Growth Marketing — Kevin Pham

Creating Growth Marketing Loops

PROJECT CASE STUDY

TL;DR - Our goal for this project was to increase user acquisition through growth marketing loops. We wanted to build a feature that would continue to create virality instead of having to invest effort into periodic marketing campaigns. For years, FieldLevel's marketing strategy was word of mouth and our commitment stories that autogenerated sharable announcement articles of the athlete's special day. This was the seed that grew into the idea of having athletes be able to share their profiles on their other social media channels. One of the biggest challenges to the project was the enormous change management effort, since we were transitioning 100,000+ athlete profiles from private to public. As a result of the feature release, we saw a 2000% increase in daily social shares and a 30% increase in user acquisition. Public profile has since overtaken commitment stories as the leader in user awareness and acquisition.

My role for this project: Product Designer

Business Goals & Objectives:

Goal: To increase user acquisition through growth marketing loops

Objectives:

Create a growth marketing feature that required minor upkeep
Do not disrupt SEO accumulation from Public Team Pages
Complete project before Q2 2000

(If you’d like to view My Product Process in detail click here)

Problems & Questions Brainstorm:

As part of our project kick-off meeting, all cross-functional groups (PM, Designer, Engineering, & Data) come together for a collaboration session where we share possible problems and questions that we have. The intent of this is to start getting ideas and thoughts on paper as we start to formulate our discovery plan.

Top Problem Hypothesis: Athletes have nothing available to share except their commitment stories
Top Questions: What type of content would get a non-FieldLevel users to click and sign-up for FieldLevel?

Stakeholder Interviews:

A significant reason why this project goal was selected was the previous success of our athlete commitment stories. Auto-generated sharable commitment stories were one of the company's most effective marketing tools early on. We needed to gain additional context and learnings from that project. These interviews were an excellent opportunity to collect some of the stakeholders' ideas and questions for us to bring back to the team to discuss.

User Research Calls & Surveys:

We wanted to speak with a couple of different user types to understand further the needs and pain points of sharing FieldLevel content. We spoke with:

Users who have previously shared commitment stories
Users that recently signed up (<100 days)
Users that are familiar with the platform (>365 days)

We realized that though people liked the commitment stories feature, that was only really helpful after they found their opportunity. They would love to share recruiting-related items to help them get exposure to more college coaches. Some users even pointed out that our competitors could share their recruiting profiles on social media. This solution was a no-brainer to them and something FieldLevel should have done better. Public profiles immediately became a top idea for our team. We needed to validate it more.

We quickly surveyed a segment of users wanting to confirm if they, too, felt a need for sharable content that would help them gain more exposure. We surveyed 100 athletes & parents. We received 75%+ feedback that they would share content on their social media if it could help them get more exposure. More than 40% of users expressed frustration that this was a limiting factor for using FieldLevel.

Data Discovery:

In terms of data, we had questions on the effectiveness of acquiring users through the commitment stories so that we could measure it against our future growth marketing initiatives. We also wanted baselines for the current user acquisition rate and breakdown.

Problem Defining Working Session:

In terms of data, we had questions on the effectiveness of acquiring users through the commitment stories so that we could measure it against our future growth marketing initiatives. We also wanted baselines for the current user acquisition rate and breakdown.

Define Problem Statement, Success Metrics, & Personas

Problem Statement: Users cannot leverage FieldLevel to get more exposure outside of FieldLevel's network.

Success Metrics:

Increase the number of sign-ups from social (~25 sign-up a month through social)
Increase the number of social shares (>1 a day)
Project completed by Q2 2000

We came to our success metrics based off the conversion rates of the commitment stories.

Conduct Brainstorm Session

We kicked off our brainstorming session with an affinity mapping exercise. This exercise allows all team members to contribute their ideas and see if any patterns or groups start to form. Here is the list of potential solutions:

Athletes to share public profiles
Commitment stories 2.0
Athletes to share their videos
Athletes to share their target school list
Athletes to share their college preferences

Impact / Effort Prioritization

Once we've compiled a list of potential solutions, we ask the engineers to estimate each idea's feasibility. I/E prioritization is helpful for talking through complexity levels and impact magnitude as we figure out what we want to experiment on first.

Sketching & User Flows

Once we've collected our ideas from the brainstorming session, we start sketching concepts and user flows. Sketches range from "Dream-state", full functionalities and dream experiences, "Nice to have" partial somewhat functionality, to "Must-have" MVP functionalities and a shortcut experience. It's essential to stay at a low fidelity so that the team and stakeholders can focus on the idea and not the UI interactions and pixels. We want to present a few options for the team to review, as visuals generally help progress decision-making.

Competitive / Comparative Analysis

This analysis is generally happening in tandem with the sketching and concept phase. Documenting how the competition or a comparative company is solving a similar problem is a valuable step toward understanding product similarities and differences. It is helping resources during the decision-making process.

User Surveys

To help our decision-making on which solution to pursue, we sent out another user survey to understand which shareable type of content users would share and rank them in value. We surveyed another segment of 100 coaches. The survey results were a resounding yes for "sharing athlete profile" and secondly, "sharing video".

