “stickiness” of Olo’s ecosystem.
However, there was a lack of internal awareness and alignment about this issue. The priorities set by leadership were focused on incremental gains vs. retaining existing customers.
My manager (the Director of Product Design for the business unit) pointed out the churn patterns from some recent customers and gave me some leeway to explore the issue.
Approach
In a vacuum, I may have split this challenge into two parts.
However, I had limited access to customers since the relationships were owned by the sales teams (and I didn’t have strong relationships with those stakeholders yet).
Plus, I didn’t think customers would just want to repeat their problems (to someone new!) without seeing any progress in return.
With this in mind, I took the following approach:
- Validate & understand the problem from existing sources
- Interviews with Olo’s customer facing teams
- Reviewing any existing documentation + research
- Generate concepts with designers & engineers
- Tease these solutions to customers to find resonance
- Note: it was important to talk with a diverse set customers, including companies that had and hadn’t switched from Serve.
- Leverage customer feedback to get internal buy-in
After learning more about the existing problems, mocking up some feasible solutions, and working with account executives to get in front of customers, I made a presentation to the entire business unit with the feedback – and a proposal for a new initiative called Serve+.
Results & Reflections
After successfully pitching Serve+, I helped the team chart the road forward to define an MVP and a loose roadmap. At a leadership offsite, I led a set of brainstorming & prioritization exercises to figure out what features should make it into the product.
In addition, I assembled a Customer Advisory Board from interested parties to help guide our development of Serve+. This had a dual benefit:
- A closer relationship with customers gave our team a better pulse on what to build
- A regular forum to “show our work” mitigated potential churn from customers waiting for the new solution
Personally, my biggest learnings from this project weren’t about research but about leadership. My manager actively encouraged me to pursue this opportunity and invested his own social capital to get me resources and the attention of leadership.
I will definitely think about this project whenever I end up in a management capacity.