New Relic’s Head of Growth Marketing identified an untapped market: marketing managers. His hypothesis was that marketing teams often have larger tooling budgets than engineering teams, but New Relic’s products were designed for technical users with steep learning curves.
The existing product onboarding flows converted at only 15-20%. He engaged me to explore 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 the hypothesis that they cared deeply about website performance (it affects SEO, conversion, brand perception) but found existing monitoring tools intimidating.
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 terminology. Coordinated 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 cancelled one week before v2 release due to organizational changes, despite strong performance metrics.
Key Insight: Market expansion doesn’t always require new technology—sometimes it requires new packaging. The underlying capability (Synthetics) was mature. The innovation was recognizing an underserved audience and removing the complexity that was excluding them. A 70% conversion rate suggests the real product problem was UX, not functionality.