Episode 134: Unpacking Doodle's Growth Strategy with Stephanie Leue, Chief Product Officer at Doodle
Episode 134: Unpacking Doodle's Growth Strategy with Stephanie Leue, Chief Product Officer at Doodle
In this episode of Product Thinking, Stephanie Leue, Chief Product Officer at Doodle, joins Melissa Perri to navigate the challenges and opportunities of transitioning from a free to a subscription-based model, the importance of a strong organizational support system, and the role of data in decision-making. They also shed light on Stephanie's leadership and focus on people, purpose, process, and performance that have helped Doodle navigate complex product challenges and achieve growth.
Stephanie has an extensive career as a product leader, navigating the worlds of startups to Fortune 500 enterprises with niche expertise in B2B SaaS. Beyond her product leadership, she offers her skills as a freelance Leadership Coach, guiding senior female leaders. Stephanies has over fifteen years of experience designing and leading products and teams.
In her earlier ventures, Stephanie held key roles such as the Head of Product Operations at Europace AG, Director of Product & Design at Contentful, and Senior Product Manager at PayPal. Additionally, her entrepreneurial spirit is showcased as the Co-Founder of 3Weine, a premium shopping platform dedicated to German wines.
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You’ll hear them talk about:
[02:18] - Originally a Swiss-founded tool by students for organizing barbecues, Doodle faced a strategic shift in 2017. Moving from an ad-based model, they adopted a subscription approach. They initially operated two platforms: one for free users and another for subscribers, complicating user upgrades. Recognizing the challenge, Doodle decided to merge the platforms. Despite careful preparations, the launch of the unified platform faced a two-day downtime and the removal of certain features, prioritizing user feedback over existing functionalities.
[07:36] - Doodle experienced customer churn when transitioning to the new platform as the company retired a favorite product and removed some features in March. To deal with this challenge, they started collaborating across teams, analyzing data and focusing on customer support insights. Doodle's mission was to restore key features while refining the new platform and restoring user satisfaction. It was challenging, but in hindsight, it solidified the team and set it on a positive trajectory.
[11:01] - In October, Stephanie was elevated to CPO, taking charge of the entire product team, where she felt an immediate need to shift Doodle towards being product-led, emphasizing data-driven decisions and customer feedback. Stephanie centered her approach on four pillars: People, Purpose, Process, and Performance. What truly set Doodle apart was its dedicated team: a brilliant growth sector, a proactive data department, and a genuine passion for Doodle's products and customers.
[16:56] - When shaping Doodle's strategy, the team faced the challenge of serving both B2B and B2C markets simultaneously. With her B2B background from PayPal, Stephanie believed in separate strategies for each market. However, at Doodle, she noticed the needs of small-to-medium businesses closely mirrored those of individual customers. Both groups strived for mutual availability, valuable conversations, and brand or personal recognition.
[25:15] - When joining Doodle, Stephanie noticed employees' dissatisfaction with ever-changing directions. For a business to thrive, she believes in creating an environment where everyone feels their role is crucial. Two pillars have driven the company's progress: the team's unwavering commitment and a powerful data structure that facilitates quick and informed decisions. Product leaders often face challenging decisions, even pausing initiatives on the brink of completion that didn't resonate with the strategy. Learn to channel your energy more effectively, selecting projects that offer real value to your business and team.
Episode Resources:
Melissa Perri - 00:00:50:
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Product Thinking Podcast. Today we're joined by Stephanie Leue, who is the Chief Product Officer of Doodle. She has worked in a variety of businesses from startups to Fortune 500 companies, and is also a leadership coach working mainly with female senior leaders to optimize their leadership approaches. Before these roles, Stephanie worked as the Head of Product Operations at Europace ag and the Director of Product and Design at Contentful, and has over 15 years of experience in designing and leading product teams. Welcome, thanks for joining me, Stephanie.
Stephanie Leue - 00:01:29:
Hi, Melissa. Thanks for having me.
Melissa Perri - 00:01:31:
So you told me a really interesting story that I want to dive right into about Doodle when you joined. So you told me before we jumped on that the first day that you started there, the site went down. Can you tell us what happened?
