How This Product Manager Transformed User Profiles into Personalized Experiences That Boosted Engagement

Gosh, um, there's a raft of things that I can pick from, but I will pick, um, I'm gonna pick, uh, the user profile for eHarmony.com. Um, so, I want to say about this has got to be about 10 years ago. This is pre-mobile. This is like when, uh, tablets were, uh, like sort of all the. Rage and everyone thought the tablets were going to be taking over the world. eHarmony it's

this is, yeah,

Windows 8, right? Like everything's a tablet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, so I'm, I'm in the same club. So, um, so, uh, eHarmony had a challenge where, you know, we would give, uh, 78 matches a day and we wanted them to feel really personalized, but if you looked across every social network, everyone's profile, whether it was like LinkedIn or Match.com or eHarmony, every profile looked the same. So you'd have the photo on the left-hand side and you'd have like bio information on the right-hand side and then you'd have everything about the person sort of, you know, down the page as you scrolled, um, and this. It is a challenge when you're only delivering 8 people, you want each person to feel like they've been curated and handpicked. And so we actually came up with this idea to turn everyone into a personalized magazine. So you'd have like a cover shot with the person's photo on it. You'd have like a, a, a real responsive reading experience that would go into like multi-column format, um, and this is before responsive web was a thing. So you can imagine like the amount of work and Uh, uh, you know, just sheer brainpower that had to go into like creating all the cut sizes and how the fonts would change and all of that. We had to manually like calculate all of those things and so we, we created an experience that like looked like that, that, that, you know, would, would be responsive with multi-column layout. It also had iconography that would pop up based on what people would say. And so the, the benefit to, to the customer or the member as they were reading these profiles was that everyone would look different. They'd have this beautiful Magazine and so everyone felt unique, which was a a a really big, um, uh, you know, goal of the, of the project. Ultimately, uh, the other goal, of course, with the project was to get people to purchase and convert and stay with us a lot, a lot longer and, um, through that experience plus like

yeah, so like a, yeah, to, you know, like all the, all, all the dating sites are on like a subscription, you know, so like, you know, and, and the idea. Except

That's, that's true. He was, he was going down the advertising model and he was trying to do micro microtransactions. And so, um, and so I think like, you know, the, the difference between like the free player and the, um, the, the paid services, of course, I think were the, the quality of interactions. I mean, you would definitely get like a lot more, uh, uh, like people, like less serious people that you'd have to like sort through and like whereas the site like. eHarmony, it was like you knew to go there to get if you wanted to get married and the intent was a lot higher. So, um, so this new profile experience along with there's like a new onboarding experience ultimately like raised our, our top of funnel conversion, which is, you know, a pretty hard thing to do for a company that's been about, you know, in the business for about 10 years at that point already, uh, we raised it by about 20%, which is, was, was pretty on 20

Uh, 20 on a, on a relative basis, yeah.

So it, it was like, uh, you know, I think we were like our normal like conversion after like what we call RQ complete, which is the the questionnaire that people would take was, you know, right around 60% and so we were able to get that, you know, 20% times that up to like, you know, about 72%. To 73%, which is just like a game changer for the business. I mean you talk about a company that's spending $100 million on advertising. If you can suddenly get your dollars to be, you know, 20% more efficient, uh, that's, that's more money.

Uh, yeah, thereabouts actually sometimes it was north of that and I'm, I'm using 100 million because it's just changed.

So, so anyways, it, you know, that, that profile was complicated because it was like game-changing. It was betting on new technology like that people would want to swipe through profiles. It was, you know, betting on like responsive technology which wasn't a thing yet for, for major websites and it was like just betting on like You know, a dynamic user experience when we put like effects in there like the swipe that I mentioned that also fades and things like that, which were not as easy. I mean the frameworks like you've got react today and like we didn't have react and you know, in in that, so a lot of that stuff had to be hand coded, right? Yeah,

