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Which? : The “Probate PA” Concept

Which? asked Nina Lovelace to look at what new products/ services they could potentially develop to add subscriber value to their existing Probate advice services, with a view to growing sales and yield. 

THE PROBLEM

Which? had an existing subscription ‘DIY’ Probate service which provided guidance to consumers to deal with the estate of someone who has died. Which? wanted to improve this service, to support more people to manage probate online not just over the telephone, with a view to selling more DIY Probate subscriptions and/or upselling more supported packages. 

WHAT WE DID

Nina assessed existing data to understand audience usage trends of the existing probate service, and reviewed or ran qualitative and quantitative research already supplied by Which? that gave insight into a number of key audience requirements that could inform potential development ideas. Nina also scoped a service blueprint in a service design role, to identify how users currently accessed the service, such as online or through the telephone, and where weaknesses lay.  

Online was underdeveloped; many users wanted more online guidance, with some audience segments actively refusing to use the telephone service (although this was still vital to maintain for many more elderly users). Digital-first audiences specifically wanted task lists to break managing probate into more manageable, achievable tasks and to avoid overwhelm. There was also a greater requirement for chatbot style support, for when consumers had additional questions, which could be potentially overseen by the customer support telephone team used to this type of conversational work. 

Nina worked with the Which? UX team to run UX design workshops, to create designs and scope in terms of Epics/ Stories a range of potential ‘Probate PA’ concepts that could affordably be tested and prototyped with end users. Nina also developed a business case into how the Probate PA could support upsell from DIY Probate or Bronze service, to progressively more supported “Silver” and “Gold” subscriptions. 

THE OUTCOME

The Which? Board welcomed the concepts which they followed up with more detailed internal costing and feasibility work. Major elements were subsequently built, tested and rolled out to support subscription growth.

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News UK: Product Comparison

News UK asked Nina to do a deep dive product comparison across its suite of digital products, and compare them in terms of features & pricing to support product strategy.

THE PROBLEM

News UK did not have a macro view of how its product suite, including websites, apps and tablet ‘editions’, compared with key competitors.

WHAT WE DID

Nina did an exhaustive deep dive into News UK’s product suite, assessing apps, website and other digital products and their benefits and value to  audience segments, when compared to similar products from other media or comparable outlets. 

OUTCOMES

On the basis of her analysis, Nina presented a product SWOT analysis to the News UK top team, helping them identify products in need of potential development in order to stay competitive, as well as innovative or good practice from other media outlets. The research informed into product roadmapping and reprioritisation work. 

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Startups: Improving Product Process

Nina has helped support multiple startups to develop agile product processes and prioritise product work to prepare for or support scaling. For example, she helped embed user experience processes such as identifying/ understanding priority audiences into mum networking startup Mush and helped storage scale-up Lovespace to embed improved product roadmapping processes, to speed up and streamline more regular development sprints, and develop junior product managers. 

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Kandu: Mentortech SaaS B2B Startup

Nina took 3 years out from her consultancy work with Nyna Consulting to launch her own startup, Kandu. Kandu was a software as a service company which helped organisations to launch, manage and measure mentoring or coaching programmes.

THE PROBLEM

Many organisations seek to run mentoring or coaching programmes to help develop future leaders. However, once they have found potential mentees and internal or external mentors, they struggle to have visibility on what is happening between pairs, and whether or not the programme and mentoring advice is helping mentees/ coachees achieve their aims. As a result, return on investment is hard to monitor and justify to boards. 

WHAT WE DID

Nina acted as Product Director, CEO and Founder. She researched target markets and audiences and scoped and built an initial software MVP (including Epics/ product roadmapping and prioritisation) which would help organisations to collect information on mentoring programmes. The software was developed over time to reflect customer feedback; it became fully customisable for different clients, and allowed them to match mentees and mentors, collect data on mentee goals and sentiment/ confidence, as well as collect data on other important issues such as community knowledge ‘gaps’ and programme engagement. Nina raised equity funding from angel investors to develop the product and built a team to sell into and manage relationships with accelerators and corporates, across the UK and Asia. Her team comprised of a CTO, leadership expert Non-Executive Director, project managers/ product managers, engineers, a UX designer, data scientist, customer support team, and business development lead/ client director. Nina also develop a data consultancy arm to the business where we also helped clients analyse their data to identify priorty actions from our insights.