Stephanie Leue - 00:01:45:
Oh my gosh, yeah, I think that's the most horrible scenario that can happen to you if you join a new company, right? And I joined as director for the scheduling division back then. It was March, it was my first day, and what we did is we released a new platform. So we had customers on two different platforms. We merged them. It was a big, massive project. We released it the day I joined and then we went down for two days. So that was my kicks tart with Doodle actually and a nice story to tell.
Melissa Perri - 00:02:16:
Yeah, that's really trial by fire right there. So what happened? So you were mentioning that you were deprecating some features, you're putting out a new rewrite. Can you tell us a little bit about the history of Doodle, where it came from? Because I remember it as a B2C App where we did all the scheduling. So what's been the journey of the company?
Stephanie Leue - 00:02:36:
Absolutely. When Doodle was founded, it was mainly founded for students by students so they can schedule their barbecue parties, right? Like who brings the sausage and the potato salad and the beer so they aligned on mutual availability and who brings what. And they were quite successful. And most people don't know that Doodle actually was founded in Switzerland. They think we're a global company located in the US, but we're a true Swiss company. And then in 2017, the strategic decision was that the company wants to transition from an Ad space business into a subscription-based business. And so slowly, the company was growing their subscription model. There was one thing that they didn't recognize, and it was that they had their free customers on one platform and the subscribed customers on another platform. So you can't upgrade customers from one platform to another. So it was just a logical step that they had to merge both platforms into one, which is in almost all companies, just a massive refactoring product, right, or project. And that's what happened to us as well. So we refactored the platform, we've built a new one to have all customers on one platform so we can just send them through any upgrade flow without any hurdles. And that's a massive project. It's nothing you do overnight, but also at some point in time, you need to make a decision. You need to push things through. You need to release something like you can't spend more and more and more time. So the decision in March was that like, for now, it's good enough. Let's release it. They felt like everything was quality assured. It's all good. We can go live. They went live. They went down two days. And with going live with the new platform at the same time, they also deprecated features because they were more optimizing for speed back then than they were optimizing for customer feedback. And that's how I started my journey with Doodle.
Melissa Perri - 00:04:30:
What a crazy first two days. So this has been a journey and you did mention that the company's about what, 14 years old?
Stephanie Leue - 00:04:37:
Exactly, yes.
Melissa Perri - 00:04:39:
Yeah, 14 years old. So it starts as a B2C, getting a lot of revenue from the ad space, right? And that's how you brought it in. And then now it sounds like we're going subscription model. What was the shift for? Like, why did they go, oh, let's transition from ads. We've been doing this for a really long time into subscription model. What was kind of the push and what was the decision making there?
Stephanie Leue - 00:05:00:
Subscription was a big topic back then, right? Like I think many, many companies decided to set up a SaaS business and to earn more money with subscriptions. And so I think the strategic decision back then was to just do exactly the same thing because it's very common for companies to also monetize their users through different ways. And so did Doodle, actually. So it was just a market trend, which they followed. And i think that's a pretty smart decision if you look into how the advertising business is evolving as of today, it gets harder and harder to earn money with ads, right? So now six years into the game, I would say starting the whole thing and journey six years ago was a pretty smart journey, but I wouldn't say it was an easy one.
Melissa Perri - 00:05:44:
No, it doesn't sound like it. So with this transition into subscription, it also sounds like you were giving Doodle away, right? It was basically free for people and then the Ads generated revenue. Now you're asking them to pay for it. How do you balance that product strategy and figure out how do we get people to pay for something that's been free for so long?
Stephanie Leue - 00:06:06:
Yeah, and that is indeed one of the hardest topics we have on our agenda right now. Doodle back then had one product and it was the group poll. So the thing where people voted on their barbecue availability. And then over time, we were adding more products through the whole product suite. So we also added the booking page and we added one-on-one. And the decision was to put both products behind a Paywall. So that already has been an entry point into subscription-based service because we had two products in the product suite that we were able to monetize. What we did not monetize at all in the past years was the group poll product. And the group poll product had a really very extensive feature set. And we now have a very SaaS-like setup meanwhile. So we also have a growth team that really helps us to monetize single features and to help us to grow. And they've done a couple of like really amazing experiments over the past couple of months, especially. And we experimented a lot with pricing and which features we can put behind Paywalls and how we can monetize our products better. And I would say we're meanwhile in a state where we have a very solid understanding of the features that customers really value and are willing to pay for. So we've put those behind a paywall, but we still have a very extensive feature set so people can get a very good idea of like what group poll is all about. They can get one booking page, one one-on-one for free, but we still are able to monetize them over time.
