Retail/Education Spotlight

Children's Magazine

Overcoming project mentality and ambiguity with analytics and discovery

About the Client

Children’s Magazine provider with 75 years of history helping enrich and teach children valuable lessons while fostering creativity and fun.
Primary products are 3 magazines that run the span of a child’s early-life years until 11 but are looking to expand into other offerings that fit the brand image.

The Challenge

The Senior Director of Product was put into a position to stand up a product organization, yet organizational factors were limiting the product’s growth potential.

The organization was reacting to waning growth and an unstable market where the executive team was driving solutions by assumptions. This led to top-down direction with limited analytics, no customer interaction, and no discovery to prioritize the right work on the right focus.

Additionally, project teams had to work at an unsustainable pace on unclear priorities, leading to low job satisfaction scores and continued attrition.

The organization drove a customer-first message, but driving solutions from assumptions was antithetical to this goal. Analytics had no direction and too many priorities to match limited capacity.

The Solution

Two Pathfinder representatives, a Product coach and a Product consultant, collaborated with client leadership and teams on the following:

Laid the foundation for data-led decision-making. Partnered with a leading analytics provider to implement a crawl, walk, run approach to implementing the tool that met their limited budget.
Set the example for how to execute exceptionally under tight timelines and ambiguity. Provided multiple product experts when they lost their lead to execute their product needs during the holiday push through multiple challenges.
Helped team move away from a big-project mindset to incremental, iterative developments. Encouraging customer research, we helped them get closer to solving customer problems and streamlining the purchasing process.

The Result

A complete transformation of how internal product teams operate from discovery through measuring success that leads to the results below.

Implementation of an analytics solution, operationalized with teams in 3 months. This led to the identification and resolution of 10 customer-impacting issues.
Enhancement of product pages improved Add to Cart, Conversion, and Average Order Value, increasing an estimated incremental $700K-1.2M in sales per year.
Enforced A/B testing before implementing a workflow that would have led to $186k losses, allowing the client to pull the cord on the idea before full investment.

"Results-oriented, highly collaborative, and smart are the words that come to mind when I think of the Pathfinder team. What started as a temporary contractor quickly evolved to a strategic engagement that enabled the building blocks for scalable eCommerce growth. As a result, we’ll be able to serve more grown-ups; helping them raise curious, creative, caring, and confident kids!"

Senior Director of Product

Let's Co-Create Positive Product Change In Your Organization

To hear more stories or start your own path to contact us today at 614.915.9180 or info@pathfinderproduct.com.