Innovation Engine: A engagement-led monetization strategy

First, read all about the success of Innovation Engine here. This post will give a peek into the BTS :)

The success of Jetpac birthed Innovation Engine, an engagement-led monetization discovery project. I was brought in to develop and execute our product strategy for this project alongside our Japanese client.

Defining outcome, identifying opportunities

From the beginning, it was important to define the goal of innovation - to create a suite of non-telco consumer products to drive higher engagement, leading to higher revenue. We conducted a series of workshops with the Japanese team to identify opportunities based on their current business strategy, outlining key outcomes and focus area for each of the session.

Following, we evaluated the ideas using criteria crafted based on market size, user needs, potential risks and challenges, and company direction. This narrowed eliminated over 40 ideas from a list of 60+ ideas.

And because we had decided on a rapid test-and-learn approach, we further filtered the list through a lens of feasibility and time to market.

Aligning on key outcomes

Recognizing that "Innovation" was pretty ambiguous objective, we had to define what success would look like for the team. We created a framework to align business stakeholders and identified some important milestones along the way.

First, activation, which validates that users like the concept of the product idea. For each idea, we defined the activation event and measured the conversion of visitors to active users of the product. This helped us validate if our users liked the concept of the product. Performance of each idea was benchmarked against other players in the same category.

Next, engagement / retention, which tells us if the users liked our product specifically. If they did, we could expect a higher time spent on the app engaging with the product, or seeing recurring visits from the same user, or both. At this stage, we’d begin roping in the marketing team to help scale the product and boost our GTM strategy so that by our final stage, monetization, we would have sufficient scale to make a significant business impact.

And finally, because this was managed by a small fast-moving team, we also also agreed on a framework to kill or iterate on a product if it performed below the expected outcome.

Successes and failures

Of the 10 products shipped, we saw significant success with 3 in driving up engagement on the app.

A casual gaming app for Millenials and Gen Zs, designed to provide a digitized experience of gaming parlors in the 1990s to early 2000s.

Key results:

Over 180K gameplays from 30K users by the first 3 months
An 82% increase in time spent on the app, from 0.57 mins a day to 1.04 mins
Substantial improvement in Day-7 repeat rate, from 13% to 30%, coming primarily from the users in their 30s

A horoscope reading app that users could get personalized predictions for that day and month

Key results:

While horoscope did not increase the time spent on app as significantly as games, boosting weekly time spent by ~8% (compared to 82% for games)
But it was successful in bringing users back to the app regularly, with an average of 50% of users being returning users every week