An in-depth exploration of the challenges, learnings, and successes of bringing Vistaprint’s latest Website Builder, code-named “Tower”, from idea to prototype to launch.
Alex is passionate about creating and growing powerful web and mobile products that make a significant impact in millions of people’s lives. He also enjoys building and managing the development teams that help achieve that mission. Over the course of Alex’s career, he has observed many different types of Product Owners across various sizes and types of companies across several industries. From this experience, and the experience of his Product Owner peers at Webs, Pagemodo, and Vistaprint he has gained valuable know-how of the industry, and the product development process.
12. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL
PM’s Best Friend
Customer
Sites
The
Launch
KPIs
Customer
Feedback
The
Prototype
Historic
Website
Builders
13. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL
PM’s Best Friend
Customer
Sites
The
Launch
KPIs
Customer
Feedback
The
Prototype
Historic
Website
Builders
14. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL
PM’s Best Friend
Customer
Sites
The
Launch
KPIs
Customer
Feedback
The
Prototype
Historic
Website
Builders
15. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL
Listening to Customers
Customer
Sites
The
Launch
KPIs
Customer
Feedback
The
Prototype
Historic
Website
Builders
16. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL
Reacting to Customer Feedback
Do We Need Multipage?
Do we need full-featured
eComm?
Do We Need More
Templates?
Does Onboarding Make an
Impact?
Yes!
Yes!
No!
Yes!
Customer
Sites
The
Launch
KPIs
Customer
Feedback
The
Prototype
Historic
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Builders
17. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL
Improving Metrics
Publish Rate
Churn
Net Promoter
Score
25% 60%
50% 30%
25 55
$75 $175 Lifetime Value
Customer
Sites
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Launch
KPIs
Customer
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Historic
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Builders
18. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL
The Launch
10%
20%
50%
100%
Dec-15 Jan-16 Feb-16 Mar-16 Apr-16 May-16 Jun-16 Jul-16 Aug-16 Sep-16
Percent Getting New Website Builder
Customer
Sites
The
Launch
KPIs
Customer
Feedback
The
Prototype
Historic
Website
Builders
24. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL
Give Tower a Try!
bit.ly/TowerWebsite
Username: [anything]
Password: vpswift
@amitch5903
AlexMitchell.co
Feedback?
Customer
Sites
The
Launch
KPIs
Customer
Feedback
The
Prototype
Historic
Website
Builders
Hinweis der Redaktion
Alex Mitchell from Vistaprint Digital. Vistaprint Digital is the Digital products business of Vistaprint, the leader in customized print products for small businesses.
I want to tell you a story about the journey to build our latest website builder.
Who has built a website before?
Who used a website builder to build that website?
Was it an enjoyable experience? A delightful one?
Video Links: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByvDHeygnMuwREp1Yk94NUVYS1U/view?usp=sharing
Youtube (Backup; lower quality): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWL7SXGoAUE&feature=youtu.be
This is how pretty much every website builder worked in late 2014.
You would drag and drop individual elements onto the page and you were forced to be the designer of how these elements fit together
As you can see its pretty difficult and time consuming to drag each of these elements and position them on the canvas
But…This is what almost everyone was doing in 2014!
It was incredibly difficult for our customers to build a good looking website in this way
Our customers average 35-50 years old and very lower technical experience
They wanted to build a good looking website and we were giving them the wrong tool to accomplish that goal
It was incredibly difficult for our customers to build a good looking website in this way
Our customers average 35-50 years old and very lower technical experience
They wanted to build a good looking website and we were giving them the wrong tool to accomplish that goal
On mobile, results were even worse
We had a “mobile website builder” but required lot of extra work for the customer to get something that looked good
Even if a customer figured out how to build a good looking desktop site…
the chance that they could also build a great looking mobile site was close to 0
With that understanding of our customers, we set out over a year and a half ago to change the way websites get built
We knew what was wrong and we had an idea that we wanted to test of what was right
Idea centered around the idea of “blocks”, pre-built designer made sections of a website that could be stacked on top of each-other to quickly build a website
Best of all, this framework would make the site instantly responsive, working on all devices.
