Product design case study

Talking to men

I recruited and spoke to a wide range of men, ensuring we included various faiths, relationships structures, LGBTQIAP+ identifying men, economic situations, and jobs. I was incredibly buoyed by these interviews. They were deeply impactful, vulnerable, and showed that nearly all the men I spoke to valued their partner relationships from various angles, to a great extent. Unlike many women who have social circles that regularly talk about relationships, however, men in general have fewer networks and communication skills in respect to this. While it appeared to be progressing, our society has reinforced these structures. I was able to gain valuable insights, identify common trends, eliminate a number of existing hypotheses, and develop a report on the findings and how they were placed with the academic research. This work also allowed us to distinguish a few clear patterns between dating, relationships, separation, and single status of various phases.

Building a product by stepping up a staircase of needs

From the research into men's needs, we knew we needed to start by engaging men and supporting immediate needs before progressing into more complex areas. From expert insights into high drop-out rates of men's therapy attendance, we also knew we needed to be able to provide quick value, action, and establish trust. With this in mind, I created our first take of the product staircase to illustrate how this might look and ensure that all of us understood the journey we were building for (that might change as we learned more en route). I created this to be product-agnostic and built for impact. We knew the behaviors we wanted to change and the intended positive outcomes for men (and society), so at each step we could meet this with the right campaigns and tools rather than be trapped into one solution. This also laid the foundation for our product ideas and content—what do we need to do now, rather than building for an unknown end product?

Bringing in insights from ecosystem research

Finally, to ensure we were also meeting a market need and clearly understood our positioning and value, I undertook a large sweep of the market, other organizations and charities, our research papers, studied numerous other papers in the field, and compiled supporting evidence whilst collating our unknowns and what was missing. Academia, community services, government policy, legal remedies and private products are mostly focused on addressing downstream issues, including intimate partner violence. We wanted to head upstream to skill building and encompassing all men in their efforts to create meaningful, healthy, fulfilling relationships. This is generally where paid, private programs existed, but where corporate and government interest was growing. There are some awesome men in the private space doing great work. In reality, only a very small group of men are likely to take up paid courses so our project was aimed beyond this, but the information some of these men regularly provide in social videos can be really useful and if found and the person is relatable, can provide engagement on the topic.

Developing non-shitty personas

With that in mind, instead of creating detailed demographic personas, which are generally not useful, I developed profiles of people that arose during research and would be useful to the product direction, content development and marketing. Interwoven through these were hundreds of personas and combinations that existed within our target audience, all with different personalities, experiences and relationship scenarios.

I wanted to move away from overly complicated segmentation (a more rigorous accurate-fit-always approach) with pragmatic market segmentation (capturing 70% of cases) in order to make it practical to use and provide us enough confidence to act. I also stripped the typical ages, faux names and photographs from these profiles. We gave the profiles colors, neutral gender constructs, locations and cultural backgrounds within relationships. Though each of these would require specific research, content and marketing, the broad themes remain similar.

Shaping the product

With the initial research phases over, I created and facilitated an ideation workshop to go as broad as we could with ideas. We included experts, target audience men, Movember team members, and the CEO. We had a lot of fun and also produced a whole range of ideas to test. I brought together these themes and pulled the highest-ranked ideas into a testing plan. After testing the ideas with a new round of research participants, I analyzed the results, pulled out the trends, noted what required changing and which were most likely to engage men and be useful, and presented this for executive consumption.

Developing useful content and channels

Producing the content we needed to start with on our staircase involved a significant amount of my time. I needed to translate what academic approaches outlined, what men wanted and needed, how we could package this up in a digestible manner, and which channels we could leverage. We also agreed we would need to expand this into amicable separation as a lot of problems were manifesting here and an increase in amicable separations would be healthy.

By far the most challenging to work on was the tone of content and its inclusiveness. As a relationship product for a wide audience, we gleaned how we needed to sound through our research. Additionally, this field is flooded with certain influencers and figures with a strong pull; the way they speak and their tone often engages men. I pulled together numerous examples we could share amongst the experts, product, brand, and content teams to dissect what parts we liked, what we didn't, and how we wanted to sound.