THE OUTCOMES

Nina successfully designed and built a product and business, and sold and account managed a variety of clients over three years including a major bank and multinational communications company. The service was well received and gave clients vital data insights such as which mentees were developing/ achieving hoped for goals, which mentors were adding value, engagement levels into programmes, and vitally ROI into these types of programmes. Sadly the COVID-19 pandemic severely affected Kandu’s sales pipelines during 2020 and the business was closed.

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The Guardian: Streetstories App

In 2012 Nina Lovelace was part of a team that built the Streetstories geolocated audio app, to promote the Guardian’s first Open Weekend.

THE PROBLEM

The Guardian audio team wanted to test their capabilities in integrating its core skills – such as storytelling and creating audio – onto new platforms, in this case mobile, and promote the Open Weekend.

I worked as commercial lead on a prototype native app for iPhone and Android called Guardian Streetstories, a free native app for iPhone and Android that triggers audio relevant to your location using GPS around King’s Cross, London, UK.

Once loaded your smartphone knows where you are, and plays the stories automatically. Stories were high quality audio created by the Guardian’s multimedia team and included audio about the local history of the area, local attractions and amenities and also about the Guardian itself.

The apps received great feedback and many thousands of downloads, so formed the basis of a business plan Nina drew up around the creation of geolocation based apps.

THE OUTCOME

In early 2013 this led to the Guardian making its first sale of a geolocated native app to a sponsorship client, although the build for this was based on the Guardian’s n0tice platform which allowed the newspaper to create more affordable, scalable products.

Watch the video to learn more about Streetstories.

Specifically on this project I:

Worked with the editorial lead and technology partner to scope a minimum viable product

Oversaw UX and design

Project managed the app launch from start to end, in three months

Carried out QA on the apps on location

Managed Apple Store and Google Play process

Created KPIs and monitored success

Created a business case to support the case for further sales of similar apps to sponsorship clients

Helped close the Guardian’s first geolocated native app sale – launch of the app is scheduled for 2013

Audience and press feedback

http://thenextweb.com/uk/2012/03/21/the-guardian-uncovers-london-street-stories-with-a-beautiful-geolocation-and-audio-app/

http://www.lovecamden.org/streetstories-guardian-kings-cross

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The Guardian: Money Section Transformation

The Guardian wanted to boost traffic and revenues across its Money vertical by transforming planning, process and communication across commercial, editorial and technology.

THE PROBLEM

The Guardian wanted to adapt ways of working to develop and deliver a better strategy towards revenues, audience and content across its Money vertical. 

WHAT WE DID

Working in a digital publisher role, Nina developed an audience strategy for Money, and optimised commercial and editorial processes and priorities to better work together to grow revenues, while still protecting the independence and high quality of editorial.

Director of Commercial Delivery at the Guardian, Juliet Fowler, headed up the project. She said of Nina Lovelace who ran the project:

“Nina is well versed and experienced with transformation projects in a fast moving pressured industry. Having worked with Nina for several months to make changes in order to maximise revenues for an important part of the business she very quickly got up to speed with the project and understood the complexities around it.  Nina had a great ability to understand the problem, come up with creative solutions, understand the data needs in order to test and coordinate her and others ideas.  She built a great rapport with the team and had very good stakeholder management and project management skills. The project resulted in revenue and traffic growth as well as better audience engagement and internally far more collaborative ways of working. It was a pleasure working with Nina. ”

THE OUTCOMES

Nina helped to:

Set up a weekly meeting across commercial, editorial and product/technology to improve communication, forward planning and strategic approach.