Melissa Perri - 00:07:36:
You mentioned too at the beginning that when the site went down and when you launched this new platform, there was some churn in customers. Was some of that due to putting features behind the paywall or what happened there?
Stephanie Leue - 00:07:49:
No, what happened is that we just really deprecated one full product. So we had also a product called TextPolls. People love TextPolls. They used it for everything, actually. And we also deprecated a couple of features in March on top of that. TextPolls was the main reason why we lost a couple of customers and also the features contributed to it. It was not the pricing experiments we've run because we started those only in October. And that was already six months into the journey where we already made the shift and we brought back a couple of the missing features to our users. So user satisfaction was back on track, I would say. And so we had a good opportunity to now, with already again satisfied users, monetize our product even more.
Melissa Perri - 00:08:38:
How did you react and what did you do when you found out that people were leaving after these deprecated features?
Stephanie Leue - 00:08:44:
I was one week into my job when that started, right? We suddenly had an exploding inbox on the customer support team. We got plenty of backlashes across different channels. And that was the most challenging experience I had in my entire career so far. You join a company, you're excited about the team, you're excited about the product, and you think, cool, I can build new features. And then the first thing you have to do is you have to figure out what the heck is going on here. Why are so many users complaining? I didn't know how the previous product looked like. I had no idea which features the users were missing. It was a complete mess and chaos. So the first thing we did is we just really collaborated super close with all the teams. We analyzed very deeply with data where we lost customers. We listened a lot to our customer support team to understand what are the key complaints. We listed, we prioritized, we evaluated the value and solutions we wanted to bring back. And then we just executed on it. We were just really bringing back one feature after another, while also maintaining and growing the new platform, which usually isn't 100% quality ready. So we had to balance both. And I would say it was super challenging. But at the same time, six months later, I would say it paid off. And for us as a team, it just helped us to grow stronger.
Melissa Perri - 00:10:10:
You weren't there for this, I know. But what was the decision to deprecate that feature? Like how was it made?
Stephanie Leue - 00:10:16:
It's a guessing game for me, to be honest. I think we know that, right? Like how many of the companies you work with work in a true feature factory where someone has a gut feeling and they just build features?
Melissa Perri – 00:10:29:
Yeah.
Stephanie Leue – 00:10:30:
Reverse engineer that. How many companies just deprecate features? Usually deprecating is not on our agenda, especially not in feature factories. But my experience now shows that deprecating features can happen as fast as building features based on gut feeling. So I would say there was not a true process in place that helped the team to analyze which decisions to make. They just did it based on quick estimations and time pressure.
Melissa Perri - 00:11:01:
And what do you think they learned from that experience? And you said you became stronger after this, you became more functioning, well-functioning team. What did you do to get them to think a little more critically and look at the data and pull that together?
Stephanie Leue - 00:11:15:
Yeah, and I think that that is the most exciting part of my journey. I mean, I got promoted to CPO in October, so I then had the opportunity to take over the entire team. One thing that, from my perspective, was really helping me to succeed so fast is that we have a CEO who is super keen to learn and improve. And he was really eager to listen to me. So although I was not part of the previous journey, at the same time, I was convinced that we have to transition that whole organization into a product-led organization. And that we are not allowed at all to repeat the mistakes from the past, but that as of this point, we only release or deprecate things once we have data and once we have customer feedback and once we've done discovery. So I focused on four key areas, which helped me to also structure the 10,000 things ahead of me. I focused on people, purpose, process and performance. And that's how I evaluated the organization. So I looked on the purpose side. Has this organization a vision and a strategy? Does everyone know why they are working on certain things and how they help us to achieve success? Well, the answer back then was no. Process. If I ask five different people, will they be able to explain me how we build products at Doodle and is it a coherent story? I can tell you it wasn’t. People. Do they have clarity? Do we have the right roles? Do the people have a clear understanding of their responsibilities? Do they collaborate well?
