Lightstep
(acquired by ServiceNow)
Sandbox
Lightstep Sandbox is an interactive experience for developers to learn how Lightstep solves their most painful app performance problems.
Team
+2
Skills
Product design
User research
UX
UI
Timeline
12 weeks
Date
2019
Background
Lightstep leadership set our H2 2019 goal: align the company to our product use cases.
With this new direction, we’d change our sales process from top-down to bottom-up (self-service) to shorten our sales cycle and avoid competitive feature wars.
There was an open call for projects, and our team set out to understand the opportunities across GTM and Product.
Lightstep leadership set our H2 2019 goal: align the company to our product use cases.
Approach
Leveraging our UIE framework we created a plan for aligning our team and leadership.
Understand
Interview developers, Product, and GTM
Capture the customer journey
Audit analytics
Identify
Opportunities that will drive Free plan signups and lead to higher conversion to paid plans
An experience that can show developers the unique value of Lightstep so they will be motivated to instrument their code
Execute
Design and build an experience that can be applied to current and future product use-cases
Deliver an experience Marketing can integrate throughout their funnel
Understand
Customer journey
Instrumenting code was by far the biggest blocker to adoption.
Marketing funnel
Website traffic was the strongest conversion to Free plan signups and code instrumentation was vital for Free to Paid plan conversion.
Research insights
Developer interviews
Free plan users
Unclear how Lightstep is unique from other tracing solutions
Assume instrumenting code with tracing telemetry is not worth the effort
Paid plan users
Experienced critical regressions that only tracing could solve
Customer champions can communicate Lightstep’s unique value
All users
Highly skeptical of marketing material
Prefer to try products and decide for themselves
Favorite learning experiences are game-based
Internal interviews
Teams were frustrated. We had proof our product found regressions that competitors couldn’t, but we struggled to build customer champions.
Takeaways
Inconsistent language to describe product
The fastest closed customers instrumented 10+ services within 30 days
Customers with the most services allocated time for code instrumentation
Challenge
How might we educate developers about the value of Lightstep so they will be motivated to sign up for a Free Plan and instrument their code (activate).
Identify
Project prioritization
GTM wanted us to update our product walkthrough videos. While this could have been a quick win, we pushed back because our interview findings showed developers prefer to try products over consuming content.
Solution direction
Execute
Revised funnel
Success metrics
Design strategy
Solution ideation workshop
We ran an iterative workshop with participants from our team, Marketing, Sales, Product, and Customer Success.
Build vs buy
We evaluated several products but decided to build our own solution to provide the right combination of data collection, exploration, triggers, and the ability to redirect users.
Game design
Scoped requirements
Start screen
List of scenarios
View scenario description
Start scenario
Gameplay
View number of steps
View current step instruction
View app feature call out
Get hint
Replay a step
Navigation redirect
Completion screen
Sign up for Free Plan
View Paid Plans
Navigate to scenario screen
Share
Start screen
We designed a solution that preserved content for multiple use-cases.
Initial release scoped to one scenario.
Future release for multiple scenarios.
Gameplay UX
We chose the vertical layout because it fits more scenario steps and has a better mapping of content and actions.
Did not pursue this direction
Chosen design direction
Learning support
Lightstep is a technical and information-dense product. We balanced direct instruction with opt-in hints and redirects to give a sense of freedom while nudging the user forward.
Completion screen
We chose the more simplified design for converting users to a Free Plan.
Did not pursue this direction
Chosen design direction
Release 1
To drive traffic, Marketing emailed groups of existing and potential customers a link to our Sandbox.
lightstep.com/sandbox
Initial release scoped to one scenario.
30-day results
As users completed more steps the conversion rate for each step increased – they were building momentum.
Users who completed the scenario
7% signed up for Free Plan
36 SQLs generated
3 Paid Plan conversions
Release 2
We add two more use-cases and a persistent Free plan signup, iterated on content and animations, and moved Free plan signup form to our website to reduce spam.
Second release with multiple scenarios.
We promoted Sandbox everywhere
With our refreshed brand, we bought ads, wrote a blog post, created links throughout our marketing site, and showcased Sandbox at events.