I mean, I think like if you, if you think about like, you know, from a product manager perspective, I mean, I'll, I'll speak to that and then I'll sort of speak to the, the technology piece like the, the engineers actually had to like build like with the new infrastructure. Um, so, uh, like from a front-end perspective, like designing a, a responsive website where you're like taking like every element on the page and making, you know, a, figuring out what the breakpoints are going to be, B, figuring out every element on the page and how it's going to change according to those breakpoints and then like writing up all of those specifications to be like like because I mean you had to tell the front-end engineers exactly how this line would change, how the line lengths would change, how. How the font size would change, uh, how this image size would change if there were embedded images in that part of the, the, the content. Um, that piece was, was pretty technical. Also, there's a, there's the user challenge of like, OK, when you're talking about picking a, uh, uh, a photo to be your cover photo, we're talking about a photo that's not like a square photo. We're talking about one that's like sort of like more of a 16 by 9 photo. How do you guide them through an experience of picking the right thing? It's not that you want someone's face just like. Right up close on a 16 by 9 image, like it was more about like, OK, let's show you doing something interesting. Like if you like surfing or if you like riding, like let's have the cover of your shot be you riding a bike. So, it's more of like you pulled back and showing you on your bike, you know, careening down like a road. That's an interesting shot for your magazine. So, leading people through that experience to where they're like, they, you know, ended up picking the right things and doing the right things to their profile so that they looked as good as they possibly could. Um, was, was kind of a challenge, I think from a user flow. I mean, no one had really done that to date in the, in the dating space. Um, so I think like there was a lot of, a lot of challenges on that side that, you know, you know, today, I think we, we just sort of take for granted because I think like if you in In the world of apps, you know, everyone's used to this, this, uh, experience where it's like, OK, here's a question per page and I'm gonna answer this and then I move on to the next thing and I answer this, and then maybe there's some like pop-ups or guidance like that didn't exist back then and so we were doing a lot of that for the first time. OK, and then on the, on the technical side, um, we were moving to a, a more service-based, uh, uh, uh, infrastructure and so like having, having a, you know, the front end like actually be smart and try to be like, you know, a quote unquote smart app was a big challenge. We were a server side rendered app and you can imagine from the user experience side of things. Back in that time that wasn't a really great experience. Like if you scroll to the next page, you don't want the thing to spin and have like a whole loading experience and so we had to basically gut our entire experience to like our, our infrastructure to actually support this sort of like more dynamic, more, you know, app-like experience and again in 2011 there weren't a lot of companies that were doing something like that. I mean, I think really like, um, you know, server sided server side load loaded apps were like kind of the rage. I mean, I'll like close this real quick just because their lawnmower back there couldn't hear it oh right on, um, yeah, so you know, 2011, this is like a pretty big, pretty, pretty big change for a large company that's like, you know, got a massive scalable app to turn into this like dynamic like app-like experience.

Um, great question. So, part of it was a, like leading people through, leading the, the, um, the company because it, it started out with a. Sort of a, a hopes and dreams type of exercise like brainstorming workshop, um, so leading, leading us through, through that experience to like sort of capture like what the possibilities could be, how we wanted to move the brand, how we wanted to move the experience like, like across the axis if we wanted to be experiential, if we wanted to be more, you know, like analytical and efficient, um, and so once we sort of establish sort of that North Star, like going through the process to establish that North Star, then It was a matter of like, OK, well, working with the designers to like ultimately see like what are the best ways to, to, to bring that to life and so like for example, one of the North Stars was that like everyone, and I alluded to this earlier, needed to, to feel unique. Like even if you just did feel, did the bare minimum of like uh of filling in your profile, like you just posted a photo or like you put like one piece of data in about yourself, like we still wanted you to feel different and we want To present you in the best light. So that was like a North Star and so that, so we started to figure out like, well, how do we, how do we get people to, to, to feel that way and that, that sort of gave rise to this, this novel, uh, side scrolling profile. And then how do we get people to like do a better job filling those things out? It was like, OK, well, let's put samples in front of them, let's put guidance in front of them. And so, like, my role in all of that was sort of like leading, leading the charge on all of that, right? Like working with the designers to like pull all of that together. And then testing it, working with the UX researchers to ultimately like put that in front of customers and then, and then, you know, like similar to like most a lot of product development, um, challenges were like, well if you put like a multiple like multiple types of uh um uh prototypes in front of people, sort of like synthesizing that, putting together and be like, OK, well this worked better than that, this is buildable, OK, this is gonna be our offering, right? Um, so, you know, I don't know, it's like. Traditional product management step it's like pulling together lots of competing voices, synthesizing that and then and then putting it together and into a vision and then putting, you know, putting that on the schedule on the roadmap and ultimately like building it, delivering it and ultimately testing it and iterating on it. So that would be, I guess that would be my role, um, through that so it's sort of managing all of that. OK.

With the benefit of experience since that decision, what if anything would you do differently? [Dive Deep]