Bring editorial and commercial teams together to support and shape Guardian Labs native advertising pitches to brands, ensuring content was engaging to the target audience. This work helped the Money section team secure a major sponsorship deal that led to the build of the Guardian/Zurich Life Navigator tool, working with the in-house Digital Agency.

Prioritise the importance of Guardian Money Deals (eg affiliate services provided in partnership with external companies such as MoneySupermarket) into the Money section, by instigating tests to make Guardian financial services better promoted against relevant content.

Support editorial to get better involved in digital transformation by facilitating them to produce more in-house video for sponsorship or advertising purposes. This saw the launch of the popular Smart Money series, sponsored by Halifax.

Launch the Money Talks weekly email.

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The Guardian: Video Traffic Growth

Nina Lovelace supported the Guardian’s director of multimedia to grow video view starts and subsequently source and manage video content partnerships for Guardian digital platforms.

THE PROBLEM

The Guardian needed more video, and greater video starts, to help maximise video related advertising revenues.

WHAT WE DID

Nina assessed different sections of the site and their audiences, in terms of their video content consumption and preferences to identify new partnership and/or series opportunities. She worked closely with editorial to help them develop video series ideas to help support sponsorship, advertising or syndication revenue growth.

THE OUTCOMES

Key outcomes of this work were:

development of in-house video series such as the very popular ‘New View‘ series for Skoda which included practical ‘how to’ guides on how to use your iPhone (see below)

development of new content partnership video series based on ad revenue share eg Ad Break series for Media desk

project management of live music streaming events such as Glyndebourne Opera and Other Voices Festival.

Nina also supported business planning around Guardian podcasts.

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Time Inc: Millennials Digital Research

Nina ran a detailed audience study into the interests and digital habits of millennials, preparing Time Inc to launch List for Life.

THE PROBLEM

Time Inc (UK) have invested significantly in their digital portfolio – developing digital magazine editions for all of their 60 brands as well as some incredibly successful stand alone apps.

Like many publishers they were keen to understand how to continue to grow their digital revenues and wanted a view on where to focus investment for the future.

WHAT WE DID

Nina, working as a principal consultant with digital agency FEB, worked with them to look at what had been achieved so far, leading on a focused look at the millennial audience, what the shape of their digital future should be.

Nina conducted a detailed audience study. Her focus was on 16-18 years olds – the age at which you would previously have developed a magazine reading habit in line with your interests developing into lifelong patterns.

To really understand the mindset of this generation she conducted face-to-face interviews with individuals in their homes, at college and at their jobs, talking to them about what they were interested in, what they read, and how they paid for it.

The findings were fascinating and allowed her to create a series of personas that Time Inc. (UK) could use for ongoing product development for this audience.

The research also particularly highlighted the need for continuous product development and that as an organisation, the company needed to be set up to meet this challenge.

This would mean not only doing more, but working in an entirely new way.

THE OUTCOME

The research helped us to identify a number of opportunity areas for Time Inc. (UK) and using a ‘MVP in a Day’ workshop format we developed the first concept for this audience which launched shortly afterwards as List for Life.

This was the first of a number of new product launches at the now established millennial publishing division have gone on to launch.

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The Guardian: Gardening E-Commerce

Nina created a 6 month, low cost plan to achieve an immediate sales uplift.

THE PROBLEM

The Guardian e-commerce team wanted to scope out how their Gardening editorial and e-commerce offer should change in the short to medium-term in order to maximise revenues and grow audience size and engagement while avoiding major platform changes.

WHAT WE DID

Nina Lovelace completed a short strategic piece outlining The Guardian’s current situation and identifying options for growth.

THE OUTCOME

In addition to developing a 6 month, low cost plan optimisation designed to achieve a 58% sales uplift, we created a clearly defined CRM plan identifying cross-sell opportunities across other areas in the business.

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The Lawyer: Market Intelligence

Nina helped Centaur launch an intelligence service for private law firms keen to understand and target potential corporate law clients.

