Calliper

Improving goal tracking for startups

Company
Industry
IT services
Platform
Web
Year
2022
My role
Product Design
Timeline
4 weeks
Team
Two co-founders, CTO, front-end engineer, external researcher

Calliper is a collaborative analytics platform backed by Sequoia Capital. The product helps startup founders build data-driven teams by focusing on the metrics that matter. Get clarity on the most important metrics, from every team, in one place.

Unlike most data tools out there, you don't need to be an engineer or a data scientist to set up Calliper. You can connect your data sources in minutes with zero coding needed. Once you've connected your tools, Calliper will analyse data and serve insights.

With this project we wanted to create a feature that attracts users to log in the product more frequently. We know that decision making in any business involves collection & analysis of data.

Focusing on the right goals, will help you survive and grow. What goals do you set? How do you follow through? Too much noise and lots of data scattered around tools. Takes time, confuses companies.

Cross-functional & dynamic: we had less than 6 weeks to build everything
I worked with founders to gather requirements, while we were doing the research and building the feature
Used the services of an external researcher who conducted exploratory research on my behalf

I tapped into existing research and interviewed co-founders to shape our assumptions. To save time and focus on product strategy work, one of the co-founders and I developed a questionnaire and participant criteria. We then hired an external researcher to conduct the interviews.

As the market for data products and OKR software is already crowded, I aimed to investigate what was working and where there was room for improvement. To narrow down the focus of my research, I concentrated on OKR and goal tracking software since we already had some knowledge about data products.

The external researcher did 15 interviews with a questionnaire focused on open-ended questions. We were collaborating closely the entire time using Slack & Looms to ensure we collect data accurately. We created a robust questionnaire that was tapping into topics such as data quality, time & data, collaboration, etc.

How data-driven is your organisation on a scale of 1-10? Do you care? What stops you from being a 10?How effectively do you feel your teams collaborate around data & metrics? How do they do it? Could you tell me about an important decision you made recently? How did data play into this decision?

I trialed 8 different products and documented the flows in Figma. I wanted to understand how are OKR products working?

Can you connect data sources and report on quantitative, measurable key results? How easy it is? Do you need to code or write SQL?

I spent 2 days mapping clusters of information given to us by customers. The snapshot bellow is representative of the work in progress.

I analysed 200+ data points from 15 different founders of early stage companies. Some of the challenges: keeping track of everything in Notion & Miro

Head of Product

Data is scattered across tools, and usually that requires coding for automating or manual repetitive tasks. Companies may not have a data engineer, so they need to scrap APIs together and dump data in excel sheets, even manually. 12 our of 15 expressed they can’t find the right product/solution that syncs the data they need easily and is feasible for their scale.

“We need a systematic way to look through the business and metrics, so we make key decisions faster”

“We need to feel the pulse of the company and judge if we are healthy”

“The worse the data input is the more important these meetings become because not everyone knows what’s happening”

Themes and insights

Time

Often times companies would paste screen shots or manual copy of data
Whenever possible, APIs to pull data in excel/google
Root-cause analysis is timely, but necessary for decision-making

DAta quality

Bad data input confuses everyone involved. Keeping a positive image to others
Sense of urgency can cause sacrifice of data quality in reporting
Often times the feeling was the data-literacy was not to the level needed

System

In some cases there's a data engineer on the team
Excel or Data studio connecting data from various sources
Alerts or channels for important topics and goals in Slack
Constantly looking for ways to improve setting and track performance

We explored concepts async and on virtual workshop in Miro and Figjam. We kept co-creation customers in the loop.

3 major design improvements. 3 iterations, each building upon the suggestions of the previous.

Guided goal creation

Users were asking about a guided way to set up the right goals. Add more users to Calliper, add integrations, educate people on goal setting.

How do we structure goal creation

Which is more effective: function-specific metrics and goals or metrics based on company stage? Ideally, I would have conducted a card sorting study to determine what metrics and information users consider most important when setting goals. At Calliper, we offer a predefined list of metrics that you can track. If you haven't integrated a tool that we need to pull a specific metric, we will prompt you to do so.

Individual goals

What information do we present for individual goals in the dashboard with company-wide goals? This design went through 6+ feedback sessions with internal and external stakeholders. Users were asking for scannability & insights preview immediately once they open the dahsboard with all goals.

The grand vision of the feature was to be a growth and retention driver for Calliper (connect integrations to track more metrics and invite team members to collaborate and assign as owners.) As a start we prioritised core functionality such as setting up a goal, dashboard visualising company-wide goals, and further data exploration.

Guided goal creation

Easy & educational goal creation process that guides the user. Based on the metrics Calliper pulls from various integrations.

Goals dashboard - automatic goal tracking

Does the data gathering and crunching for you. Gives you and your team mates back time and guarantees quality. The information architecture focuses everyone’s attention on immediate priorities, on hover you can see performance overtime. Enables a level of data exploration and root-cause analysis.

Data exploration and team collaboration

Calliper's focus is on collaboration and communication around data. We created dedicated spaces for each goal to facilitate data exploration and communication at a granular level. The purpose is to enable anyone across the organization to gather context and pinpoint the most relevant information.

Customers

Met customer needs - evident through verbal confirmation
Potential increase in retention after Beta release

Product

Potential increase in retention after Beta release
3 tested solutions for implementation

Learnings

Assertive and concise communication
Navigating ambiguity at pace

Challenges

Facilitating work with a young founder who had a lot to say about each pixel

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