TheyDo is a customer journey management tool. Bastiaan is the “Journey Owner” at TheyDo. He is responsible for analyzing the data to help the team make data-driven decisions to optimize the journey from acquisition to retention, and monetization.
“TheyDo is on a mission to help organizations scale Journey Management.”
The background
TheyDo.io was founded in 2020 and currently employs 16 people, all working remotely across 5 countries. Bastiaan:
“TheyDo is on a mission to grow the journey-centric approach to managing customer experience. We call it journey management. No more messy whiteboards, duplicated efforts, or wasted resources.
We are excited to standardize journey management and firmly believe that the best companies work journey-centric.”
To accomplish that mission, TheyDo built a product so intuitive that companies could onboard themselves onto TheyDo.
Nine months ago, they decided to better understand if their self-served users were successful, and if not, why.
The challenge
TheyDo had 2 main challenges
- Build a great self-served product
- Convert and retain high potentials leads
The solution
Improve product activation
Bastiaan noticed that their product activation was low. In particular they noticed a significant drop between the first and second journey created.
After a few weeks of iterations the team achieved their goal to improve their retention curve, and make it less steep.
Bastiaan also looked into their product retention using a daily scale (retention at day 0, day 1, day 2, etc). Using this method he figured out the exact number of days after which users stop returning to their product.
Indeed product retention was the first reason why Bastiaan started to use June over Amplitude:
“We also have Amplitude but I find myself using June more and more as my primary analytics tool. The same goes for the Product Owner in our development team.
June feels fresh and modern, it's easy to use and the visuals are great. The report pages, with graphs and cohorts on one page, are insightful and complete.”
This helped his team craft a relevant first day experience asking the job to be done and guiding users through the product, which in return improved activation.
The team now thinks about going further and plans on adding mockup data after to a mock up journey.
Measuring PMF for self-served users
A product may have a good activation but retain poorly.
Bastiaan confirmed that not-only self-served users had a good activation rate, but also that those users were staying to use the product over time.
For that he uses acquisition cohorts and checks that most companies stay over time. He is comparing self-served and sales onboarded companies.
Removing users that didn’t set up the product
TheyDo acquires a broad set of new users. To fix that Bastiaan and his team decided to pay particular attention to onboarded users.
Bastiaan created a group of users that set up TheyDo (users that created at least 1 journey, 1 persona, 1 opportunity and 1 solution). This narrowed audience helped TheyDo to focus on onboarded users and compare retention vs. the total base audience.
Keep a view of the product blockers
You can easily lose track of your main product bottleneck when you only look into a specific set of users.
To avoid that situation Bastiaan keeps measures of what users do across their product at a high level. He defined 3 main milestones as follow:
Figure out which features are popular
Activation and retention give TheyDo the confirmation that their product is being used at a high level. But it does not tell Bastiaan what features are being used the most.
To get this granularity, Bastiaan and the team use feature release reports. These reports tell them if the adoption of a feature is at the level they expected.
For more advanced features, Bastiaan is using funnel reports to understand the main hurdles to using them.
For all these reports, Bastiaan makes sure to remove TheyDo employees (“email” does not contain “theydo.io”).
Rally the team behind the numbers
Bastiaan’s role is to enable his team and to make sure that leading metrics are visible to everyone.
To nail that problem Bastiaan is using Slack notification to make sure metrics are visible once a week to the entire team.
This is an example of a Slack notification he set up:
Bastiaan also runs another session once a week where he shares with the rest of the team the main learnings coming from data in June.
Recently they learned that their product had two happy paths.
In his own words:
“In the ideal workflow, the Triple Diamond which is based on design thinking, you first create opportunities and then solutions. Most users indeed follow this path. But in the data we saw there’s a sizable group that first create solutions and then opportunities.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but insights like this do fuel internal talks about e.g. playbooks, product tours, and if there’s a ‘perfect‘ flow.”
The outcome
Now TheyDo is able to measure the success of their self-served product, and figure out which features are driving recurring usage. They’re also able to keep a high level picture of their business and rally behind their numbers.
Based on the measured success of the self-served product, TheyDo recently introduced a new pricing plan so that large companies can onboard too, without human touch.
“ We learned that sometimes large companies don’t want to start a ‘formal’ sales process but do need additional features.
Based on the results of the self-served plan we introduced an intermediary plan for enterprise self-serve which within days gained traction and subscribers” – Bastiaan, Journey Owner @ TheyDo
