@ LeadCrunch.ai
LeadCrunch.ai is a marketing technology startup that uses AI to facilitate more effective marketing strategies. When I joined LeadCrunch, it had recently pivoted to focus on selling AI guided qualified lead campaigns. In these campaigns, the AI prioritizes targets and humans engage the leads. To help users place their orders, I worked with business stakeholders to define the product vision and design an extensible AI marketing platform.
After pivoting to selling qualified lead campaigns, LeadCrunch experienced rapid growth in demand. However, taking client orders was a manual process conducted over email and phone. These orders are highly complex with dozens of requirements and materials needed to generate the perfect lead. Taking these orders over phone and email was error prone and slow, limiting our ability to capture the demand for our product. We needed a way to take the pressure off our sales team and allow clients to place their own orders.
Additionally, LeadCrunch was looking for avenues to expand the product offering. Although we initially offered only one type of lead engagement, strategically we wanted to branch out and offer more services in our product. We needed a way to help organize and manage that complexity, making it easy to extend the product offering. With these objectives in mind, my team and I set out to design and build a product experience that aligned the short term needs of taking orders more scalably with the long term objective of expanding our revenue streams.
The first task to building this product was developing a deep understanding of our users, their workflows and how we fit into their world. I worked with a product manager to conduct extensive user interviews with marketers, both clients and non clients. Our goal was to develop a customer journey of how they planned, executed and analyzed their lead generation campaigns. We wanted to identify all the touch points in the life of a lead in our client organizations. We also conducted interviews with non-marketers who were connected to the lead gen process, such as sales team members and finance team members.
As a result of this work, we identified a four phase process that our clients used when running their demand generation efforts. This involved planning their campaigns with finance, selecting vendors (like LeadCrunch) and executing their campaigns, transmitting the leads to the Sales team, and finally analyzing the results and their ROI. For each of these steps I mapped out the pain points that marketers experienced to find opportunities for our product to meet their needs.
One aspect that complicated this analysis was that there was a great deal of variation among the marketers we spoke to. Many distinctions emerged among our user base - large companies did things differently than small companies, agency marketers had one set of metrics, direct clients had another. To keep track of these variations, I developed a multi-layered customer research database to organize our user research notes. This helped us explore trends at multiple levels and synthesize observations about our multi-dimensional users.
Another ongoing task to inform our product strategy was evaluating market trends and and our competitors. To help with this, I worked with product managers to identify competing products and evaluate what set us apart from them. I also attended marketing conferences and events to conduct ethnographic research about our users. I created strategic analysis reports for executives at LeadCrunch to help inform product decisions based on the data I collected.
To help drive empathy with clients and inform feature selection, we conducted a series of workshops to develop customer personas. In these we distilled our user research into a few primary players in the demand generation workflow. These helped the team understand the underlying motivations and tasks that drove different members of our client organizations.
With this background research in mind, the design and executive teams conducted an offsite workshop to craft a larger strategic vision for the product. In this workshop we created a future state map of the customer experience using the “11 star journey” ideation method. In this process, we mapped out the high level steps of the customer journey. Next, we filled in the gaps with ideas on the best possible ways the customer could experience each step. The result was a collection of feature ideas that would give the customer a truly differentiated experience using our product and services.
Following this ideation, I organized the ideas into a customer journey map that summarized the product vision. I then helped socialize this with the rest of the company to gain interdepartmental alignment and incorporate their ideas and feedback. This vision document organized our long term product vision and helped define the bigger picture that we were looking to build.
The key strategic objective that we identified was extending the product into new channels and applying AI to optimize the entire marketing workflow. As our research had shown, marketers were often overwhelmed with the decisions about who would get what message through what channel. At the same time, LeadCrunch was missing out on revenue opportunities by only focusing on one channel. By creating an automated, multi-channel product we could simplify our user’s workflows while expanding their lifetime value using our product.
With the product vision defined, we set out to design a product architecture that could realize this vision. One challenge in this process was how to re-organize the features of our current product into a more extensible and easy to use framework. I led a series of whiteboarding ideation sessions with product managers, executives, data scientists and engineers to help piece together a vision of how the product could work.
