Finding Product Market Fit: Supporting Millennial Women
Make Key Decisions
TheSkimm exists to support millennial women with some of their biggest challenges (chronic stress, work inequity, mental load imbalance, to name a few) and help them live smarter lives through its main offering: the Daily Skimm email, web, and mobile app experiences. In 2023, a decision to expand that vision led to new business opportunities and strategy. We would not just provide information but aim to assist women in making key life decisions by providing the necessary information, tools, and services to help navigate these big steps.
Impact: Led the team that was responsible for delivering a new integrated product vision that allowed for board buy in. Continued to evolve our MVP, creating a zero-to-one product that solves our customer’s biggest problems and integrates our suite of products through recognizable UX patterns.
Initial results:
10% of WAUs returned within 7 day period
20% of MAUs completed 1+ more steps in a single guide within a month
My Role: Product Design Director - Led Design, Research, and Strategy (Under VP of Design)
Timeline: Q1, Q2 2024
Prioritizing quick launches and deliveries led to a fragmented user experience.
We quickly set out to build this platform prioritizing quick launches and deliveries. 8 months later we’ve inherited lots of learnings but also a fractured user experience. It was not clear where the team should focus: do we keep building new features, iterate on what’s already shipped? Additionally guide production was slowing and it was clear we wouldn’t be able to serve any of our customers well.
Below a few of our key screens.
Our content catered to a broad audience, however with our low volume customers told us this was also adding to a disconnected experience.
Customers valued topics, but found solutions random. Feedback emphasized need for more content for better assistance and deep engagement.
Revisit decision-making as the value prop.
Our goal was to revisit the initial value prop: partner with her to accomplish the key decisions in her life and iterate on the features that best helped accomplish that. This meant we were updating our product strategy as well as our content strategy. Originally targeted at our total addressable market, we decided to pivot to address one persona and her life stages, this would help increase production and sharpen our messaging.
Our goals for H1 became:
Create one cohesive journey
Increase Guide Production
Get her to return and deeply engage
In collaboration with Sr. Product Designer, Andrea Torres
Leverage customer feedback effectively to optimize our most engaged paths and features.
In collaboration with our Sr. User Research we created a three pronged approach to collecting user feedback. Since we were in such early stages, we were relying heavily on user feedback to help guide us to where we should be investing more time.
Based on data and user testing, we removed several platform features to enhance the overall user experience and focus on further developing our checklist feature.
We learned users want their checklist to provide more guidance and help them achieve greater results. We started shifting from a checklist feature to become a full guide experience, that would eventually use AI to create a personalized guide.
We enhanced the functionality and utility of the checklist feature, making it more interactive and enabling a linear flow. We also included more details in each step.
We also updated the checklist to be a linear flow and guided experience.
Final Design of V2. Mobile and Desktop
Additionally we updated our content strategy to address just one persona and her life stages helped to focus our content and product marketing strategies.
New content was produced that focused solely on Susan’s life stages. Our guides unblock her by covering topics like:
Should I return to the paid workforce full-time?
Should I scale my side hustle?
Should I start therapy?
Can I afford to cover my child's college degree?
Should I move or renovate?
Does my family need a new budget?
Where should my family vacation?
Innovating and evolving the journey to be the place she goes to make key decisions in her life.
When the decision was made to shift our focus to create a full guide experience, our team organized several cross-functional workshops. It was in these workshops that we ideated on the functionality for V2 of the checklist but also what the future would be.
Building towards personalized, modular and flexible guides that meet her where she is.
Initial sketches and designs that we’d be able to use through the whole experience.
