How 383 used Productboard and Mixpanel to enable Busy Bees to develop an industry-first digital platform

This post is written by the team at 383. 

Great products don’t just happen by accident. Simply having a great idea for a product isn’t enough to make it a success.

It takes a dedicated team that’s united behind a shared goal — what they’re building and why — to create products that people love.

As a digital product studio, our job is to help clients navigate the complex world of product development. To do this, we’ve developed a modern product stack — a suite of tools that together allow us to plan, manage and review features, and gain insight into how the products that we build are used.

In this article, we take a look at some of these tools and how we used them with our client, Busy Bees, to ensure that we build the right thing, the right way. 

A strong product vision

Busy Bees used two of our main product tools, Productboard and Mixpanel, to translate their strong product vision into a transformative app experience that delivers learning experiences to over 40,000 children every day.

Over the last 35 years, Busy Bees has grown to become one of the largest and most renowned childcare providers, operating more than 350 nurseries in the UK and more than 500 globally. Based on her experience over the last 35 years, Busy Bees’ co-founder Marg Randles saw an opportunity to develop an application that could be used by everyone across the business to deliver a world-class learning and development experience for children under the care of Busy Bees. 

Our goal at 383 was to help Busy Bees translate their strong vision into a product strategy. We worked with Busybees to develop UP — an interactive platform designed to unleash the potential of parents, practitioners, and children. 

Aligning with Productboard

The first tool in our product stack is Productboard: a tool that helps product managers understand what customers need, prioritize what to build next, and rally everyone around the roadmap. Productboard integrates with delivery tools such as JIRA to ensure that everyone is on the same page. 

Roadmap alignment

We took the results of our product discovery work with Busy Bees to identify key objectives for the future product’s two core audiences — practitioners and parents. We input our strategic drivers and product principles into Productboard, and analyzed how each feature aligned to them.

From there, we formed a cross-functional group of stakeholders, which was comprised of the 383 product team and global CEO of Busy Bees, to meet quarterly for collaborative prioritization sessions facilitated within Productboard. Together, we ranked and scored proposed features against our drivers to collectively decide where to focus our time to meet our shared objectives.

Development clarity

Productboard reduced noise and increased focus in our Jira environment. Productboard captures a forward-looking view — helping to plan, prioritize, and evaluate upcoming outcomes. JIRA helps teams effectively organize work that has already been planned and prioritized to ensure it’s executed on schedule. Keeping the two activities — upcoming work and work that has been prioritized — separate helped encourage new feature ideas while avoiding any distractions on the development work that was in process. 

Customer-centricity

Productboard also ensured we incorporated customer feedback into our product iterations. We connected our in-app feedback and customer emails to Productboard Insights to build a centralized repository of feedback. Categorizing feedback empowered our team to add another vital input to our ongoing decision-making — user desire. 

Understanding usage with Mixpanel

The Busy Bees team’s vision to empower children through powerful educational experiences was reflective in their approach to measuring usage data. The goal of the app is to encourage positive physical interaction with children. We introduced Mixpanel to bring insightful product analytics to iterate on the product’s ease of use.

Mixpanel allows product teams to analyze how users interact with products. It’s designed to make teams more efficient by allowing everyone to analyze user data in real-time to identify trends, understand behavior, and make decisions about a product. 

User-centricity

Mixpanel employs an event-based, user-centric model that connects each interaction to a single user. Mixpanel’s data model is built on the concepts of users, events, and properties. A powerful segmentation tool generates bespoke reports using the data contained within the event database.

Flexible reporting

With Mixpanel, we empowered the Busy Bees team by building dashboards to dive into detailed usage statistics and common usage patterns across regions and individual nurseries. With this information, Busy Bees was able to make targeted improvements for specific populations of users.

Bringing it all together

Bringing together Mixpanel and Productboard, we empowered the Busy Bees team to make data-driven decisions to solve for real customer pain points.

The Mixpanel Funnels reveal completion and drop-off rates for specific tasks and actions. The Busy Bees and 383 product team observed a common pattern in the music section: parents and practitioners were trying and struggling to play the same songs in quick succession within a short period of time. 

Customer feedback in Productboard revealed the customer desire for “playlist” and “repeat song” functionality. Our practitioner interviews allowed us to dive deeper to understand the importance of these tools for child development. 

The moral of this particular story is that even with multiple sources of insight, the knowledge of the entire product team is needed to create features that are both valuable and useful to their intended audience.

Life-changing results

After launching in June 2019, UP generated 1.2 million content views and 10,000 parent downloads in the first two weeks, and a five-star rating in the app store. 

For Busy Bees, whilst the stats and numbers are great, it’s the transformational, real-life stories that are the biggest indicator of success — such as a letter that told the story of a household where nightmare bath times have been transformed by the activities available on UP. For one dad, ‘All of a sudden it is no longer traumatic to wash his daughter’s hair at night. That is life-changing.’

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About 383 Project

Since 2006, we’ve been helping businesses big and small create customer-centric digital experiences that deliver real value both to the business and end-user. In order to do that, we’ve created a framework that allows us to produce consistent results for a range of clients including Hilton, Busy Bees, The AA, Adidas, and Audi.