Bringing People and Process Together: Product Mapping with Gainsight PX

Acquia, the open digital experience company, empowers enterprises to create world-class digital customer experiences. Acquia turned to Gainsight PX to capture deep insights into user behavior that could be used to deliver powerful, engaging experiences for the company’s own customers. Tagging product features to accurately measure user behavior was a critical first step, but Acquia also required a solution and programmatic approach that fit the company’s unique use case. With Gainsight PX, Acquia created a product mapping process that increased scale and efficiency and helped their team better understand how customers were using their products.

Acquia provides cloud-based solutions for building, delivering, and optimizing digital experiences. The company’s vision is to make it possible for doers and dreamers to craft the digital world. For Jillian Cheuka, Senior UX Designer and Gainsight PX Admin at Acquia, delivering on that vision means striving to understand what customers need from the Acquia platform.

Cheuka and the rest of the UX team at Acquia had already conducted extensive user research, established key user personas, and then collaborated with their partners in Product and Engineering to put those insights into practice as they designed and optimized products.

But understanding users’ goals was only one piece of the UX puzzle for Acquia. To create a truly amazing experience for their customers, Cheuka and her team needed to know exactly what their users were doing in their products and which features they were using to accomplish those goals. To help them meet that challenge, Acquia turned to Gainsight PX.

Acquia chose Gainsight PX because the platform’s deep analytics allowed it to:

• Capture quantitative data around product and feature adoption
• Use adoption data to enhance the user experience
• Get a clearer picture of user happiness, adoption, engagement, retention, and task success
• Determine where users are dropping off or encountering friction in-product, and counteract that with in-app guidance and tutorials

After onboarding with Gainsight PX in late 2022, Cheuka and team were ready to start implementing PX across their product ecosystem.

To start off on the right foot, the Acquia team knew that they needed to harness the power of Gainsight PX’s Product Mapper. The Gainsight Product Mapper allows organizations to model their product features and modules in a simple and powerful hierarchical tree structure. This helps them quickly and accurately associate tracked user events with corresponding features and modules—with no coding or engineering resources required.

But for product mapping to be successful, Cheuka and her team needed to overcome several challenges.

Acquia has multiple products that often work together and are interconnected, and their users tend to use more than one product at the same time. So the product mapping needed to fit within a multiproduct strategy that included six core products.

They also needed to build a product mapping process that was scalable and relatively decentralized so it could be executed without overtaxing the team’s resources.

Ultimately, the product mapping initiative would do more than simply provide insights into user behavior; it would also bring people and processes together to create a more customer-focused organization.

The Acquia UX and Product teams worked together to start mapping their customers’ user experience with Gainsight PX.

Tapping into PX’s Product Insights, Cheuka and her partners in Product identified a problem with the user experience during the release of a new product. Customers were creating a workaround to a major workflow rather than using the new product with their existing Acquia platform.

Instead of taking advantage of the integration between the two products, users were searching the UI and taking multiple manual actions on a specific page in the UI. With Gainsight PX in play, Acquia now had visibility into how customers were navigating to the specific page in their UI. This allowed Acquia to benchmark how often this workaround user flow was occurring and understand that it was impacting 40% of the users of the two products.

Instant Improvements Through In-App Engagements

To help users correct the issue, Cheuka designed and created an in-product engagement, or in-app guide, with PX that appeared when users navigated to the specific page. This engagement redirected new users to the connected product instead and clearly communicated the value of using the two products together.

With the engagement and PX in place, the team could now track the impact of their efforts, and saw that after just a few months, usage of the workaround dropped from 40% to 12%, a total change of 28%.

This initiative improved the user experience for not one, but two products. The UX and Product teams were able to share this joint success story with the larger product organization. And this success has served as further support for Acquia’s plans to continue implementing Gainsight PX into the larger product ecosystem.

Gainsight has proven to be a valuable contributor to Acquia’s business strategy.

The product mapping initiative has helped the Acquia Product teams become more data-driven. This has helped the organization make smarter, quicker decisions about how to deliver the experiences that will drive expansion and retention among their customers.

“We’re able to look at these user centered behavior metrics to help align to our hypotheses. So now UX, product, and engineering can make those data informed decisions and in turn build features that users want and need,” said Cheuka.