The Product:

Bell Email is one of the company’s core product offerings, with over a million accounts and 300K active users. These users represent Bell's most sensitive and oldest customer base, with the average email user being 45% less likely to churn.

In terms of core product features, Bell Email is extremely similar to other popular email platforms, offering features such as emailing, calendar, contacts and tasks. However, its 10-year-old UI was unfriendly to new users and incompatible with the planned backend. Due to these factors and other business needs, I was tasked with building a new interface for 300K email users and migrating their back end data.

My Role:

As Product Manager for Bell Email, I worked with our multidisciplinary team to take the new front end from conception to launch. I conducted research, user interviews, managed user onboarding, oversaw operations training / support and worked closely with the executive team, product designers and lead engineers.

What I Did:

• Had daily stand-up meetings, clarified scope, implemented changes, prioritized deliverables, got stakeholder acceptance, monitored status for performance and budget. Planned WBS schedule.
• Based feature prioritization off user interviews and engineering development time (Priority exercise of new UI features vs back end development)
• Worked with third party design company to develop new look that suited existing userbase
• Worked with a team of eight engineers to develop a new UI. Increased team performance by implementing Jira ticket management & weekly brainstorming sessions
• Built and implemented user trial program. Interviewing over 100 early access users.
• Surveyed 4000 users for feedback on new UI
• A/B tested new features with trial users to determine value of new features

New User Interface

Old User Interface

Metrics:

• Call rate post migration was 50% lower than expected
• Users rated the new UI an 8.2/10 compared to the previous UI
• Modernizing the UI on mobile led to a 20% increase in mobile usage

Key-Takeaways:

• How to increase communication through all team members by optimizing the tools that are already in use like Jira, and Slack.
• How to use user research to help prioritize product strategy.