THE PROBLEM

After identifying a topline opportunity to build a new intelligence service around their successful The Lawyer magazine, Centaur asked Nina Lovelace, working as principal consultant at FEB, to run an opportunity and concepting phase to fully refine the proposition.

WHAT WE DID

Nina: 

Planned and managed the concepting phase working with internal and external resources

Ran a full competitive review & market opportunity analysis

Ran user needs interviews to clarify information needs & user/ buyer personas

Clarified content & feature prioritisation into concept sketches/ epics and stories

Supported internal teams on business case/planning.

THE OUTCOME

On the back of Nina’s work, The Lawyer successfully launched The Lawyer Market Intelligence in 2015. This tool identifies and illuminates the commercial relationships between Britain’s top private practice firms and the largest and most valuable corporate law client organisations in the £20bn-a-year UK legal services sector.

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Nyna Consulting

Nyna Consulting is Nina Lovelace’s solo digital product consultancy that helps organisations to digitally transform or improve through new product development. Nyna helps organisations to discover new market opportunities, improve existing customer experiences, or launch new products and services. Clients have included News UK, the Guardian, Which?, The Pool, Centaur Media and more.

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IQ Student Accommodation: Competitive Analysis

Nina helped IQ Accommodation research and assess how they might more effectively message the benefits and value for money their accommodation services offered on their website.

THE PROBLEM

IQ Student Accommodation wanted to ensure that potential foreign students visiting its website and considering whether or not to rent its accommodation while at university fully understood its benefit and value when compared to comparable HMOs of PBSA competitors.

WHAT WE DID

Nina assessed the value offered by IQ in multiple locations, reaching and researching different IQ sites for pricing, accommodation options but also other aspects offered by IQ such as community events and pastoral support. She then compared this to key competitors in those locations, to identify areas in which IQ compared favourably to generate ideas on how to covey IQ’s VFM faster to prospective renters through its digital platforms, but mainly its website. 

OUTCOMES

Nina presented a number of options to the business how they might improve their overall messaging, whether via content or also though the use of comparison tools on their website. She also suggested areas in which IQ could differentiate itself further. 

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Which? Elderly Care & Money Comparison

Which? asked Nina Lovelace to assess and clarify the business and/or product plan for a number of new launches including Elderly Care and its improved Money Comparison service.

THE PROBLEM

Which? often has many good internal ideas for new launches that could help drive subscriptions or affiliate revenues. It used Nina, working for digital agency FEB, to help assess the strength of several opportunities and to work with internal teams to clarify a proposed product, develop its business case, and draw up first stage wireframes and/or features.

WHAT WE DID

Nina helped to clarify the target audience for its Elderly Care information service, including advising on best possible user experience.

She also worked with third party developers to define a roll out plan for new comparison services for mortgages, credit cards etc.

THE OUTCOME

Elderly Care launched in 2015, including a user online questionnaire to help them find the best advice and services personalised to their needs.

The new Money Compare service also launched in 2015.

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The Pool: Concept Testing

Nina, working with consultancy FEB, helped Sam Baker, Lauren Laverne and Sara Horrocks to launch their women’s lifestyle digital product The Pool.

THE PROBLEM

When we first met the Pool team they were at a very early design stage – the concept was clear, but they needed support to get the product defined and ready to launch.

WHAT WE DID

Nina recruited and interviewed individuals who represented The Pool’s target audience, to understand their information needs and to capture immediate feedback on first stage wireframes for The Pool responsive site.

THE OUTCOME

The audience feedback helped to clarify the features and functionality included on the final site.

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Guardian: TagBot API Campaign

In 2011 Nina Lovelace launched Guardian ‘Tagbot’, a fun social platform search product to promote the Guardian API system.

THE PROBLEM

The Guardian API allows users to publish Guardian content directly onto their own platforms or products, however not enough partners were using and accessing the content available.

WHAT WE DID

Nina devised and launched Tagbot. Tagbot was set up on its own Twitter account. Fellow Twitter users could then message it with a query or keyword, which Tagbot would then reply to, sending a link to that user which when opened listed the most relevant Guardian content related to their query which was available on the API.