Solutions Hypothesis Selection

The solutions hypothesis selection meeting is a collaboration of the product team and its stakeholders. The product team presents their proposed solution and findings, to which the stakeholder give their feedback and additional direction. For this project, it became increasingly clear that "athlete sharing public profile" would significantly impact and deliver value. The challenge is that the effort level for this undertake was going to be quite large, and the concern for issues with change management. This was considered against smaller solutions around "athlete's sharing video" and "sharing target school list".

Ultimately, the stakeholders decided to move forward with the proposed solution. We moved into the design/prototype phase.

Stakeholder Working Session

Our team needs to engage stakeholders early and often. A quick working session to discuss potential design and direction allows constant collaboration and transparency.

Wireframes & Peering Designing

This is where we start taking our sketches and concepts and adding a new layer of detail. A peer design request is made once a first pass on wireframes is done. This also allows designers to get an informal review and bounce ideas off each other.

Prototyping & User Testing

We turn the wireframes into a clickable prototype and assemble our user test plan. As we start user testing, we see feedback around the level of permissions needed for them to feel comfortable making their profiles public. A profile has sensitive information such as full name, contact info, photo, and location. The feedback from the user testing helped us evolve the controls to have more flexibility and privacy based on the athlete's and parent's comfort level. We also learned that there was some hesitation from club coaches around athlete public profiles due to the potential for other organizations to poach athlete membership. We continued to try and verify the magnitude of the problem and deemed the outlier acceptable for now.

Design Reviews

We begin all our design reviews, reminding the group of the project goals and objectives, the defined problem, and the proposed solution direction. We want to make sure that we make clear what we are trying to accomplish with the particular design review, whether it be a "state change" or a more specific UI/UX/content review. We briefly overview our findings, relevant data, or user feedback and then walk through the proposed flow. Details such as a rollout plan or implementation details are generally not included during this review. We are either given feedback and asked to do another round of iterations or are given the green light to move forward.

Tech Feasibility

Without going too deep technically, it's an effort to turn a private network into a public one. However, we engage the engineers throughout the design phase to understand what guardrails and limitations we face and get another valuable perspective. In this feasibility check, we learned some video and contact info rules, which helped us refine our proposed solution.

Legal Feasibility

Since the changes we are proposing have to deal with children under 18 and their private information, we needed to check with our lawyers to ensure it didn't violate our Terms and Conditions.

Change Management Strategy Session

The change management aspect of this project was one of the largest in our company's history. Not only were we changing the rules of the network, but we were changing the way we spoke to our value proposition. This effort needs a clear and structured rollout to our internal teams so they can be prepared as we roll this out to our network. We decided to break the rollout into phases:

Phase #1 - Internal Announcement & Demos

Phase #2 - 1st announcement through email and in-app to users (athletes, parents, promoters, and recruiters)

Phase #3 - 2nd announcement with CTA to pre-set profile to private - (athletes, parents, promoters, and recruiters)

Deploy #1 - Launch new user Public Profile settings

Deploy #2 - Launch legacy user Public Profile settings

Phase #6 - Announce to all users that the new public profile is out

We review our change management plan with stakeholders and begin communicating our change management plan to the rest of the company.

Deliverables

Once stakeholders give the green light, we prepare the development deliverables. These consist of redlines outlining specific components and patterns, states, notification triggers, dynamic data points, and API calls that must be made. An updated journey map and prototype are also included for reference. Once it's ready for a handoff, the designer will meet with the developers and PM to review the deliverables and provide additional context. Because we are dealing with a new user/legacy user type, we are feature-flagging different setting configurations for the separate phased rollout.

Pre-launch Communications, QA, & Tracking

Once we have a game plan for our test we make sure that we notify the company on what we’re hoping to test and what changes can be expected. We set up a meeting with the Customer Success team to give a demo of what’s to come in case they need to field any customer service issues. There also is coordination around updating any FAQs or help documentation.

We run a couple of rounds of QA testing and log a few errors and cosmetic changes.

We also set up our interaction recording software (Hotjar) so that we can observe user interactions and discuss any visible changes or experience failures that may need to be immediately fixed. Because we are also testing our new CTA positioning we add Google Analytics click tracking.

Launch & Post-launch Communications

Deploy #1 is live!

We sent out a company-wide release note. The team has a mini-celebration!

After a few days of observations and testing, we launched deploy #2!

We will start working on the next item on the priority list concurrently.

Initial Results

In the 1st week, we saw a 10% public profile adoption rate amongst the legacy users and 2% share profile share rate among new users. After the 2nd week, we saw an 18% adoption rate and 6% profile share rate. We also started to see athletes taking their new public profile links, placing them into their social media bio, and sharing them with their feeds. Initially, we were pleased with the tool's engagement, but as weeks passed, we noticed that engagement on the social post needed the traction we'd hoped. We began to investigate this issue.

Project Follow-up

We discovered that though we successfully got athletes to share on social media, their posts needed to reach optimal audiences. We learned that # hashtags are a powerful aspect of discovery and organization that people use to search on social media platforms such as X and Facebook. We quickly made an iteration to the share tool to start including relevant hashtags #uncommitted. This minor tweak was all the different for these shared public profiles. We saw engagement of the post skyrocket, and subsequently, our user acquisition numbers also started to spike.

Over the next six months, we saw a 2000% increase in daily social shares and a 30% increase in user acquisition and an adoption rate of 35% for legacy user. Public profile has since overtaken commitment stories as the leader in user awareness and acquisition.