User Research & product strategy

Setting the product strategy to boost revenue growth

COMPANY

Backbase

ROLE

Senior UX Designer

EXPERTISE

UX/UI Design

YEAR

2023 & 2024

Project description

Backbase is an Engagement Banking Platform company supplying white label experiences to millions of users worldwide through partner banks.

My role

I was the sole UX Lead doing the research, problem defining & solutioning at a high level for the entire product.

Background

As our product grew out of it’s MVP stage, our marketing campaign solution was struggling to gain product market fit. We were missing key maturity features & we weren’t gaining many clients for our product.

We ended up with a multi year product strategy that evolved over time to gain Product Market Fit.

The team

I worked with: Product Director, User Researcher, Lead Product Manager and later Product Managers.

The challenge

With our product struggling to gain revenue & product market fit, we faced a difficult situation. As a company, we had put a large investment into the marketing product for banks as a bet on personalization.

Given that our product was struggling to sell, we needed to come up with an evolving strategy to get to product market fit, and beyond, as quickly as possible.

We set an ambitious target - by the end of 2024, we will have doubled our revenue & clients from 4 to 8.

2024 Strategy

Research

I decided to undertake interviews, along with our User Researcher, in order to gain a better understanding of the situation we faced. We knew that we were struggling to sell our product, but why was the question we needed to answer.

Who we spoke to

We spoke to 3 client banks and our internal sales team about our product, interviewing them on what they thought of our software, what feedback our clients had and what feedback our sales team was getting.

Lacking maturity

The answer was very clear. Our platform had just come out of MVP stage in 2022, but had failed to mature in 2023. The software felt incomplete, ineffective and a struggle to run campaigns within the banking apps on.

Problem definition

We had a high level, clear problem. What we needed to define is exactly how the software not “maturing” affected the app we were creating. In other words, what did this actually mean in practice?

In order to find this out, we analysed the interviews in more detail & hosted a workshop to find themes. We came out with 3 problem areas for 2024: Linking, basic software maturity, and campaign channels.

Linking

Our customers spoke about how, using our existing software, they weren’t able to convert people via the apps. The problem was, to open a savings account, or apply for a credit card was only available via the web & mobile apps. Our software only allowed you to redirect to a public website - which caused problems.

Basic software maturity

Again and again, we heard very similar stories - your software is lacking basic features. For example, people wanted to do campaign lifecycle work such as archiving campaigns, pausing (yes pausing!) & ending campaigns. This made the software feel incomplete.

Campaign channels

At the end of 2023, we had 2 channels - Banners & Secure Messaging for marketers. The main problem was that these channels are reactive. They rely on users being in the banking apps. If we could bring more channels that are more proactive to our app, we’d increase sales of our app.

The strategy

Proactive channels
We would introduce two new channels - Push Notifications & Overlays. By doing this, we would encourage banks to swap costly SMS' for more trusted Notifications & Overlays to bring attention to one topic.
Internal linking, an industry first
To provide marketers with the option to target links in-app, we provided a simple, industry first deeplink selector
campaign lifecycle maturity
In order to increase the maturity of our software, we would provide the option to end a campaign, pause a campaign and archive a campaign
Proactive channels
We would introduce two new channels - Push Notifications & Overlays. By doing this, we would encourage banks to swap costly SMS' for more trusted Notifications & Overlays to bring attention to one topic.
Internal linking, an industry first
To provide marketers with the option to target links in-app, we provided a simple, industry first deeplink selector
campaign lifecycle maturity
In order to increase the maturity of our software, we would provide the option to end a campaign, pause a campaign and archive a campaign
Proactive channels
We would introduce two new channels - Push Notifications & Overlays. By doing this, we would encourage banks to swap costly SMS' for more trusted Notifications & Overlays to bring attention to one topic.
Internal linking, an industry first
To provide marketers with the option to target links in-app, we provided a simple, industry first deeplink selector
campaign lifecycle maturity
In order to increase the maturity of our software, we would provide the option to end a campaign, pause a campaign and archive a campaign
Proactive channels
We would introduce two new channels - Push Notifications & Overlays. By doing this, we would encourage banks to swap costly SMS' for more trusted Notifications & Overlays to bring attention to one topic.
Internal linking, an industry first
To provide marketers with the option to target links in-app, we provided a simple, industry first deeplink selector
campaign lifecycle maturity
In order to increase the maturity of our software, we would provide the option to end a campaign, pause a campaign and archive a campaign