Because of how this new builder worked, we code-named the new builder “Tower”
A prototype was built in 5 weeks with a team of 3 developers
We wanted to test if the “blocks” concept resonated with our users
In 5 weeks, we stood up a builder prototype that could be used completely separate from the rest of our infrastructure.
It had most of the major features needed to build a website and put our hypothesis front and center for testing
We wanted to compare this prototype to best-in-class website builders in the market
What Did We Do?
We conducted in person testing with 10 individuals asking them to use both Wix’s latest builder and the Tower prototype
Remember, at this point, Wix’s builder had years of engineering effort invested in it, while this prototype had only been built in 5 weeks!
The results?
Tower won in Net Promoter Score (likely to recommend), Ease of Use, Build speed and tied in Preference and Professionalism.
This was a MAJOR WIN for such a new concept, we knew we were onto something.
It was time to dedicate more resources to building this website builder!
What Did We Do?
We conducted in person testing with 10 individuals asking them to use both Wix’s latest builder and the Tower prototype
Remember, at this point, Wix’s builder had years of engineering effort invested in it, while this prototype had only been built in 5 weeks!
The results?
Tower won in Net Promoter Score (likely to recommend), Ease of Use, Build speed and tied in Preference and Professionalism.
This was a MAJOR WIN for such a new concept, we knew we were onto something.
It was time to dedicate more resources to building this website builder!
Now that we had proven the prototype, it was time to start the build out of this new builder.
Introducing Intercom
Now that we were ready to build, we looked at what tools we wanted to embed in Tower to keep the flow of customer feedback constant
Although it was still a new company at the time, we decided to implement Intercom as a chat, email, and engagement platform
Intercom allows a product manager, marketer, or anyone to easily target and message customers
Also lets us support customers with help inside of an application
Interaction with Customers
Here is a small sample of questions we get about our builder through Intercom chat and email responses.
While we have traditional help documentation through Zendesk, we find that the additional layer of Intercom helps customers find help even easier
Depth of Data
Another great benefit about Intercom is the depth of data available on each user.
You can track any descriptive information you want about a customer, group like customers together, and target them easily for messaging.
Intercom serves as a fun and easy to use database for product managers
But Intercom wasn’t the only channel we used to gather feedback. We layered on many other sources of customer feedback as we built and iterated on our product.
Listening to customers in all channels:
Cancellation Calls
Intercom
Detractor Surveys
In-office testing
Usertesting.com
Personal Emails
Hotjar
Customer Feedback Only Matters if You Use It
What did we learn from customer feedback? A LOT
Here is just a small sample of decisions that we made directly informed by customer feedback
Go through 4 examples
As important as what customers say is, what they actually do is even more important
What metrics did we measure, what did we measure against?
How did we choose these metrics?
We chose to track 4 key metrics that either correlated or tracked the experience we were delivering and the value of our customers.
Publish Rate
Churn
Net Promoter Score
Lifetime Value
The Launch
From December – June, we tracked these improvements in our KPIs against our legacy website builder.
Once we had beat our legacy product in all metrics, we started funneling more new customers to our builder to test its’ reliability
Once reliability was confirmed, we ramped to 50% and then 100% in August and September.
Video Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByvDHeygnMuwVDBPTVZtVmhoZHM/view?usp=sharing
Youtube (backup, low quality): https://youtu.be/UgHo0ZnXEc4
https://fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/urfmrykxvm
But the real proof is in the customer websites
http://www.explorethelowcountry.com/
http://www.whetstonesantiques.com/
http://blacktimepieces.vpweb.com/
Takeaways:
Give Tower a Try
Building a great New Product requires:
A vision
Constant testing/refinement/feedback from customers
An amazing development team