From here I established our guidelines for tone and, alongside the Product Director, a process we could use for developing the content from expert input (particularly important in developing activities and topics) through to the final output. One of our experts, a men's psychologist, then read through our pieces and edited them to provide clear samples of the tone he wanted to ensure was used throughout. Ultimately, I worked with our experts to create core pieces from our hypotheses, including a user-generated experiment of activities, remedies for common problems with instant action steps, activities to participate in, a video series we could evaluate, and a limited weekly challenge through instant message channels.

Testing, testing, testing

With numerous tests in process and an MVP underway, I conducted more testing with the challenges, activities, channels and products themselves. We learned an incredible amount through this and what was exciting for me was the number of comments on the design, freshness, and inclusivity without it being prompted. In their own language, participants noted that themselves, their family members, their situations or their friends felt represented. This was very heartening.

Interestingly, from this round of testing came a big question of - how would I find this? How would I get here? Men themselves recognized they often relied mostly on the algorithm to serve up content, businesses, podcasts, and events in the region, rather than actively seeking them out or specifically following folks outside some of the well known or local ones. Turning to big, public campaigns (or distributed micro-influencers) and onto social channels was the next stage of the product, and these insights started to lead into how we might best develop this. With skill building, there is a small group of men taking active steps to look for this information or help. With many, it's a trigger that brings them to that place - this project needed to work in the prevention space—inevitably, nearly always harder!

Producing a video show

From the validated ideas we narrowed down, one of the most expensive to pursue would be the development of a digital series that combined humor, vulnerability and hosts on a wide variety of topics within dating, relationships and separation. This was a very popular - and polarizing - concept. I wanted to test real world engagement and different formats with a tiny budget before any decisions were made to pursue this. I collaborated with an awesome Product Manager who was in the process of developing a significant mental health series for Movember and borrowed a couple of days of filming time with our resident expert. We then created clips with participants to test different formats of these on socials, email campaigns, and media to land on a direction. Big thanks to Thomas, the excellent editor, for these trial cuts!

Making a plan for marketing

Marketing was a big component of this work and also needed to specifically be part of the product. Stage 2 of our work was to create what we called Conversation Campaigns. Our user research had shown we needed to start the conversation in public and bring it to men in order to engage them. I went digging for the best campaigns and ads that grabbed men, along with Movember's best performing campaigns for change. From here I created a four phase plan idea. Our conversation campaigns, including guerilla marketing and partnership concepts, our user generated challenge, and a dedicated social media strategy, as much of the content itself was expected to be consumed here. This was then handed off to the internal Marketing department for review, input, and development.

Given Movember's huge breadth and network scope, I had a lot of fun ideating and crafting examples. Shown here is an example of one of the proposed partnerships and the social media tone.

Monthly reports to keep things flowing

It might be unusual to point out any behind-the-scenes communication, dashboards, and reporting that happens, but at Mo we created digestible monthly reports so that all the teams, management layers, and experts across the organization could quickly see a status update each month. From the start, it was a core piece to refer to and highlighted what was working well, what needed more attention, and created a feedback loop into the internal process improvement team that was working on changes to make. The Product Director drove this idea from the start, and it helped me learn how enormously helpful it can be in multichannel, complex environments.

What's next

I wrapped up my time with Movember by outlining a six-month product plan and which unknowns still needed to be addressed with a higher priority as the product developed. I was incredibly buoyed by the enthusiasm of men for this project and left knowing there was a vacuum in this space that was being filled with incredibly needed conversations and action as we assessed the status of relationships post-pandemic and how we spend our days together.

My many interviews left me with the impression that though we may not utilize the right words, and though some of the global influences might be unhealthy and there definitely remains a number of strong stereotypes particularly in partnered relationships with children, we have grown in emotional maturity, and most of us would find it useful if there was more wayfinding and opportunity to have discussions about the shape of our lives, our relationships, and the futures we want to create. In many instances, I felt that what we see in mainstream society every day - whether comedy, campaigns, charities or corporations - was often lagging behind what people were doing, trying, feeling, thinking or dreaming in the real world—in our cities as much as the open country.