Obviously, that was potentially the best area of all of the four areas, but also there was room for improvement. And I always tell my teams that only if these three things are in place, and if I have a proper setup for my teams, then I can also expect performance. Performance always comes last. So I looked into all three areas or four areas, I discussed with everyone, got their feedback, evaluated it, and then I created a Kanban board for myself with all the actions I think we have to take in order to make progress. And the good thing about Doodle is that we just have a fantastic team. So we have a super smart growth team. We have a really, really engaged data team that is always eager to deliver every single piece of data we're requesting super fast. And we have people that really care for the product and their customers. So they just love Doodle from the bottom of their heart. And I think this was one of the key drivers for me to really also help the company to succeed way faster than I've ever seen in any other company before.
Melissa Perri - 00:13:59:
So when you went through and evaluated all these different opportunities that you just went through, where did you decide to start with Doodle and why that place?
Stephanie Leue - 00:14:08:
In that case, the biggest challenge we had is that we have had no vision or strategy. So we just chose features based on gut feeling or based on the customer that screamed the loudest. So it was really hard to argue why we're working on certain things. And I also got the feedback that in the past, the teams often started working on certain features. And then in the middle of the build phase, they were stopped and paused and never continued. Or they just delivered half baked things and then jumped onto the next feature. I think all of that is well known from many other companies, right? And from my perspective, the easiest path to at least give the teams clarity about the things we want to work on was to just create a vision and a strategy and break it down into their day-to-day tasks, actually. And that's what we've done. It took a while. I would say it took three to four months because I didn't know the product at all. So I also had to onboard at the same time, but the vision I developed back then, meanwhile, got way more defined, but it's still similar to what we set in place back then.
Melissa Perri - 00:15:22:
When you're coming into a company like this and you got to get up to speed on the product, do you have any like tips or tricks to figure out what's going on quickly?
Stephanie Leue - 00:15:30:
Listen, listen, listen, listen, talk to everybody and their doubt. And I think that's the hardest part, right? Because it was a super stressful situation. Imagine you join this company and the site is down and you lose customers and everyone is panicking and disappointed because also the people were already working for more than a year on this initiative, right? So there was a high stress level. And the best thing or the first thing you usually want to do is want to jump right in and just help everyone and really get things done. That's completely wrong. You need to listen. So I scheduled 30 minutes one on ones with almost everybody and their doc and I was always asking the same questions according to the four areas I'm following. So I asked like, how would you describe the processes? What did you learn from the past? Which mistakes do you think we shouldn't repeat? What do we want to keep? So I did like Mini Retros with everyone. And I wrote everything down like a Product Manager. I really just analyzed it like I would analyze a market. And then I just also clustered things clustered my insights. And then I presented my findings to my whole team and got their feedback on whether my evaluation is right, identified steps. And I think thanks to a great team, I was also not alone in implementing it, but everyone really just bought in into the idea of transforming that organization.
Melissa Perri - 00:16:56:
When you're looking at this strategy with Doodle, we talked about this a little bit before we jumped on, but at the beginning we talked about you've got individual free people on your platform. So you still got your free service. Now you've got subscription. Then it looks like Doodle's also making a B2B move. Is that correct?
Stephanie Leue - 00:17:17:
It is, absolutely.
Melissa Perri - 00:17:19:
So now you've got B2B and B2C, which is wild, plus a refactoring component merging two platforms together. So it sounds like you had your work cut out for you to prioritize all that and figure out how to get the company to growth. And that's no small fee. I'm just like wildly impressed, awesome, kudos. How did you think through all of that? What were the implications? How did you balance? Should we go B2B versus B2C? Should I concentrate on free users and converting them to subscriptions? What was your mental model?
