Overview & Process

Over the past two years, I worked on the growth team at Houzz and saw the tremendous growth of user metrics as well as how we operate. At first, the team was scrappy and we looked for low hanging fruits that we could win. But as the team grew in size from 8 to 40, we concentrated efforts to improve each step of the growth funnel (awareness, acquisition, activation, engagement, churn). Thinking in growth framework allowed us to extrapolate a small project to larger initiatives (set of projects) and vice versa.

With every growth initiatives I lead by collaborating closely with PMs and lead engineers to define the problem, derive hypotheses, form potential project ideas, and think about the potential impact these projects could have. During this phase, I often mock up concepts that help align stakeholders on the same page. Next, I work on ways to understand why the problem exists using various methods of user research, explore design options, honing on the solution, and help set up experiments to maximize the probability of a successful launch.

Below, you can explore some examples of the work that I’ve done at Houzz.

Examples of initiatives and projects

Improving the core photo browsing experience to boost time on site by 140%

This project came about when we were thinking of ways to make a big impact on engagement. From research we know that browsing photos is one of the key activity that most users do on Houzz. Hence, if there’s a way to improve the photo experience, it would lead to sizable impact on the overall engagement.

We started by looking at the data to understand how people are currently interacting with the existing pages related to photos, and observed user interaction on Fullstory to develop a set of hypotheses. During this phase we thought about how the current experience limits their natural behavior and thought about what we could do to improve the experience.

We ended up doing 5 projects, each targeting different areas that would attribute towards the overall goal of improving the photo experience, while not sacrificing the set of features we currently give users. With each projects we saw significant boost in our KPI (Time on Site, and WAU).

Creating a dynamic homepage that led to x% increase in gmv and time on site

This project came about when we found that the existing homepage had low engagement despite having high traffic. So, we started this project by learning about how people are interacting with the existing page using the data, and talking to users to understand why the feed isn’t great. From this, we pinpointed the feed as the biggest opportunity to improve.

Designing the new feed involved thinking about how the users home remodeling journey changes over time, along with the business goal, brand, and technical constraints. In the end, we created a new flexible feed that allowed us to recommend different types of contents to users, depending on what we know from users activity on our platform.

We decided to launch this feed in two phases. In the first phase, we launch a version where the feed recommend different types of contents to users at a navigation(group of contents) level. In the second phase, we plan to launch a version where the feed starts recommending specific content to users. The initial launch of the project was extremely positive, as we saw significant boost in both user engagement and monetization metrics.

Improving Emails and Push notifications and improving CTR by 2000%

This initiative started from looking at the performance of our existing emails. Our email performance wasn’t strong compared to the industry standard despite sending various types of regular emails in the form of stories, product, professional recommendation…etc. From competitor analysis, we came up with a hypothesis that we should send more personalized emails rather than sending a generic batch of emails to everybody. Then, we tested this by launching a mvp product recommendation email based on users’ activity on our platform.

Personalized emails proved to be very successful and had a clear impact on the open rate. Following this success, we expanded this learning to multiple types of emails across different offerings we had and saw similar results. Meanwhile, we ran a series of A/B tests to optimize the performance of each emails. We experimented with different copies, CTAs, email lengths, navigation elements to further boost the Click Through Rates. To maximize the velocity of impact, I designed these emails in a form of modules, which saved both design and build time.

To further boost the impact of our churn initiative, we pushed ahead to implement the similar concept in push notifications in the form of creating a personalized landing page. With a flexible landing page on mobile, we further improved retention by x%. With this results, we also had confidence to push ahead with building the landing page on the web which led to further improvement in the retention metrics.

acquisition campaign across landing pages

As a consumer company, one of our key business goal is improving the number of active users. When it comes to improving active users, improving acquisition plays a critical part; more new users mean more likelihood of active users. So, we started by looking at opportunities that will have a sizable impact.

From looking at the data, we realized that visitor homepage, discussions page had a big opportunity given that there was sizable bounce rate, big traffic, and low follow through to signup. During this phase, we also realized that app up-sell banner played a big role in converting visitors to signups on mobile web but the existing design could be better.

While these 3 projects were essentially focused on getting visitors to signups, we tackled each with different strategy because each problem had different underlying problems, and the nature of how users arrive to these pages are different. For example with visitor homepage, the existing landing page was unclear, which caused visitors to bounce. With discussions page, users come from SEO and leave as soon as they found what they came to look for. With app upsell banner, existing banner was neither relevant, situational, nor interesting.

With each release we saw a significant increase in signups. Visitor signup page had 20% increase in signup, Discussions page had 10% increase in signup. App upsell banner saw 40% increase in signup.