How to navigate your digital transformation journey
Scott highlights four key learnings from Koala's digital transformation journey:
Koala x Contentsquare
Koala is an international direct-to-consumer (D2C) furniture company with a mission to "build better furniture experiences, designed with the world in mind".
Scott Shillinglaw, Senior Digital Product Manager shares insight into their digital transformation journey. He reflects on key learnings from instilling a data-led culture, mistakes the team made, and how data from Contentsquare’s Experience Intelligence platform has helped the team prioritize decision-making.
Scott highlights four key learnings from Koala's digital transformation journey:
When Koala began operations in 2015, the team emphasized a flexible approach to decision-making towards ideas and projects. They seized growth opportunities and prioritized speed-to-market over perfection. This approach led to exponential growth in their first few years of operations.
Over time, this scrappy approach created technical issues. The technical team had not yet invested sufficient time in documentation, and tracking became confusing. Quick decisions without optimization led to accumulated technical debt.
The team noticed a drop in conversion rate performance after launching their new website. However, there were many contributors to the issue, and they needed to scope out the problem and identify quick wins.
Koala organized cross-functional teams comprising technical, product, creative and commercial team members to scrutinize the performance of each website page.
To close the performance gaps after migrating from Shopify, the cross-functional team analyzed performance data from critical path areas like checkout completion, mobile-specific features, and product landing pages for quick wins and to prioritize issues for fixing.
Data analysis is key, otherwise you’ll just be opinions lost in the void."
Scott Shillinglaw
Senior Digital Product Manager
Koala underestimated the speed benefits inherent to Shopify’s platform while migrating to their new tech stack.
Contentsquare’s Digital Experience Monitoring Speed Analysis showed a decrease in their Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric on mobile after the new website was launched. This metric measures the loading time of web content on mobile devices and is a key user experience and SEO ranking factor.
Though they could resolve the issues and return to their previous rankings, Scott reflects they could have avoided the issue if they had spent more time thoroughly evaluating and scoping out functionality gained and lost from changing website providers.
It’s tempting to jump from problem to solution when faced with an issue, especially when complaints come from customers or public channels. However, Scott shares that quick action may not always be the best option.
Example 1: Koala’s welcome flow popup was too ‘spammy.’
Koala received feedback from social media that their on-site welcome flow pop-up was too intrusive. The team jumped into solution mode, reducing the frequency of the pop-up and pushing the solution live.
While the broken feature was reported as a bug, a quick check on Contentsquare’s Customer Journey Analysis showed only 0.04% of users used that specific feature since launch.
Based on the low usage data, the team decided it would be better to prioritize their time elsewhere and remove the feature entirely rather than fix it.
Having solid data to justify decisions also helped in proactively explaining the basis of their decision to stakeholders.
1. Stay flexible and adapt as your company grows
Growth presents the opportunity to shape your organizational culture to prepare yourself for the next stage of growth.
2. Validate opinions with data
Use data to inform opinions and decisions. Data gives you a more solid base for decision-making and helps justify your decisions to your key stakeholders.