Stephanie Leue - 00:17:52:
Yeah, that's an interesting question and it really drove me nuts because in the beginning I thought like, okay, I need two strategies. I need one for the B2C part, one for the B2B part. Because when I worked previously for PayPal, I was only responsible for the B2B parts, only for the merchants. And to me, it was always very clear that I have a completely different job than the PMs on the other side who look for the end customers. Now, after being in that job for quite a couple of months, I would say that in Doodle's case, the difference isn't that big. When we're talking about B2B, I think it's super important to also look into the size of the companies. We're not an enterprise business, not yet. Maybe we become one at one point in time, but right now I would say we're rather focusing on really like small to medium-sized businesses. And to be honest, when it comes to scheduling, small to medium-sized businesses and customers have similar needs. They want to find mutual availability. They want to have conversations with other people. They want to build their brand or they want to be recognized as a person. So the differences in the jobs to be done between both segments isn't that big that it requires a completely different strategy. So what we've done is we've done a jobs to be done analysis. We looked into the target markets. We looked into all the data we have, we clustered it. I mean, we have 32 million customers, right?
So you can imagine how much data we have to also really come up with like really well-defined insights. And the outcome of the jobs to be done research and the target market research was that actually there are three key target markets and the jobs to be done across all target markets are more or less the same, at least the three jobs to be done. And this for me was a major breakthrough because it meant that I don't have to create different strategies, but I can just focus on the biggest area of overlap first. And then evolve from there once the product is mature enough for my key target market. I can always add more and more features for specific target groups on top of it. But first goal for now is to find similarities, build those, build those really good. Focus on simplicity and then take it from there.
Melissa Perri - 00:20:12:
I think it's really interesting what you were saying before too about this, where like in PayPal, you know, you have B2C and you have B2B and considered very different strategies. Do you see advantages in thinking of them holistically as the same strategy that needs to be prioritized? Or do you feel like because PayPal was bigger, it worked for them?
Stephanie Leue - 00:20:33:
Yeah, I mean, it makes my life much easier now, right? I had a similar challenge back then at Contentful as well, where we were suddenly shifting from a long-tail business into an enterprise business. And that was the point in time where also the Contentful strategy was shifting. Because if you are working for more like long-term freelancers, smaller customers, usually the person you talk to sell your product is also the person that uses your product. Maybe it's a colleague, right? But usually there is not such a big complexity. And from my perspective, the whole product strategy becomes only complex once you have multiple personas in the whole lifecycle, where you do have the admin and the person who pays the check and the person who actually uses the product, right, or has to sell it internally. Then this is what makes the complexity of a B2B business. So I would say this is what made it hard for PayPal because we looked into all kinds of businesses from all various sizes. It made it hard for Contentful when we shifted to enterprise customers. And i'm pretty sure once we make the decision to also be enterprise ready at Doodle, we will face similar challenges. And then I would need two different strategies for sure. Right now, that's not the case.
Melissa Perri - 00:21:48:
I think that makes sense. If you look at the, like you were saying, the small and medium business market, a lot of the needs usually overlap with consumers. So we can keep that really tight. But then when we get into the enterprise, it gets way more complicated with all those different personas. That's a really interesting way to think about it. What I like about the way you're thinking about Doodles, it sounds like having this tight strategy, having this overlap is really going to allow the team to focus and to grow really fast. What have you been observing with this new strategy in place and how the team operates and how the company's growing?
Stephanie Leue - 00:22:23:
It's really amazing. I also have a really, really amazing CTO next to me and we're like twins, I would say. So we just collaborate super well. And one thing we introduced is a very coherent product process. So from defining the strategy items to really breaking down the things that teams want to work on, it's all very well defined and teams all follow the same structure. Like we use business model cameras and all of the staff, right? It's all documented in the Jira Discovery Tool. So we have a very solid setup that helps teams to not think over and over again about the same things because it's all structured and they can just follow. And what I observe with the setup we introduced is that we do not even need a regular planning anymore. So I just had a chat with a couple of product leaders recently and said, like, I think we really have a challenge with planning because we don't have planning cycles. Like, we're not running four weeks of planning meetings where everyone has to align and we're not working on everything and that feels so fundamentally wrong. And they listened to me and they were like, are you crazy? Like what you described sounds really like you don't even need that. So I reflected on it and I can tell you like, yeah, we don't really need planning. Like we had quarterly check-in today, but not to be aligned on goals, but just to see if anything changed at all. So we have a rolling planning process. Teams work on the right things. If new things come up, they come into our portfolio management system. They are prioritized with a cod based on the prioritization. It's either on top or it's at the bottom. And then the team that is available next just picks the things on top of the list and we're good to go. It's that easy.
