Medley MVP Platform

UX Design

Product Management

Timeline

August 2022 - April 2023

Platform

Web

Role

Senior Product Designer

Tools

Figma, UXTweak, Miro

Project Overview

Summary

Medley is a New York City-based startup that focuses on helping people grow personally and professionally through group coaching. Founded by a mother-daughter duo, they first sought to validate their core product with heavy investment in technology: they recruited top-tier certified coaches, hired a data scientist to create a customized group matching algorithm, developed a thorough member interview process, and launched several pilot programs.

Due to high interest from direct-to-consumer (D2C) channels and numerous contracts with Fortune 100 companies, Medley experienced rapid growth.

The problem

The company's existing model of launching D2C cohorts (the collective of Medley members starting group coaching over the same fixed time period) at fixed intervals didn't work well with B2B contracts, which required a customized experience for their members. Cohort launches involved a multitude of tasks, including collecting member demographics and behavioral details, matching groups based on similar goals and relevant expertise, onboarding members, and more.

Changing the model from fixed cohorts to concurrent cohorts made these launches a lengthy process, as the large number of tools and manual tasks overwhelmed our Membership team. Despite building an in-house platform on Bubble by contractors, it didn't alleviate the workload on cohort launches.

Goals

Unify internal tooling: Build in-house features to replace the patchwork of third-party tools used in the cohort launch process
Increase productivity: Improve overall efficiency in cohort launches to reduce the time and effort required by the Membership team
Automate manual tasks: Implement automation solutions to reduce the manual workload
Decrease possibility of human error: Minimize errors and improve the accuracy of cohort launches by implementing safeguards and error-checking mechanisms

Scope and Constraints

This project operated within a constrained scope due to various factors:

Short timeline: The platform was slated to launch before an upcoming cohort, which gave the Product team a whopping nine months to design, build, QA, and launch.
Lack of dedicated Product Manager: The absence of a dedicated PM posed challenges in related to streamlined decision-making and project oversight. Clear communication channels and regular updates were critical to ensure alignment with overarching product goals.
Lack of QA team: One significant constraint was the absence of a dedicated Quality Assurance (QA) team — the Product team worked together closely to create and implement testing procedures.

Design Process

Early Ideation

During the early stages of the design process, I spent time shadowing the Membership Team to understand each step of a D2C and B2B launch, what tools were being used, and what workarounds and solutions the team implemented on their own to increase productivity. To my surprise, I found that the majority of the steps were manual.

From there, I collaborated with members from the Product and Membership teams and created a prioritization matrix and user journey map.

With the former, I was able to identify key features that we could begin designing that would automate heavy-lift tasks. The core principles that we kept at the forefront of our minds while identifying these features were scalability and velocity of development (quick to build or ability to leverage a third-party plugin).
With the latter, I was able to identify which steps overlapped between D2C and B2B cohorts that would have the most pay-off.

The following were identified as the top features for the project:

Testing

Given the time constraints and lean team, my testing strategy was tailored to prioritize critical aspects of feature functionality while maintaining a balance between thorough testing and project timelines.

Early prototypes leveraging hi-fi designs: Being the only designer on the team and with a mostly-completed first version of our design system, I prioritized rapid prototyping to quickly visualize and communicate design concepts. These prototypes were shared with Product and Membership teammates to gather initial impressions and identify potential pain points. This scrappy and iterative feedback loop allowed us to make swift adjustments.
Cross-functional product demos: The Product team held bi-weekly product demos with the Membership team and other stakeholders to ensure a holistic understanding of user needs and to gather diverse perspectives on design iterations.

Results

The MVP was released on schedule, coinciding with two major cohort launches in the spring of 2023, which provided a valuable opportunity to validate our work. As a result, we were able to reduce the time spent on manual launch tasks by 20%.

As for future improvements, the Product team and I had scoped out several features to further reduce this time, including in-app group matching which currently accounts for a considerable amount of launch preparation.