Crew Connections
Growth team
Product design
Product management
Business strategy
Crew is a communication app for desk-free workers (retail, QSR, hospitality, etc.). The experience is built around messaging with people with whom you share an organization, like your coworkers at a store, such as Starbucks at Pike Place or Macy’s in Union Square.
We fundamentally changed our product to support a professional network where users could invite and communicate with past coworkers, vendors, and people in similar jobs on Crew, as well as their existing coworkers. In doing so, we significantly increased our viral growth potential.
The work below summarizes the full process of research, design, and development over the course of a year.
Before building anything, we ran a survey to over 20K users and received over 2.5K responses. We then framed these responses as user problems:
I have to invite someone to my organization to communicate with them on Crew
I don’t want to share my personal number with past coworkers but want to stay in touch.
I can’t use Crew between jobs (without an organization) to communicate.
I have multiple conversations with the same person across different organizations over different profiles.
It’s hard to track down messages across all my organizations.
What would solving these problems mean for our business?
If you look at a typical Crew user journey (shown below), there are only a few times in a user’s lifecycle where they can create growth…
We don’t support any use cases for inviting people outside your working team (e.g. Starbucks on Pine Street), to Crew. We also don’t support using Crew without an org (e.g. after you’ve left your job)…
But what if we did?
You see a lot more opportunities for viral growth.
A challenge with this project was designing an experience for communicating with people outside your organization while maintaining the team or store-centric experience.
Today you have a profile, compose, inbox, and search for each organization or store you work at. We found through research that this makes using Crew across multiple stores frustrating.
Having to switch to a different store on Crew to message a different a team member in that store is heavyweight. Maintaining four different profiles is difficult. Adding another layer of communication would only complicate this further.
To solve this, we took functionality that spanned all teams/stores/organizations - profile, compose, inbox, search - and centralized it, while maintaining a view to “sort” your messages by organization.
Here’s how the system works across two organizations/stores:
From left: The organization inbox (with our new information architecture), compose, and the global unread inbox
Before implementing these changes, we discussed these features with a panel of key user segments, including some of our largest enterprise customers. We also built a working prototype to dog-food internally.
Now we have a system in place that can support communicating with people outside your organization. The next step is designing the experience to message with those people.
We can leverage our organization system to add and support a “network” to communicate with others.
I explored different options such as Connections in the sidebar, or only in the unread inbox. These didn’t feel discoverable or in line with our current organization paradigm.
The solution streamlined functionality without changing any core elements of the org experience:
The unread inbox and global compose significantly reduce friction for messaging people outside of, and across, your organizations.
Using Crew with a single organization doesn’t break with the new system.
Connections MVP
Two month project
We shipped an MVP of connections and saw exciting top-of-funnel metrics (i.e. users inviting other people to Crew with via Connections). We identified areas for improvement through quantitative (funnel drop-off) and qualitative (user interviews) and further improved the experience with better feature education, notifications, and clearer display of requests. We’re incredibly excited about where this work stream will take the company.
Thank you to the engineering team on this project - TJ Pavlu, Deepa Chaganty, Nate Winters, Charlie Chilton, Matt Lenehan, Ansel Merino, Adam Proscheck, Adam Lickel, and Broc Miramontes. True partners in roadmapping, ideas, feedback, and late nights along the way.
Thanks to Danny Leffel, Suchit Dubey, and Bec Lai for excellent product support.