Melissa Perri - 00:24:10:
That's amazing. I advocate so much for this type of work, like rolling with the planning, because I feel like that's the vision, right? Like what you're doing, I think is the vision. And it does feel weird because we spent our whole lives as product people and engineers going into, breaking everything into like a two week, we do something for two weeks and we stop and we do something else, right? Or every November we get together and we reset the product strategy, right? And then we do something else. And it shouldn't be that way. It should be more like, if we're going in the right direction, we should just update it as needed. But I see so many companies make that mistake and what they do is they like, they will stop the good work. And then introduce something else, and then nothing gets out the door, and then there's all this swirl. And i've seen so many leaders also be like, why can't we get anything done? And it's like, well, you change your priorities literally every day. So I don't know how anybody's going to change, get software out the door then. So I really love that you're advocating for that and that's working for you.
Stephanie Leue - 00:25:14:
Yeah, to me, honestly, I also care a lot about the people. And one thing I heard when I joined is that they are so tired of ever shifting priorities and that it is so frustrating that they start working on things and then they just stop and start new things. And it always feels like they are not creating value also. They love this product like really, really a lot, right, which is a massive asset. And if you care about the people, I think you should also listen to them and you should create an environment where everyone feels valuable and important. And I think two things helped me to get to where we are. There are three things. The amazing team, which I mentioned already. So I really, really just love every single doodler. They are amazing people. But also the data structure we have.
We can really break down all the things. We can measure everything. We can look into data right away. And if we don't have data at hand, the data team is never questioning on whether things are important or not. They just deliver what we want. So that also helps us to always really observe how things are evolving. But the hardest part, and I think that's potentially the hardest part for all leaders, is that you also have to say no. And one thing I did when I joined Doodle is I said no to at least, I would say, five initiatives that were partially even like really close to the finish line. And I'm sure that the teams were really upset on me. And I understand that, right? Like there comes this new person and she just stops all the projects and they potentially felt like this is my way of working and I will continue doing it. But I didn't. I stopped the things that didn't contribute to our strategy, at least not back then. And then we just really focused on a few things so that each team has a clear idea of their quarterly responsibilities. And that's the hardest part because we also have 100,000 things we can do. And all of them seem to be so exciting and so shiny. But I won't help anyone, neither the business nor the people nor our customers, if I would just jump on every single next shiny object, right?
Melissa Perri - 00:27:24:
I wish everybody would remember that. I think it's a good lesson for leaders.
Stephanie Leue - 00:27:29:
That's printed on a shirt.
Melissa Perri - 00:27:31:
Steph, let me just stamp it on their foreheads. So you mentioned too that you've got a great data team that kind of helps you support you so that you can make these decisions. What does that look like? And specifically, what are they doing for you as a leader so that you get the right information?
Stephanie Leue - 00:27:47:
They provided a perfect infrastructure for us while also always delivering insights. And honestly, I have no idea on how they did that. And I don't know with how many data teams you work, but i'm sure you had similar experiences. Usually, if you put things on a data steam backlog, what is the first thing they do? They roll their eyes and they tell you like, oh my gosh, this takes ages. We have so many things to do. We won't be able to deliver this kind of insight anytime soon. The data team at Doodle is magic. They are super ambitious and they have a very clear strategy as well. So they understood that once the tech infrastructure is set up properly and all data is generally available in a data warehouse connected with a good tool, you train everyone to use the tool properly, then their life gets easier and they can focus on the real deep analysis. And that's what they did. And they did all of that within a year. So they also started around may or June last year. And I would say we're meanwhile in a setup where we are like really sophisticated. We have weekly check-ins with the data team. So they prioritize all of our requests. They have a super clear process. They have certain data analysts assigned to certain teams so that we can also pull them in into early discovery. So the data team also knows when we are even only in discovery and we don't pull them in at the very end of a process. That makes it easy as well, because many teams also pull in data only when they are in measure phase or close to release. That's a big mistake. Pull everyone in when you start discovery, because then people are aware that things are coming and they can contribute. And I think the mix of tech infrastructure, ambitious people, and well-defined processes. Plus collaboration. Helped us to be where we are today.
