At Fauna, I identified high churn and slow user activation as key blockers to growth and retention, leading to a data-driven redesign of the product experience. Through syntax testing and iterative design, I reworked the experience to reduce time to activation from 2–3 days to under 15 minutes.
Fauna was struggling with user growth, retention, and revenue stagnation. Upon joining, I worked to identify the causes of high churn and redesign the product experience, uncovering through internal interviews that there was little data on user challenges, conflicting views for improving retention, and that recent overage charge enforcement had only provided a temporary boost in revenue but no long term gains.
I implemented in-product analytics to get a baseline of the existing product experience. I tracked key engagement milestones, as well as feature usage and adoption in order to drive a data-informed approach to understanding which aspects of the product were better or worse at serving users over time. My overall objective was to foster a culture of user-centricity, increasing the number of decisions that were directly informed by user insights.
My second initiative was to help drive alignment around product strategy, given early interactions with leadership revealed many competing opinions on what core issues were driving churn. I conducted an in-depth churn analysis in which the top reason cited by users was the Fauna Query Language (FQL) being too confusing. Other reasons cited were a confusing onboarding flow and that users felt it was taking too long to understand new concepts; they were not seeing value soon enough during their evaluation period.
The churn analysis convinced leadership to invest in redesigning the query language. After the completion of a conceptual proof-of-concept, I worked with the engineering team to create a ‘paper prototype’, and then I took users through a series of tasks that mirrored an onboarding flow. This allowed me to assess their comprehension of the language, its overall utility in achieving key onboarding milestones, as well as their ability to transfer existing skills when using it for the first time. While initial onboarding tasks were successful, indexing (used for query optimization) was still challenging and need further ideation.
I sought to create a product experience which essentially decoupled key engagement milestone for users from them having to learn a new query language. This allowed them to assess the product and fully grasp its value proposition and key differentiators independent of having to learn any new skills. The goal was to essentially removing all of the current barriers to entry identified in the churn analysis.
The redesigned experience allowed users to create theirt first index, a key activation milestone, in less than 15mins on average – a dramatic improvment when compared to the current experience of 2-3 days. The new product experience achieved, and exceeded, my initial goal of 30mins to activation without users having to learn one line of code from the proprietary query language. This successfully communicated to leadership the importance of the product experience in achieving the activation goal, which could not be accomplished with the new syntax alone.
