Enrique
Sánchez

Enrique
Sánchez

Enrique
Sánchez

Testing new markets with an Activity Library

2023

Parabol

Parabol started as an agile meeting platform and quickly became a top choice for teams who needed to run Retrospectives, Standups, or Sprint Poker meetings. On 2023 we set out to explore new markets by expanding the type of activities our customers could run in our platform.

We knew from our data that the more the teams within a company used our tool, and the more types of activities a team ran in Parabol, the more value they would get from us and the more likely they were to stick around.

As a Product Design Lead, I worked closely with our Product Managers, Developers, Growth Experts and our Founders, to explore, test and validate our assumptions.

The plan

Based on our own research and customer feedback we already had a pretty good idea of the type of activities and jobs to be done that our customers were missing from both ours and our competitor's platforms. We narrowed it down to the following types:

  • Retrospective

  • Estimation

  • Standups / Check-in

  • Feedback

  • Strategy

Our goal then was to create a familiar and easy-to-use interface that enabled our users to both continue to run the meetings they already ran with Parabol, and introduce a new catalog of activity types and pre-made templates that expanded the kind of meetings they could run on Parabol, and value they were getting from us.


Note: activity illustrations by Frederique Matti

Based on our own research and customer feedback we already had a pretty good idea of the type of activities and jobs to be done that our customers were missing from both ours and our competitor's platforms. We narrowed it down to the following types:

  • Retrospective

  • Estimation

  • Standups / Check-in

  • Feedback

  • Strategy

Our goal then was to create a familiar and easy-to-use interface that enabled our users to both continue to run the meetings they already ran with Parabol, and introduce a new catalog of activity types and pre-made templates that expanded the kind of meetings they could run on Parabol, and value they were getting from us.


Note: activity illustrations by Frederique Matti

Based on our own research and customer feedback we already had a pretty good idea of the type of activities and jobs to be done that our customers were missing from both ours and our competitor's platforms. We narrowed it down to the following types:

  • Retrospective

  • Estimation

  • Standups / Check-in

  • Feedback

  • Strategy

Our goal then was to create a familiar and easy-to-use interface that enabled our users to both continue to run the meetings they already ran with Parabol, and introduce a new catalog of activity types and pre-made templates that expanded the kind of meetings they could run on Parabol, and value they were getting from us.


Note: activity illustrations by Frederique Matti

The Activity Library

In order to test our experiment, we designed a library of activities where users could browse our catalog of activity types, as well as get recommendations of activities based on various criteria.

A mockup of Parabol's new Activity Library, showing tabs for all the offered categories, and activity templates under each section.
A mockup of Parabol's new Activity Library, showing tabs for all the offered categories, and activity templates under each section.
A mockup of Parabol's new Activity Library, showing tabs for all the offered categories, and activity templates under each section.

Creating a flexible system

I designed a new architecture and component system that gave us the flexibility that we needed in order to test different activity types and presentation formats. This included alternative layouts for displaying and highlighting activities, as well as an end-to-end flow for searching and bookmarking activities.

This new flexibility also allowed us to explore ways in which we could improve the overall experience, zparticularly when it came to onboarding new users. From nudging them to try some of our most popular activities, to surfacing tutorials on how best to facilitate activities and coordinate their teams.

Outcomes and discovering a direction forward

We feature flagged the new Activity Library and released it by user cohorts. We found that users who experienced the new library where 20.5% more likely to start a meeting and tried different meeting types beyond our agile offering.

Once we released it to all users, we continued to see a positive trend. Users were spending more time on the platform as well and running more activity types beyond the traditional agile offering we already had.

These insights gave us the confidence to plan next steps and double down on our expansion strategy.

✌️

Enrique
Sánchez

Enrique
Sánchez

Enrique
Sánchez