Melissa Perri - 00:29:49:
i just want to point out for some people listening who are saying that we can't get data. You said that you have 32 million customers. 32 million customers, so data on all the things they do. So that's not a small data infrastructure to build by any means. We're not talking startup level. And that's impressive.
Stephanie Leue - 00:30:09:
I know. As I said, they are magic for me because I can even track how long it takes to create a single meeting. I can track every single button. I can track every single flow. Whatever data I need, they either put it in power BI or popsicle. It's really available to me. And they do one additional thing, which I have never seen before. They also already provide an analysis of the data based on their experience. They give me an idea of things they figured out that might be interesting for me. So that i'm not sitting in front of all of the dashboards wondering how do I set the right settings. But I also already get an idea of what they identified when they worked with the data.
Melissa Perri - 00:30:54:
Amazing. I like, i'm so jealous of that data team. It sounds really fun, you know? And I think people, they look at data as this thing that we have to do instead of a way to empower the leaders and the teams to make decisions. But I love the flexibility that you're talking about and the way that they went about this. Who came up with the strategy for data? Was that the CTO take it on or was there a head of data? What did that look like?
Stephanie Leue - 00:31:22:
Yeah, our data team is reporting to the CFO and we have a Head of Data. And I think the two are like really, really very experienced and they came up with the strategy together. And the CTO also supported a lot, plus the Chief Growth Officer, he had a very deep data mindset. So I think we had a couple of people who really also understood how data is beneficial for the business and how to set up the right structure. They collaborated, brainstormed, also involved people from different teams to see which requirements different teams have. And then they just implemented it.
Melissa Perri - 00:31:58:
Because data reports into the CFO, do you see like a tight coupling of your financial metrics back into the data that the teams are getting? Like is it easier to draw those parallels and get the data that you need to trace it all the way back up to revenue and cost?
Stephanie Leue - 00:32:13:
Yes, absolutely. I mean, we can connect data through really various angles. We are a SaaS business, and each SaaS business has a flywheel. So do we. Our flywheel is connected to revenue, obviously. And we can track the whole flywheel, which is connected to revenue. So I also can always see that once I increase the number of meetings, how does that affect the flywheel? How does that affect the revenue? So I would say both financial data, but also product data is tightly connected. And we can really also see the effects of things we are building on overall financial impact, which makes it easy for us to immediately also provide an answer to how valuable are the teams, where the things they delivered really having an impact on our top line. And that is super good, actually. I've never seen that before, to be honest.
Melissa Perri - 00:33:05:
Yeah, that's awesome. Because I think that's a part that... Product managers, especially in teams struggle with, they're like, I don't know how to connect what I'm doing down here back to what money we're making or what costs to do things. And a lot of times they'll lose some of the business focus. I think to be a good product manager, we need to be firmly in the middle between customer and business and pull it all together. That's definitely a gap that I see is that financial knowledge or being able to connect things back to the finance or the value that it's actually producing for customers and the company.
Stephanie Leue - 00:33:38:
Yeah, what's your experience here? Because my hypothesis is that also many companies don't talk very often about their numbers. So the people in the company don't have access to financial numbers, actually. For us, that's different. We share these things with everyone. The dashboards are accessible. So people also know where we are. We talk about it in all hands. So it's nothing we hide in front of everyone. And I think that's also part of the education. So people just know where the numbers are, what they mean and how we use them for daily business. And that feels to me very educated and helps us also to make better decisions.
Melissa Perri - 00:34:16:
Yeah, and I think that's really mature for a company. Like if you're entrusting people to build things of value for the company, you should be telling them what that value is and like, did you do it? And this is where we're at. I agree with you. I think some leaders are scared to share those financials, but if you're in a company where, let's say the teams are directly impacting that financial metric and that's what a product led team is, right? Like it's like we build products and it makes us money. I could see in more of a sales led thing. It will just be like, build this. And that might be, that actually might be one of those mentalities, right? Maybe that's why people don't share those metrics. Because in sales, sometimes the numbers could be arbitrary or we will charge different things for different people and sometimes they make stuff up. And then it goes back to what we're actually delivering them. But in product-led, the value should be extremely clear for your products. Like I buy this for X amount of dollars and this is how it works. So that might be like a holdover from a sales led mindset now that I think about it.
