Rebuilding the product while building a strong team - Happierco Case Study

I joined Happierco with CodeIgniter Web Developing experience, and I left with Ruby on Rails and Product Management strong skills.

Happierco was my first experience in the startup ecosystem. It’s an employee engagement and performance management solution that helps managers and employees to build a happier company.

I worked there for 2 years, as Software Engineer & Product Manager. We had taken over Happierco that had be abandoned. At the beginning, we were 3, and we worked well until the team grew to 15 people.

I’ll show you how we did it, how we manage to maintain a strong team culture even during the COVID-19 pandemic, what my role was and what I learned.

What is the story behind Happierco?

Happierco was founded by Eric Degboe in 2017. His dream was to help employees be happy at work. There are many ways for employees to become disengaged, and he decided to build an OKR management solution that would help each employee align with the company's vision and achieve their personal goals.

Together with his team, they built a solution to help employees and managers define their personal or team goals and align them with the company's vision. Happierco also allow them to manage their team or personal priorities.

Unfortunately, Eric and his team had left Happierco for unknown reasons. Eric entrusted the product to the incubator Etrilabs.

On my side, at that time, I had just obtained my degree in computer science applied to business management, and I was building with a friend a project management solution for companies. Our goals were to help companies achieve their projects and maintain their customers informed and satisfied during the process.

I met Ulrich Sossou, the CTO of Etrilabs in the time, who were looking for a new team to continue where the previous team stopped. Ulrich has an amazing background and also the vision of the project wasn’t too far from what my friend and I were working on. 

That’s how we had taken back the project. Our goal was to increase our customers and improve the product.

What am I proud of about Happierco?

In a few figures:

• 3,000+ users onboarded
• $9,500+ revenues
• 500+ website visitors each week, even 2 years after no activity

Happierco was a startup registered in the USA, but the team was based in Benin, West Africa. So we were proud having customers around the world, but also about what we built together:

• We reanimate an abandoned project by redefining the scope of the product and its vision,
• Without any paid ads and only with SEO and content marketing, we were able to attract over 600 visits to our website every week.
• We built a strong team culture and maintained the team productive from 3 to 15 people, even during the COVID-19 crisis.

How did I contribute to that?

As I mentioned earlier, a friend (cc Christian) and I were hired as web developers for Happierco. But we were just 2, and we had to do more than web development. That’s how I discovered that I liked to learn different things. So I started to take on some product management role without knowing it. It was only when the team grew that I officially became the product manager.

So here's what I did at Happierco:

Prioritize and drive the roadmap

One of my roles was to make sure our customers reach their company’s goals and make their team happier. So we had to improve the OKR management features, but also add new features to support our vision. Here are what we have built:

• Maintain managers updated about what’s their subordinates are working on with regular check-ins
• Create a news feed of activities in the different teams to bring them closer
• Generate feedback, spontaneous praise, and recognition for talented people in the organization to motivate them to continue and inspire others
• Build strong relationships between managers and subordinates through regular one-on-one meetings
• Allow employees to evaluate each other to help them understand their weaknesses and turn them into strengths
• Measure employees' general impressions of the team's values, the company's vision, their mental well-being, etc. through anonymous surveys

We added those features because of what our customers wanted. They wanted to have a productive and engaged team. And the OKR management feature was not enough to help them properly.

I was handling the role of the customer success with Intercom in the beginning and after Crisp. It helps me understand what problem they were facing and assist them solve them. I also looked at the competitors hot features to decide what and how we should implement our own features.

We were using Jira for project and task management and also for the roadmap. We have used the sprint methodology to stay productive and daily standup (using our own product) to ensure everyone not facing any issue.

Improve user experience

There were a lot of concepts I didn’t know in the beginning relative to what Happierco was solving. I had to read different books from John Doerr (Measure What Matters) or Marty Cagan (How to create tech product cust) and articles from over the world.

After I understood the value we were offering, I had to know why people are not using Happierco to solve their problem. To understand why users are not buying the product, we had to see what they were doing during the trial period and if they were facing any issue.

Tracking Tools

Nowadays, there are some tracking tools that can allow you to track individually everything a user is doing and globally the key important actions users are doing. Here the different tracking tools:

Hotjar

It’s a cross-platform behavioral analysis tool created to help product managers and designers better understand their audience.

We've used it to understand how our users interact with our onboarding and what they didn't do that we wanted them to do. It also helped us when a specific user encounter a bug. We could see their behavior and understand what happened.

For example, it’s thanks to Hotjar that we knew some users didn’t understand how to create their objective and how to easily add the key results properly.

Before

After

Mixpanel

It’s a tool that allows product managers or data analysts to analyze how users interact with their product. It allowed us to identify trends, understand user behavior and make decisions about the product.

We would send to Mixpanel and other third parties all the key activities or actions that users had performed while using the app via Segment.

It helped us track the effectiveness of our onboarding and improve it. We knew what was missing or what users should have done that they didn't do to reach the "aha" moment for example.

The new onboarding is customized according to the user. We wanted something that will help them start quickly and discovered their aha moment with the possibility of exploring the whole product.

In-app & Email onboarding

We created the in-app onboarding to walk users through the application to find out themselves how our product solves their problem.

Checklist onboarding

The in-app onboarding is a checklist based on the company goals. For example, if a company has created an account and tell us they want to reach their goals, the onboarding will walk them to explore the OKR methodology feature, the Priorities, and Check-ins management features first. After it will suggest the other features.

Empty States

To prevent the display of boring and empty pages, we’ve created some quick tour of the features in the feature page. So that new user know how this page would look like when there will be some data and also what they need to do to start well.

