Yerbo Health Monitor

Web Mobile App

In short

Yerbo is an early startup with the goal of bringing happiness to work environments through mentally-healthy teams.

They recognized mental health as a problem in the tech industry, inducing people to change jobs within months, hurting teamwork efficiency, and even leading to physical health problems.

What we did

User research
User interviews
Design studio workshop
UX / UI design
Concept experimentation

Client

Yerbo

Year

2020-2022

Declining retention and high churn

The first iteration of the product was the Mood Tracker, a Slack bot that ran daily surveys to companies' employees, to track their weekly emotions to help them build self-awareness.

User research showed that for most users, the Slack bot was spammy and didn’t show significant value, which exposed severe engagement issues:

“We found a declining retention curve, which indicated that churn would be close to 100% by week 8 of use.”

Research

We wanted to know users' motivations for starting to use Yerbo. We conducted generative research to understand the users' tasks, talked to team leaders to find out their motives for using a mental health tool.

Defining value

After learning about users’ main motivations, and brainstorming ideas with the team, we ran an experiment to validate the ideas proposed to improve the engagement with the product.As a key result we obtained:

- 6 / 6 ranked Burnout Monitor in the top 3.
- 6 / 6 purchased Burnout Monitor.

From mood tracker to burnout tracker

We placed our bet on a burnout tracker monitor for teams and also integrated burnoutindex.org as an acquisition source.

As a result we developed the product new feature, the Burnout monitor, a feature for teams to prevent burnout at work.Retention improved after release, hitting 64% after 6 weeks of use.

Excellent results, but... Yerbo still had issues getting their first paid client, which was key for them to keep running as a very early startup, while validating their product-market fit.

Pushing research further

Generative research

After interviewing a dozen of Managers using the product, we found insights to keep iterating its key features:
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💣 Although the new Burnout Monitor was great at diagnosing team’s potential issues, its main indicator - burnout risk - was negative in most cases, being a loosing game for team managers
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🤔 For teams not doing well, managers felt the tool left them haning: “Ok, my team has a problem, now what?”
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💥 Burnout risk was a lagging indicator, not great for spotting problems earlyng ideas with the team, we ran an experiment to validate the ideas proposed to improve the engagement with the product.‍

Competitor benchmark

We analyzed competitors that some of the interviewees mentioned when they compared using Yerbo with other tools in the market.Know your team:

- Recommendations (content)
- Lattice: Work Engagement (new metrics for external factors)
- OfficeVibe: Company wide report (granularity)

Iteration process

After reviewing the competition, we came up with a new feature to complement the Burnout Monitor: Work Engagement - a feature that would balance Burnout Risk, and also added leading indicators like job satisfaction and cognitive traps, plus recommendations for improving each of those factors.

Once both features were improved and released respectively, Yerbo was able to successfully close paid pilots with 3 clients: PandaDoc, Nubank, and GitLab.

Keep reading

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