In these white boarding sessions, we took the various concepts involved in each order and grouped them into different categories to simplify the moving parts. I then took these categories and tested them with users, iteratively adjusting them along the way. What we developed was a four part information architecture that organized our product around the units of programs, audiences, activities and delivery instructions.
What we developed was a four part information architecture that organized our product around the units of programs, audiences, activities and delivery instructions. These four components allowed us to restructure our campaigns into modular programs that elegantly organized the complexity of our product.
The central concept we developed was reconceptualizing our disparate "targeting criteria" for each campaign into discrete audiences. Audiences define a re-usable population that a client wants to engage with their program. Users can create audiences in a flexible process and re-use them between orders. This reduces the workload for creating subsequent programs, and also makes it easier to track how saturated a given audience has become.
The next key piece of this information architecture are modular marketing activities. These define the specific outreach actions that users want LeadCrunch to run as part of their program. These include things like content syndication, display advertisement, phone engagement. Clients can add one or more activity to their programs, defining a set of multiple things they want to have done to their audiences. These organize the set of work that LeadCrunch will perform as part of a program into discrete, more easily trackable units.
The final piece of the information architecture are modular delivery instructions. These are the mechanisms by which the output of a program gets delivered to a client. Our clients had lots of different preferences for how they wanted leads delivered, such as by email, or by form post, and delivery instructions allowed us to extend the product to meet what ever delivery needs clients might have.
With this product architecture, clients can define the programs they want LeadCrunch to run by adding these modules to their orders. Setting up each module provides a self contained scope, allowing users to focus just one aspect of their order at a time. The re-usability of modules across orders ensures that users never need to enter the same information twice, providing a more streamlined experience.
As LeadCrunch’s product offering grew, this IA made it simple to add new engagement activities and audience targeting dimensions, without overhauling the whole product experience. The modular framework helped keep the complexity of the user experience and service design to a minimum.
After defining this information architecture I worked with another designer to create high fidelity interactive prototypes from our initial IA concept. To test our hypothesis and refine the experience, we conducted user interviews and usability tests to gather client feedback. We found that clients appreciated the clarity with which the product re-organized their workflow.
Many of the clients we tested the designs with also immediately understood how the modular architecture could be expanded, and had ideas for what else they would want to add. In addition to being easy to use, the product seemed to resonate deeply with our user's mental model of their work.
Although in general clients reacted very positively to the information architecture, follow up user testing led us to modify and extend the designs. We found that many clients were attached to their existing marketing automation systems and wanted our product to integrate with their current workflow.
To accommodate this, I helped select a third party integration platform and design a delivery method component that allowed our system to plug directly into any CRM. I also worked with the customer success team to define the complex service design user flows involved in setting up and verifying CRM connections. We added this as an optional delivery instruction so that clients could the re-use the integration as needed.
This strategy had the secondary benefit of opening the door for our data science team to ingest outcome data via this connection, if clients were willing to share it. The data on how leads we delivered performed was then used to enhance the effectiveness of our AI targeting service for that client in the future.
Another finding of our user tests was that some clients actually preferred the white glove experience that we offered, and were not interested in a self service product. These clients didn’t want another system they had to log in to. To accommodate these clients, we extended the product design to include an Admin experience. From this experience, our internal team could take advantage of the product to organize new orders for clients.
After incorporating customer feedback into these designs, I worked closely with the product managers and engineers to guide the creation of the product. The product strategy was implemented in an agile method, which benefited greatly from the modular design philosophy we had employed. Throughout the implementation process I worked with our engineers to ensure that the interface and API’s were to align with the long term product strategy.
This product became the foundation for LeadCrunch’s client facing user experience. It allowed LeadCrunch to align it’s short term product goals with a long term strategy and vision. The platform streamlined the process of gathering client order requirements and reduced expensive errors arising from miscommunication. At the same time, it helped smooth the process of incorporating new marketing channels into the product. Ultimately, it set the stage to rapidly expand the company’s revenue streams into new channels.