Product-led Feature Growth

Streamlining internal processes, empowering customers, and improving the self-service experience for clients.

Dwolla

Shipped May 2021

In early 2020, we shifted Dwolla to a product-led growth strategy. After we revamped our onboarding process, we found that our clients didn’t have an easy process to add new features. As a result, we were missing out on upsell-related revenue opportunities

Understanding the problem

Dwolla has a host of features that helps our clients improve the experience for their business and their end users. This includes anything from faster payment speeds, to addenda records.

Through initial discovery calls with our clients, we learned that a majority of our clients were unaware of our list of feature offerings. Additionally, when a client did want to add a feature, the process of enabling the feature for the client was a heavily manual process, took longer than the client expected, and pulled the client out of the Dwolla ecosystem.

Who does this impact?

After initial discovery calls, we identified the core personas involved in feature upsells from a client perspective. By identifying the key personas, we were able to create a shared understanding of their motivations and pain points throughout the process.

Competitive analysis

I conducted a comprehensive competitive analysis. This involved collecting screenshots of various competitor products. By reviewing our competitors, I gathered insights and ideas that helped in shaping our own UX. This analysis not only allowed me to benchmark our UX against industry standards but also provided inspiration to create innovative experiences for our users.

User journey

In order to create a shared understanding of our ideal upsell process, I led a (virtual) journey mapping workshop with key stakeholders from sales, legal, risk & compliance, marketing, and customer success. This exercise helped us create our north star for the feature upsell process in the dashboard.

Feature mapping

Dwolla has a lot of features with varying levels of complexity to enable. Enabling features can be as easy as flipping a switch, or as grueling as signing a new service agreement. Working with my product manager, our next step was defining which features to include in each of the milestones for the features page.

We sent out a survey to internal stakeholders from sales, customer success, and legal. The survey asked them to evaluate each feature in terms of effort to enable and how often clients were asking for the feature. We then used the average scores for each feature to bucket them into each milestone.

Sketching

I hosted a (virtual) sketching brainstorm with my design team. I set the stage with the 4 areas to focus on:

How might the user find the features page in the dashboard?
How might the user browse current and additional features?
How might the user learn more about a feature?
How might the user learn more about a feature?

Mockups

Taking into account the ideas from the sketching session, I created mockups that incorporated the key elements the group discussed.

Usability testing

We leveraged UsabilityHub to conduct usability tests. Through a series of tests and iterative design improvements, we were able to gain valuable insights into how users interacted with the page. By analyzing real user feedback, we were able to make data-informed decisions that improved the accessibility and ease-of-use of the page.

Hypotheses:

Users know where to go to view new features.
Users can identify what feature they need based on the name and description.
Users expect to see the features they are speaking to sales about.
Users are aware of what features they will need to pay for to enable.

Refining mockups

After reviewing the mockups with the team, our engineers identified an opportunity to streamline the development process. Rather than creating individual call-to-action buttons for each feature, they recommended using a single button to simplify the code and reduce the potential for errors. By taking this approach, we were able to speed up development while still delivering a seamless user experience.