Let's Talk!

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About the project

Let’s Talk! is a cloud-based listening solution that helps school leaders and their teams engage their communities.

My role

I starting helping K12 Insight in the early stages of Let's Talk! growth, shortly after they launched their beta version in late 2013. Since then, we've grown the solution to help thousands of K-12 leaders and countless students.

As a product manager, I help K12 Insight and their respective teams (design, dev, etc.) continuously improve Let's Talk! for their customers. To achieve this, I work directly with sales, client support, service delivery, marketing, c-suite, and our customers to gather requirements, understand pain-points, fall in the love with the problem, and work tirelessly to craft and validate solutions.

Achievements

• Doubled daily active user metric by launching weekly digest emails
• Introduced and implemented new specification template for all new features
• Managed eight major releases over a two year period
• Introduced and implemented style guide and tone guide development
• Conceptualize and launched the Let's Talk! knowledge base - aka the "Learning Center"
• Reduced hands-on technical training by 50% through launch of automated on-boarding feature
• Introduced success metrics definition and review process - driving stronger culture of data driven decision making

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Let's Talk! - mobile

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About the project

Through user persona research, we found that a large percentage of principals at the middle school and high school grade levels were rarely behind their desks, and therefore, without frequent access to a desktop. To support these users, we developed a mobile app that provides the core functionality of Let's Talk! to users on their Android or iOS devices.

My role

After the initial app had been in the marketplace for close to 11 months, I spearheaded an app revamp that would be guided by the principles of user centered design and design thinking.

I didn't want to make any large assumptions about our users or their behavior when using the app, so I started with lots of research and talking with users. This gave me the quantitative and qualitative data points I needed to make further design decisions regarding this update. We built a few prototypes and tested them with our more engaged users.

Achievements

• 5,000 downloads and above 4 star reviews for Android and iOS app
• Identified most engaged users of app and formulated research project
• Conducted and led number of user research interviews to gather data points of usage
• Worked with UX and Design to craft new experiences where current users were experiencing friction
• Led redesign of app - complete with full UI lift and UCD approach (anticipated Q1 2017)

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Let's Talk! - mobile

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About the project

Metric analysis determined that a good portion of parent and student users were accessing our technology on mobile devices. To lower bounce rates and ensure these users were getting the best experience we explored development of a dedicated mobile app for this audience.

My role

I advised K12 Insight to pursue a separate and dedicated app over expanding functionality over their existing app. This would provide isolated and key metrics for this apps usage which is predominately by parents, students, and community members. Blending this app with the K-12 staff app would have bled the metrics and made it much more difficult to measure engagement by audience grouping.

Through external scans, research, and prototyping, our team landed on an initial MVP that used a card based layout and simple form for sending and receiving messages.

Achievements

• Conceptualized and launched new app targeted towards parents and students
• Designed the initial mockups and UI while our only mobile designer was out for 3 months on STD
• Created full prototype in Invision for quick user feedback and testing
• Gathered more feedback after build and launch through third party user testing group

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Learning Center

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About the project

The Learning Center was a second version of our Let's Talk! knowledge base. Prior to the Learning Center, updates to the content had to be sent to the development team. This made updating content, especially around major releases, very difficult logistically. To address this issue, we proposed updating the existing knowledge base to a CMS.

My role

To make the process of updating the knowledge base leaner and quicker, I proposed moving the content to a CMS and shifting the control from dev to the support team. The advantage of this shift was the support team could update articles quickly based on customer inquiries. This added autonomy increased their ownership over the knowledge base and freed up the development team from this responsibility.

While we were moving to a CMS, we also updated the look and feel of the knowledge base to match our product branding and style guide. The CMS also allowed us to add a workflow and hierarchy to article and content development. We layered the CMS to include authoring, reviewing, and publishing stages to ensure only the best content was published.

Achievements

• Conceptualized and launched the first version of the Learning Center
• Developed content authoring workflow and implemented process
• Introduced Google Analytics to Learning Center
• Migrated 100+ articles and videos from knowledge base to Learning Center

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Legal Hat

Live link: www.k12insight.com/lets-talk

About the project

Within any startup product, team members are sometimes asked to step outside their comfort zone and work on something they have never done before. For me, this happened in early 2014 when we wanted to add a design mark and trademark to our new product.

My role

I was tasked with exploring the process and managing the entire project through completion. In the end, the entire trademark process took twelve months to complete. Having no prior experience with trademarks, I was proud that I was able to quickly learn the best practices, approach, and management of this process to ensure we were able to obtain the legal recognition of these marks.

Achievements

• Successfully researched the entire trademarking process through USPTO and kept leadership in the loop on timelines and status
• Navigated through the unknown terrain of allowances and disputes
• Worked directly with legal counsel to hit trademark milestones in a timely manner
• Worked with Apple to file and resolve a claim against another app that used a similar mark to our trademark

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Product Development Process

Live link: www.k12insight.com/lets-talk

About the project

Let’s Talk! is a cloud-based listening solution that helps school leaders and their teams engage their communities.

My role

I worked with most departments of the company to identify the current workflows and mapped them all together into one narrative. We printed this full workflow, spanning twelve feet, and taped it on the wall. At any point the development cycle, if something wasn't working or needed to be included we simply wrote on the printout with a comment of what needed to happen at that point in the timeline.

This simple approach broke silos and allowed multiple teams to have an ongoing conversation about how to iterate and make the process leaner. We used the printout at our retrospective as an initial talking point to what was working and what did not work.

Achievements

• Introduced first retrospective to development process
• Mapped out the entire development process from customer request, design, build, and launch to measuring success
• Presented findings and insight to company and talked about advantages of holistic approaches to problems

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