PandaDoc Growth Experiments
Growth initiatives and product tweaks in a fast-growing company.
Role
Growth/Product Designer
Period
2019
PandaDoc lets companies create and send proposals to people, who sign it in a few clicks. Thus creating a hustle free environment for the recipients, and increasing deals closing rate for the companies.
In 2019 PandaDoc decided to create a Growth department to increase the number of customers from small companies. I was lucky to become a part of this team as a growth designer, which was a new experience for me.
ONBOARDING
We knew that small companies had difficulties with discovering features, as they had no assistance from the sales team. So the onboarding experiment was an obvious thing to do.
Previously we had an onboarding where a user had to choose what kind of activities he wanted to learn. But this time we made it more simple and sent a user into an onboarding-document with a manual inside.
SOCIAL PROOF ON A SUBSCRIPTION SCREEN
People copy the actions of others in an attempt to undertake behavior in a given situation, so why don’t we use it to our advantage? We asked ourselves and added our clients’ logos on a subscription page.
INVITE USER
What if collaboration increases the conversion rate? As the user had free seats on a trial period we decided to put invite button into the main screen, and save the user at least 3 clicks.
ADDING A DOWNGRADE OPTION
Some users simply didn’t know that they could pay less for the product if they didn’t need all the features. By providing a downgrade button on a subscription cancelation screen we saved few users a month.
PROFESSIONAL SERVICES EXPERIMENT
We offered paid onboarding for big companies, during it we provided some paid services such as batch document conversion and onboarding for team members for different roles.
But it wasn’t accessible to small clients. So we decided to try to sell some services as an experiment. We added an ability to buy an onboarding to a new team member on an invitation screen and added a document conversion tab, in the case when a user has a lot of real-world documents and wants to convert them into PandaDocs.
FEATURE UPSELL
The higher the plan – the more features are available. To increase plan upgrades we highlighted locked features and provided an explanation popup for each item.
During that task, I also created a style and essential components for the ‘Upsell flow’ to provide predictability for users when they click on these badges across the product.
IN CONCLUSION
The manager who built our team left the company shortly after the team was formed, and as we all were new to it we struggled to get into a steady pace and to release experiments in a way that doesn’t break other features.
Somehow we have managed to close our OKR but without any significant outcomes for the company. So the team was disbanded.
TAKEAWAY
- No analytics in advance—no growth experiments.
- Experiments prioritization is an essential skill.
- The proper process is important to make sure the implementation of each experiment is good enough and doesn’t break the rest of the product.
- Not every company needs a growth department. Sometimes user research and UX improvements can do the job.
- Not every company is ready to have a growth department since it requires tolerance to bold decisions.
- Not every experiment may be developed in a day. Sometimes it can take months and it may be okay for some features.
- The product is just a part of the funnel.