Email onboarding

The email onboarding had different roles

• Bring back new users that didn’t do anything or not so much in the app
• Support users with great articles around Happierco features (for example, how to define an OKR, etc.)
• Celebrate quick wins with the user and the company owner

We used Customer.io to create and schedule the triggered emails. Customer.io was also receiving the data from Segment.

Working on the team culture

When our work started to pay off and we had brought in our first clients, Ulrich who was initially just a supervisor of our work officially became our CEO. This was a little pride for us, as he was also the CTO of the incubator which included several other startups that he also supervised.

When he started to get more involved, he contributed a lot to the improvement of our work process and to the creation and maintenance of our company culture.

Company values

One of the things the other startups in the incubator admired about our startup was our company culture. When we started recruiting new members, Ulrich took the lead and we defined the cultures and values of our company.

Above are a mind mapping we did to define our values. Every members have to propose what are the top 5 values they think are worthy. And after we had a brainstorming to convince others these are the right values to represent our company.

You can notice the final selection is different from our personal selections, and it’s like a mix of our brainstorming.

Having a clear company values, especially when the team is growing, help to maintain every member connected and to ensure we’re working towards the same goals. It had improved the team cohesion and has created a sense of commitment in the workplace.

We had used Miro to define our company values.

Departments meeting

As we grew, we began to split our company into departments because we noticed that everyone was no longer talking in meetings and the meetings were getting long.

In addition we went into lockdown in March 2020 and needed to make sure the team stayed productive and happy especially since we had hired interns.

• Daily department meetings: Each department had two daily standups (one in the morning and another in the afternoon) to ensure everyone is not facing an issue and is progressing on their goals
• Daily leadership meetings: After the morning daily department meeting, the managers had another meeting so that each team know the progress of others
• Weekly overall meetings: On that meeting every manager share what their team has worked on and what they will work on the next week, I share the progress on our company OKRs, and we have a praise time where we can recognize our peer work.

We had used Notion to record our different meetings.

1 on 1 meeting

Each department has a manager. And we promote recurrent one-on-one meeting between a manager and their subordinate. It’s a free space where they can talk about their dream, project, goals, performance, mental health, etc.

The goal is to make sure everyone is happy.

We had used our own product: Happierco for handle our 1-on-1 meetings.

Learning day

One of our value is to challenge our limit. And we noticed that every friday the team was not really productive. They was working but they was distracted, probably because it was next to weekend. So we have decided to turn the work day into a learning day.

We have created different team driven by learning goals. Some of the goals was to learn a new language, improve development skills or read books. So each team members can join multiple team if they are interested.

It’s during that day I found time to read INSPIRED from Marty Cagan, Product Led Growth from Wes Bush, Web Copy That Sells from Maria Veloso and Measure What Matters from John Doerr. All those books have help me to improve my knowledge and work skills.

So, the learning day helped us achieve our personal goals and, in a knock-on effect, our new skills helped us be better at our jobs. For example, one of our designers was having some difficulty understanding database management, so he took the opportunity to work with Ulrich and he explained how it works. And a few weeks later, he had to work with our database.

Improve and build new features

In addition to what previously said, I had personally developed various features or contributed to the development of some existing features.

Skills used:

• Ruby on Rails skills: Ruby gems, TurboLinks
• Ruby on Rails related tech: HTML5, CSS3, SASS, JavaScript, jQuery, Ajax, Bootstrap, Redis
• Methodologies & Architectures: Agile development, MVC, Git versioning code
• Tools: GitLab, Heroku, Cloud66, Slack, Trello, Jira, Atom, Bugsnag, Sentry
• Database used: Postgres

Resume:

• Identify the weakness of the product and improved the user experience
• Work in agile software development team to complete various epics through bi-weekly sprints and daily stand-ups
• Design and implement new features on the product
• And, solve various bugs and errors that occurred

Communicate about the product and create demand for it

Lastly, one of our problem was to convert our visitors into new users. We had a great blog that was attracting hundreds of visitor per week, but few of them have tested Happierco.

At the time we wanted to fix that problem, I had a product team of interns (an associate product manager and an associate product marketing manager). I was supervising their work.

Lead magnet promotion

To convert our blog readers into users, we’ve placed some lead magnet inside of our best articles. Depending on the article, we suggest to the reader whether to try Happierco to fix the problem that made them read the article or to download one of our ebook to deepen their knowledge of the topic of the article they were reading.

After getting the leads through the lead magnet strategy, our goal is to convert them into a user. So we’ve scheduled some automatic message to promote our best features according to the ebook they downloaded.

We had used SendInBlue to schedule and send our automatic campaign. We had used WordPress to display our guides.

Web pages copy

Before, our website contained only a landing page and a blog page. So even if a user is interested in our product, they have to sign up to know how Happierco can solve their problem.

To solve that problem, we’ve created some dedicated landing pages to promote our most important features. The goal was to explain to the prospect what they’ll get with each of our features.

I also wrote articles about Happierco's features. The goal was to promote our features while giving important answers to the questions of some prospects. Here are the articles:

• How employee pulse surveys can impact employee engagement for remote teams
• Should 360 feedback be anonymous or not?

Product Documentation

A documentation will help your users to get maximum of use and value of your product.

To save time and better serve our customers, we’ve created a documentation. Our customers could read the documentation to understand themselves how to use happierco. I’ve created most of the articles needed for a customer to get started and to discover other possibilities.

Conclusion

I worked at Happierco for only 2 years, but I learn many things that sometimes I think I worked there for 4 years. We have built from Africa a product used by thousands of people around the world.

I’ve learned how important it is to create effective product onboarding to help users discover to aha moment ! I’ve learned how strong can be a team when you work on their values and they feel engaged and motivated.

I also discovered how quickly you can code and progress using the right framework: Ruby on rails. And how a well written copy can help you convince prospect to test your product, but also how a documentation can help the support team gain time.