See below for a typical results page a user would have received if they had asked Tagbot what content the Guardian had tagged with ‘Halloween’.

THE OUTCOMES

The tool, which Nina scoped out in partnership with digital agency Smesh, ran for a month and received significant use and media attention including from NiemanLab and Mashable, and great ratings from users who could also rate the quality of the search they received.

Tagbot had a user rating system where its search results could be classified as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – 75% reviewed the search results as good.

For the best Tagbot- related links and reviews [View the story “@GuardianTagBot, Twitter-based search tool” on Storify]

As well as helping to market the API, the product also promoted the type of innovative product that the Guardian could also create for brands across other platforms other than its own website.  It also helped the Guardian assess the utility and quality of its content taxonomy.

Nina also worked as commercial lead on the launch of the Guardian’s Facebook App, securing sponsorship for the first iteration of this service.

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Nursing Times: ELearning

Nina Lovelace scoped out and launched Nursing Times e-learning resource during her time as product manager for Plexus (formerly Emap).

THE PROBLEM

Nursing Times Learning is a collection of online learning units with multiple choice questionnaires and case studies, written and reviewed by nursing experts. In 2010 Nina launched the resource to help NT’s subscribers, nurses, to meet their continuing professional development (CPD) annual requirements by completing modules and printing out their module certificates to include in their CPD folders.

The commercial purpose of the launch was to offer subscribers greater value to help grow subscriber numbers, as well as test uptake in terms of micropayments and potential module sponsorship.

THE OUTCOME

The launch saw an initial growth of 20% in subscribers and excellent reviews from nurses. Nina managed the resource creation and launch end-to-end including:

Audience research to define interest/need

Minimum viable product scoping

Business case presentation to the Inform board

Content sourcing – finding a specialist external content partner to help provide quality modules

Building and project managing an internal team to deliver including internal and external developers

Detailed specification of the build including subscriber sign-in, database and e-commerce elements (At launch, nurses who were NT subscribers could access 5 modules for free, or non-subscribers could pay £10 per module using cards or PayPal. This meant the solution needed both a subscriber database and individual ‘learning logs’ that tracked progress, as well as an e-commerce platform)

Launching and marketing the product across print and digital

The product has since been developed by NT’s internal team to allow even more modules and increased access for NT subscribers. NT Editor Jenni Middleton recommended Nina’s work in June 2013:

“NT Learning has transformed the fortunes of the Nursing Times brand. Since its inception, it has become a more comprehensive learning suite for nurses looking to enhance their clinical and managerial skills and maintain their commitment to continuing professional development.

“Nurses tell us that they love the units and topics on offer, the ease of use and their ability to fit easily into their busy schedules. They can enhance their learning at times to suit them, which is vital for this audience. It has definitely boosted subscriptions since we changed it to become free for all subscribers in 2012 and the usability of the units makes them ideal for every nurse from students to more experienced. “

While working at Emap Nina also launched Healthcare100 Online, an online benchmarking tool for NHS and private health employers to compare employees’ satisfaction levels and worked to create a monthly dashboard for NHS trust data on various conditions for NT sister title HSJ.

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Marie Stopes (UK): Website Relaunch

Nina launched a responsive website to better meet Marie Stopes users’ needs.

THE PROBLEM

Marie Stopes is a charity that provides family planning services to NHS and private patients. Their website was not successfully delivering key messages and failed to encourage personal contact through their call centre. Nyna Consulting were asked to help them create a better experience for their users.

WHAT WE DID

Nina designed a new responsive website with a UX and design that allowed users to find the information they needed quickly and easily, direct from Google Search and/or on the website itself. Nina also helped to create more content and designed a content strategy that enabled Marie Stopes to convey key messages and to attract greater traffic through the use of specific keywords/ SEO.

THE OUTCOME

The new website was well received by users, supported traffic growth to the site/ content and more calls into the call centre.