As a user research intern on PlanGrid's Growth Team, I combined quantitative analysis with user and internal stakeholder interviews to identify value propositions, customer segmentations and prioritize target populations.
Image credits: Silvia Brazzoduro on Unsplash
PlanGrid builds project management and field productivity software for the construction industry. The company launched in 2013 with an iPad app that allowed users to markup blueprints on a mobile device and eliminates the need for bringing expensive paper blueprints to construction sites. Over the years, PlanGrid has expanded its scope to cover many more construction related tasks.
Screenshot from the PlanGrid website.
Most customers follow a typical funnel when becoming a paying customer. They first interact with marketing content of some sort, explore the product on their own, then get in contact with sales to purchase a license.
As a product organization, we noticed that there was a significant portion of new users that drop off very early. This makes it difficult for sales reps to reach out to them and work with them to fit PlanGrid to their needs before trying to close a deal with them.
As of early 2019, our 30-day retention graph looked a little like this:
30-day retention for new users that sign up for PlanGrid.
Over 50% of new users drop-off after the first day. This initial drop highlighted how important a users early experience with PlanGrid was. If we could increase retention past day 1, our sales organization would have a bigger pool of potential customers to work with.
When I joined as a user research intern, the Growth Team at PlanGrid had already been trying to solve this problem. At first, they tried to think through different reasons as to why there was such a steep drop-off on day 1. Was our pricing too high? Was our initial experience confusing? Did people have the wrong expectations going into our product? There are a lot of potential reasons why someone might leave your app or website.