PeopleGrove is a SaaS platform for helping students network and connect with mentors used by leading institutions like Stanford and Kansas State.
As a kind of social network, PeopleGrove's product has to address a large userbase with multiple personas, in a way that encourages repeat engagement.
Products like PeopleGrove thrive on the network effect, meaning their value proposition increases in proportion to the amount of users using their product. So quickly getting user buy-in on new features is necessary for healthy retention.
That's why PeopleGrove uses Chameleon to drive:
- Roadmap direction
- Feature adoption
- User feedback
Which allows developers to build core features around the use cases Chameleon uncovers.
Building a rapid user feedback loop with Chameleon
What started as a tooling upgrade for Customer Success (walkthroughs of new features as part of launches) has been adopted more and more by the Product team as a Typeform replacement to deploy engaging, targeted surveys to product users.
Since the team want rapid feedback from active users, an in-product channel like Chameleon can help produce results faster with surveys users are more likely to engage with. Tori's team leverage targeting within Chameleon to reach the right user with the most relevant survey, and to enrich data by knowing which segment (student or admin) sent the response.
Within just an hour, we can have a survey up that asks the community what they need. I think that's been the most useful part of Chameleon for us - particularly during COVID-19
The way Chameleon enables fast feedback from active users makes it particularly useful in times of crisis.
Product VP Tori Funkhouser deployed targeted surveys to different user segments to collect feedback on what the Product team should put its energy into building at a time where the team needed to stay agile.
As well as prompts like the above which are designed to collect ideas, PeopleGrove deploys very specific surveys to test hypotheses by means of fake door testing.
Measuring feature engagement before the feature is even built
PeopleGrove use Chameleon Microsurveys to help Product prioritize the feature backlog and build the most in-demand functionality. They do this by running a fake door test for a feature instead of building it.
To users, this looks like an icon for a pre-release feature in the app's navigation which triggers a Microsurvey on hover. From the user response, PeopleGrove can capture both hard data on click engagement and freeform text feedback.
We can pretty quickly spin up dumbed down versions of new features without engaging the engineering team on something they might not necessarily need to build
"If you think of how expensive it is to put an engineer on a small change to the product experience - a few hours in development, more in testing - it's 10x cheaper to do it in Chameleon", Tori said.
The speed PeopleGrove can spin up feedback surveys and run beta tests means features can ship faster to general release, with fewer bugs.
As a result, the team say they're better positioned to be get in front of technical issues before the support tickets start coming in.
Why Chameleon stood out
PeopleGrove compared tools like Intercom, Optimizely and Appcues while evaluating the space, but the team and customer success approach at Chameleon was the deciding factor.
The team has given advice both in terms of using the product effectively on a strategy level, like help to actuallly execute on product experiments. As an agile organization, Chameleon is also well-positoned to listen to individual customers and build the features they grow to need.
"The team is creative, excited and involved. Out of other teams we spoke to, we had to most cultural synergy with Chameleon".
While searching for a way to deploy product tours, question that led Tori to Chameleon was, "how can we speed up development work, rather than having the dev team build small one-offs?"
"We needed something more robust than simple product tours. I had experience working with Intercom in the past, and it hadn't been effective at doing event-driven product experiences which trigger on combinations of rules like 'show a NPS survey to members of this segment which have been active in the last 30 days'", PeopleGrove told us.
Chameleon experiences can be set up to show based on any number of custom events, user properties, button actions and elements on the page. This is essential for persona-based onboarding tours but also surveys which have need clearly defined audience.
What the team is excited to leverage next
Like many best-in-class Product teams, PeopleGrove use Mixpanel to see dropoffs across a funnel and identify where users are getting stuck in the product. Combined with Chameleon, a Tour or Survey is part of that workflow - Tori can see those actions in context with the rest of our product and run A/B tests around different experiences, copy, and prompts to understand the best approach.
PeopleGrove is investing a lot of time in analytics setup so are keep to optimize A/B testing with the Chameleon and Mixpanel integration. "We love the new control groups feature and previously had to hack that together manuallly when we were using a competitor", Tori said.
"Since we're getting a lot of feedback in real time we're excited to leverage the Slack integration soon too". Chameleon's Slack integration sends any feedback to a designated Slack channel instantly - registrations for the beta here.
We 100% recommend Chameleon - it has huge, robust feature set and a uniquely high quality of customer care and thoughfulness
To get ideas on how Chameleon can equip your Product team to drive greater product adoption talk to us today.