AI Assistant, Axios HQ
Improved AI adoption by 53% and HQ's product retention by 4.5%
Key Highlights
📈 Increased AI adoption by 53%, with 30% of DAU using AI tools every day.
🚀 Guided HQ's strategic AI vision by facilitating 4 framing and shaping workshops with executives.
🛠️ Established patterns and frameworks specifically for HQ's AI feature set.
🏎️ Made rapid iterations with continuous feedback, obsessing about creating customer value with every part of the feature.
My role
End-to-end design lead from research to strategy, conception, visualization, launch, and iteration.
My team
1 Project Manager
1 Product Designer 👋
2 Front-end engineers
1 Data scientist
2 Back-end engineers
Timeline
2 months
Framing the problem
Axios HQ is facing a retention challenge. Clients are signing up, sending one or two newsletters, then going dormant; never to send again.
What we know: Communications leaders are having a hard time consistently putting their newsletters together because it takes a lot of effort. Here are some of the challenges we heard in interviews with the head of communications at various organizations:
They spend a lot of time trying to figure out what to write
They have to hound their colleagues to submit content
When content is submitted, it comes in wonky shapes and sizes: sometimes it's way too long, sometimes without enough key information.
The comms leader has to spend time reading through each submission, editing for formatting, clarity, tone etc.
All the while, their reputation is on the line. The newsletter usually goes to the entire company with just their name on it.
Why sending matters: We know there is a strong correlation between net dollar retention (NDR) and the frequency of sending through HQ. If users are using the product more often, they're less likely to churn.
🔮 My hypothesis
If we make it significantly easier for comms leaders to put their newsletter together, they'll find it easier to develop the habit of sending, and HQ will see better retention due to more frequent usage. With the emergence of LLMs, there are several opportunities for us to help. We can…
Help users figure out what to write about next
Help users shorten long pieces of content submission
Help users apply a consistent tone to all their communications
Help users quickly find out about relevant news in their industry
💯 Success metrics
We expect our clients who are considered 'power users' to be using AI more frequently to indicate that the feature is helping our clients send.
Increase in AI usage to 20% of DAU in L30D.
Increase avg sends per organization to 2+ in L30D.
👤 Persona
SMB clients Head of Comms and and HR teams who are responsible for recurring internal communications.
✍️ Use case:
"I use the AI assistant to summarize long content that my colleagues send me and it helps me write the newsletter more efficiently.
“I can quickly apply one consistent tone to all the content that is submitted to me."
Shaping the concept
Delivering the solution
DAU using AI assistant daily
"It's a very useful tool that I could reasonably trust to give me a decent first draft, which is a far cry from you know, having to do it all from top to bottom myself.
So I think it also made me more productive. I could probably up my productivity without increasing the amount of time that I have to spend to do it."
"Hi Muneeb, I wanted to send you a quick note saying thank you for your great work developing a very intuitive and elegant UX/UI for the Assistant ahead of launch.
It looks great and I am so excited that it's now in the hands of customers.
This is a huge milestone for the company, and I'm thankful for all of your hard work to get us here. Great work!"
