New Relic’s Head of Growth Marketing identified an untapped market: marketing managers. His hypothesis was that marketing teams often control larger tooling budgets than engineering teams, but New Relic’s products were designed exclusively for technical users with steep learning curves.
The existing product onboarding flows converted at only 15-20%, largely due to complexity that alienated non-technical users. He engaged me to validate the hypothesis and build a new product entrance targeting this persona.
User Research: Partnered with Growth Marketing’s user research team to conduct interviews with marketing managers. Validated that they cared deeply about website performance — it affects SEO, conversion, and brand perception — but found existing monitoring tools intimidating. They wanted answers, not dashboards
Strategic Product Design: Rather than building from scratch, identified that New Relic’s existing Synthetics offering could be wrapped in a dramatically simplified UI. Worked with a designer to create an experience that was three clicks from signup to monitoring
Cross-Functional Execution: Worked with Product Language to ensure the customer journey used accessible, outcome-focused terminology. Led a tiger team in Hyderabad to build the product
Roadmap Development: Created a year-long roadmap with progressive value delivery: v1 (Synthetics-based page speed insights, contextualized with user impact such as drop-off rates and attention metrics, plus specific guidance on improving lagging numbers), v2 (Browser monitoring for customer experience insights), v3+ (Logs + AI for user journey insights)
Note: Project was canceled one week before v2 release due to organizational changes. The methodology was validated; the org didn’t survive to build on it.
Key Insight: Market expansion is often a packaging problem, not a product problem. The underlying capability (Synthetics) was mature and powerful. The barrier wasn’t what the product could do — it was how it presented itself. A 70% conversion rate with zero new engineering is a strong signal that the real ceiling on growth was UX, not functionality.