How to reinvent an

established product…
Zürich, 10.11.2021, Jan Schwitters
… and shift tech,
mindset and
processes
accordingly.
Agenda

Where do we come from? What did we do? What did we learn?

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Agenda

Where do we come from? What did we do? What did we learn?

4
The biggest professional social network in DACH:

XING and its

business model
has (unfortunately)
been very
successful for
many years

 cross-
functional
product
teams

>500
Lateral experienced,
leadership internal
colleagues
Very well
Double digit growth established product
on most KPI. community

Regular
user
OKR
feedback &
alignment
good
analytics

6
 2019 to 2020

But the need for

change became
obvious.

Action was driven by three

observations:

1. International competition accelerated

2. User behavior changed
3. We optimized for local optima

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Agenda

Where do we come from? What did we do? What did we learn?

9
User view Company view

Re-build &
re-use
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Signals

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12
1 2 3
New user journeys New messenger User approval
across the product pattern

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Good intent led to …

Central Getting all

Product Felt like micro
teams on
architecture management
board

Central
Deliver new
approach to Stress
user journeys
steer this

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 Good intent led to …

New
Integrate
messenger Bottleneck
everything
pattern

User
Stress &
interviews, But
wrong
Prototype & rollout plan
decisions
MVP

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Re-build &
re-use

1 2 3
Central components Leading Design Tech guardrails
system

16

Good intent led to …

Replace
Central Stress w/o
existing
components user benefit
functionality

Leading Define & align Resource

Design system every element consumption

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Good intent led to …

Guardrails
High effort,
for latest Stress
high risk
technology

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And then the situation got worse…
Micro
management

Changes &
Stress Uncertainty

Bottleneck

Corona
Stress and
Stress & pressure Homeoffice
wrong
decisions

Stress w/o
user benefit

Resource People leaving Lack of trust

consumption

Stress

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And then we launched the MVP with an ambitious rollout plan behind:

Guess what - not every

user was impressed
with 50% of the use
cases not (yet) available

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We turned back
to:
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 Title
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This is what we achieved already:

Product

People Tech

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 User-oriented
„XING GUIDE“ notifications

Product

X-cluster Coherent UX
user journeys pattern re-used
everywhere

People Tech
Decisions on
quant. and qual.
Efficiency
user data increased

Orchestration Loading time

of a big change improved

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Agenda

Where do we come from? What did we do? What did we learn?

25
01 02 03
Aim for best user Communicate a clear plan! Burn for your vision!
experience!

And consider all While keeping the agile But keep validating
consequences of good working mode. hypothesis.
intents.

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Questions or feedback?

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