Care.com transformation
How we took a public company with an outdated product, crippling tech and design debt, and a stock price of just $5 per share to new heights in 3 years.
The Story
Starting in 2015, I took over as Sr. Director of Product Design at Care.com. Over the ensuing 3 years, the company made a strong commitment to overhauling their products and platforms. My team, which grew to 16 designers in three locations, helped define the next generation for the product, inspired a new design and innovation process, and elevated the company's profitability and stock price significantly. Below is a short summary on how we did it.
design team
We leveled our existing team on iOS, Android and responsive design, adding 13 designers and researchers, focused on elevating the role of design across the organization.
mobile first
Increased TV advertising moved mobile traffic to 70 percent very quickly. We focused on building expertise on mobile apps and mobile web on all squads.
move to agile
We moved from waterfall to agile and adopted tribes, squads and chapters to give our teams product ownership and set them up for success.
design thinking
We quickly taught squads the fundementals of design sprints, user research, and co-design and measured success not just in financial terms, but in how well they solved user's problems.
design system
We created a cross platform, modern design system that resulted in consistency of the user experience across all devices and platforms.
user research
We combined Care's A/B testing with new qualitative research program. Our in depth user interviews developed accurate, empathic user personas, journey's and stories that gave us valuable insights into how to enhance the platform.
Building a Design System
Design and Tech debt can be a dibilitating and frustrating burden on a company with a decade of A/B testing and rapid iteration behind them. After years of rapid growth, Care.com was suffering from a burdensome platform that was slowing development to a crawl. We took an aggressive approach in building a new design system that could work across every platform, and on any device.
Following principles of design thinking and agile methodologies our squads quickly began redesigning specific areas of the user journey within the core product using the new system. Within a year we had all new visitor, home, search, navigation, user profiles and hiring experiences that contributed to higher NPS and revenue success on the platform. The years 2016 thru 2019 represented a comprehensive upgrade of the Care.com ecosystem for B2B, US Consumer and the International platform.
Improving process
In a company unfamiliar with user research, we set a plan in motion to utilize design sprints in 2016, focusing our efforts on user research, personas, workshops and analysis of data to drive a rework of our mobile experience. We piloted this new methodology on our Enrollment squad, which after 3 months of intensive work had great success in increasing conversion of our visitor traffic to premium subscribers.
Following the principles of design thinking and agile methodologies our squads quickly began revitalizing specific areas of the user journey within the core product. Within a year we had new search, navigation, user profiles and hiring experiences that contributed to user success on the platform. The years 2016 thru 2019 represented a comprehensive modification of the entire product line for B2B, US Consumer and our International platform.
Improving the Design Organization
As we grew our teams at Care, we were able to build chemistry in cross-functional squads that could workshop new problems together. Over a 1.5 year time frame we hired new data science, product management, designers and researchers that would be able to take complicated challenges head on as effective teams. As we did so, design became more of an essential part of how we worked, and leveraged the team's skills in research, empathy, journeying, storytelling and overall UX that had not been utilized before at Care. As a result we elevated design from an internal agency "resource" at the company, to a core part of how product was researched, concepted, tested and developed.
In weekly design chapter meetings we worked together as a 17 person team across three locations to discuss the challenges we faced both in the product's design, but also in elevating design as a core to how Care.com's organization functioned. My design directors and principals actively engaged their peers in engineering and product management to build the case for design as a practice of research, prototyping, user testing and test & iteration. It was a challenge for an organiztion so A/B testing focused with top down founder product influence...but in the end we willed the organization to a new way of working with great effect.
Care.com Designs