Stephanie Leue - 00:35:19:
Maybe it is also that if you treat your people like adults then you can share such numbers, right? And it's risky. Like what if numbers go down? I mean, it happened to us last year. If numbers go down, people might potentially be concerned. They might be afraid that this has an impact on their future in the company. So sharing this kind of knowledge is also super risky because you have suddenly to handle emotions of people. But if you hide it, then people don't know and then they don't get concerned. But then they only figure out later if they, for example, lost their jobs which is also not acceptable. So I would say if you treat your employees like you would treat adults and you trust them that they can handle a certain amount of information like adults would do, then this is also unblocking your teams and it helps them to make better decisions.
Melissa Perri - 00:36:14:
That's a really good point. So how did you handle it in the company when the numbers went down? Like, what did you do to comfort people or say like, be realistic with people, but make sure they weren't. Being super reactive, right? And going, oh my god, we're on the titanic and leaving or whatnot.
Stephanie Leue - 00:36:32:
I mean, they were.
Melissa Perri - 00:36:33:
They're like, that's the reality.
Stephanie Leue - 00:36:35:
Sure. We saw all the complaints. We're not a small company. So many users are using Doodle. There was no chance for us to hide what was happening actually, right? So yes, people were concerned. And yes, we had a lot of tough talks and people were emotional and they were also frustrated about what happened actually. So we had to cope with lots of emotions actually. But you know, like that's in the nature of things. People have emotions and that's okay. And I think the most important thing is to not neglect that they have emotions and that they are frustrated. So what we did is we just listened. We came up with a plan. We were transparent. We asked for feedback. We continued introducing new processes. We gave them the stability they needed and we created the plan we needed as a business. And we just really also accepted that potentially not everyone is now super excited and laughing about the things that happened to us. But we also had a deep trust that the connection between Doodle’s employees and us as a company is so big that we can as a team recover from what happened. And now 14 months later, I can confirm that like, yes, we're there. People trust us. We're back. We're happy. We have like a super high employee rating. So we're good.
Melissa Perri - 00:37:57:
That's awesome. That's a nice turnaround. So as you're looking now for the next stage of growth, you know, with Doodle, you had, came in, had this wild ride. Now you're setting yourself up to grow. What's your biggest challenge right now?
Stephanie Leue - 00:38:11:
Well, I have a super big vision in mind now. What people loved most about Doodle was its simplicity and what Doodle lost was its simplicity. So my vision is to bring back the simplicity into the product while maintaining the flexibility we offered. So we're kind of rebuilding the whole experience and you can't do that with 32 million customers. You can't just reiterate or reinvent everything. You have to find a good approach on how to sequence your releases and to piece by piece really get closer to your overall vision. And to be honest, I’d say that's the biggest challenge in my career so far. And I mean, i've built PayPal plus for the German market which was already like really, really big, but compared to what we have ahead of us now, that's nothing. So I'm scared because it's big and it's complex and i've never done it, but i'm also super excited because everyone at Doodle loves that vision and they believe that we will get there. So I also just trust the process and think like, let's go with the flow, we will make it.
Melissa Perri - 00:39:19:
That's awesome. And it sounds like a really exciting journey though, to put this all in place and actually watch it grow. Thanks so much, Stephanie, for being on the podcast with us. If people want to learn more about you and follow your journey at Doodle, where can they reach out?
Stephanie Leue - 00:39:33:
You find me on LinkedIn. Just search for my name. My handle is similar to my name and i'm quite active over there.
Melissa Perri - 00:39:40:
Great. Well, thank you so much for listening to the product thinking podcast. If you liked this episode, please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and definitely leave us a note on social media and let us know what you think. We will be back next Wednesday with another Dear Melissa. So if you have any questions for me on product management, go to dearmelissa.com and drop them there. We'll see you next time.