Product lead for SoulCycle iOS app

The Goal:

I took over an existing partnership with SoulCycle, where we had been owning their native iOS app, the primary surface for booking rides.

Challenges:

- Changing stakeholder landscape, we went through several different points of contact and VPs of Marketing

- Product teams reporting into the Marketing team instead of Product

- A lot of resistance to change given the good performance of the existing product

The Team:

- Product Lead (me)

- iOS Lead

- 3-7 iOS Engineers

- Design Lead

- Product Designer

- UX Researcher

- Growth Analyst

Product Process

- We conducted a cohort analysis by ride frequency, debunking a myth that the primary persona of focus should be Power Riders. We identified a large opportunity to drive ride frequency for Occasional Riders.

- Conducted a series of exploratory interviews to understand how the product was currently working

- Identified that users may be in different mindsets, but essentially they needed more extensive filtering behavior. Users shared a mistrust of recommendations, and fear of missing out on other classes they might enjoy.

- Held collaborative design studios to brainstorm solutions

- Several rounds of moderated, in-person concept testing with users

- Usability testing

- Developed a future-state app-map with a plan to deprecate two existing features to make room for new functionality later on

Find a Class

How might we make it easier for new riders and existing users to find and book rides near them?

What We Built:

- An improved Find a Class tab with an updated class list

- Added new filter facets, improved filtering logic

- Onboarding flow for New Riders leveraging instructor retention data

Original Plan My Ride Feature Design:

Updated Find a Class:

Onboarding

How might we help New Riders quickly and easily find and book their first ride?

Results:

- Saw an overall 25% lift in app-driven revenue in 2017

- Onboarding experiment saw a 17% lift in average ride count for new users