Mobile Product Leadership For CaringBridge
CaringBridge is a nonprofit social network that helps people connect with friends and family during a health journey by offering free health journal websites in order to rally community support and ensure no one goes through a health journey alone.
The Opportunity
As CaringBridge looked to meet rapidly changing market conditions and customer expectations, the brand needed a partner that could help them not only shorten development cycles, increase the feature enhancement velocity and offer guidance in growing an analytics practice, but deliver on key initiatives imperative to their growth. CaringBridge was in need of an interim leader of their product management function, along with expertise in analytics and mobile apps in order to get things done better, faster. Being a non-profit, CaringBridge had limited resources to work with and needed to ensure maximum return for the invested dollars.
Our Solution
Fahren provided CaringBridge with interim director-level product management team leadership, which quickly expanded into leading the redesign and launch of a new iOS mobile app and Android mobile app as well as providing CaringBridge leadership with guidance on high-value digital initiatives.
Interim Product Leadership
With over 15 years of building software and customer-facing digital experiences and leading large product teams across multiple industries, Joe Ruekert, co-founder of Fahren, was an ideal fit for the role of interim product leadership. He led the product managers, designers, and developers as they executed on the product roadmap. During that time, we were able to deliver on several key initiatives, including new journal and comments enhancements.
Redesign of iOS and Android Mobile Apps
Fahren’s Joe Ruekert led the redesign strategy, scope evaluation, go-to-market requirements, customer testing strategy, and marketing plan to drive the adoption of the new iOS app and Android app.
Joe worked with CaringBridge’s internal team to guide them to an ideal product team behavior, allowing the rest of the organization to incorporate this model for future projects. In only six months, the team was able to start, design, build and launch both new apps because of this guidance. This also gave CaringBridge significant cost savings compared to an outsourced agency model.
Post-Launch App Support
Joe Ruekert continued to lead the product team as they iterated on the new apps. With new features and functionality being delivered every two weeks, the apps quickly improved from the original experience. This included backlog management, sprint prioritization and planning, testing and releasing new code to the public.
Key Digital Analytics Leadership
Fahren delivered a key digital analytics leader for a current state analysis engagement to augment the internal staff. Fahren’s industry-leading expert in digital and consumer analytics helped CaringBridge assess their current practice and provide recommendations on building a robust internal analytics practice.
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