Airship Journeys

Product

A marketing technology orchestration platform that allows marketers to send meaningful messages to their customers. Marketing teams used this technology to measure optimize the conversion rate through the customer lifecycle.

Cross channel message journey UI

My Role

Discovery trio leader Led product discovery activities including customer interviews, design sprints, opportunity solution map creation and maintenance.
Product owner Created solution assets including user stories and scenarios, ran delivery kick-off sessions, and created demos and training to support launch activities.
Strategic planner of the roadmap Determined what phases of product work should happen when and worked with leadership to gain ongoing investment in the roadmap and strategic direction.

Execution

As of Fall 2018, the number one reason Airship was losing new business deals was due to our lack of a Journey Builder type solution. Airship kicked off the "Cassiopeia" project to leapfrog the competition using Product Discovery techniques.

I led a product team to discover opportunities for an improved cross channel orchestration management platform. We interviewed 80+ customers, tested prototypes, reviewed competitor journey assets and uncovered the following two opportunities for innovation:

Key Innovation 1: Separate and automate key lifecycle transitions Legacy journey builders force marketers to build all messaging into a single graph. We took a different approach allowing the marketer to focus on each lifecycle step individually and map goals together for automated lifecycle transitions.
Key Innovation 2: Simplify journey construction, optimization, and review The traditional journey builder solutions force the marketer to create a new branch for each a/b test, control group, or QA test they want to run. We developed intuitive UX to contain the message logic within the message itself, decluttering the graph while providing the marketer with a simple interface to create with.

With a solid basis in customer and market discovery, we built and launched Airship Journeys in November of 2019.

I worked with leadership to build a now/next/later focused roadmap to ensure we continued delivering on customer value. Over the following year we released sales-leading and customer-loved solution expansions including an experimentation platform and OOTB quickstart templates and guides.

Challenges & Achievements

Challenges

Sales wants to sell what they know, not something new! Led marketing team in building sales decks and FUD to help sales sell the vision and value.
Do we really need to keep investing after the first launch? Convinced leadership that further investing in Journeys meant investing in a vision for the entire platform.
Too much new, how do we demo?? Created demo videos with synthesized data to aid with pipeline capture and help success teams drive adoption. Led Gartner/Forrester demos.

Achievements

Cemented leadership position in Gartner and Forrester Airship Journeys was a major factor in our leadership position in the Gartner and Forrester rankings for 2020.
Fast and growing product adoption We observed 4x adoption of Journeys year over year, with 86 customers with at least one live Journey as of March 2021.
From sales killer to sales leader Cross-channel orchestration went from being the number one deal impediment to being the feature that led all sales demos.
Journeys improves conversion rates that marketers care about Early adoption of Journeys Experimentation led to tremendous customer success stories including 40% higher purchase rates for abandoned cart retail journeys and 2x retention rate with inactivity journeys.