Email Direct Product Migration: Bringing a legacy email service into the 21st Century
Product Management | Project Management
Background
Email Direct has been New York University’s homegrown solution to bulk email messaging for over 20 years. This product served as a free tool for internal communications and was used by over 500 clients across 150 divisions in the University, which totaled to about 50 million emails sent annually… but our clients’ needs were not being met at all by this service.
My team received a lot of negative feedback and feature requests that we couldn’t act on or implement. Our users couldn’t even save a draft, and they relied on our team to manually click send on their behalf. As a result, many departments were paying for other products in lieu of using our free service. This added avoidable costs for the University.
We knew it was time for an upgrade and we needed to identify a SaaS solution to power our service to meet our clients’ needs. After a rigorous vetting process, my team selected Emma to power the new Email Direct.
This product migration is the single largest project our team has undertaken in the last 5 years, and not without numerous challenges.
Challenges and Considerations
Meet aggressive deadline ➜ Retire legacy service by Dec 2020; supporting new and existing users on two platforms
Establish trust and restore confidence ➜ Develop clear and ongoing communications & resources
Budget cuts ➜ Streamline migration process and manage progress without official PM
Key Elements of My Role
Product Selection
Change Management and Communication Strategy
Product Service Design and Migration Strategy
Change Management and Communication Strategy
Define communication objectives
Identify key takeaways
Assess needs
Write content
Mock up & revise content
Gather & implement feedback
Sample Communications
Our first teaser email sent in November 2019 - it doesn’t look particularly exciting because it was sent through the legacy system, but our goal was to officially announce that classic Email Direct was being retired and also establish early on some expectations of our migration process and what could be expected in the next year.
An example of the final communication to migrated users. We wanted our users to be as excited as we were to start using this new product, so we included a catchy subject line with emojis, a colorful splash template, and a clear call to action for logging in and accessing essential references and tutorials. We wanted to lead by example in our emails to show users what the new product can do for them.
Product Migration and Service Strategy
I focused on the mechanics of how we would run the service and migrate users.
I helped guide what the operations of this service looked like moving forward based on the intention of giving autonomy to our users who previously had to rely on our team to release every single email.
We also collaborated with the Emma product team directly to suggest major improvements to the UX/UI of the tool. We joked that we were their personal user testers, but this relationship became mutually beneficial as we provided feedback on their tool, and they in turn released new features we knew our users would value.
We knew our approach needed to be flexible going into this project. Since we didn’t have a PM, we were OK knowing the first thing we did might not have been the best thing, but it was better than nothing, and we continued to check in and refine processes along the way. We also adjusted how we tracked and reported on our progress.
We migrated our first three user groups in April 2020, we considered this our pilot period, and selected groups that were great partners and collaborators with our team.
We solicited feedback on our onboarding process and training materials, and made several changes, such as a longer onboarding session. This valuable feedback came from clients going through the process themselves, and benefited the clients to come.
Migration Process
We started with creating two documents: a questionnaire and an intake document. We realized the intake document was too cumbersome and time consuming to use. We pivoted instead to using a questionnaire as our primary record keeping document for each client, and continued to refine and iterate the document along the way.
Sample Intake Document
We realized our initial instructions weren't clear or clients were misinterpreting the information we were asking for, so we added more help text so the client could be more successful in filling in this document ahead of our intake meeting. We added a standardized timeline to set expectations for how long the process will take, and how quickly we could move depended on the client’s participation.
…We then boiled that down into a Gant-style spreadsheet to track our sprints, but found that this format didn’t allow us to track enough detail…
Initially, we created a migration punch list that outlined the user journey our clients would take in the migration process…
…So we switched to Asana and translated our punch list into 7 action items with subtasks, which could then broken down to track our progress more descriptively, as well as add deadlines, priority, and labels to see roadblocks more clearly.
Where We Are Now
Our new service permits for “kinder emailing”—our users can leverage University data to create more personalized messages, as well as analytics to make data driven decisions on how best to engage with their target audiences. The complexity of this project and effort involved was worth it to create a better user experience for our users and ultimately the recipients of their emails.
In addition to that success, our team:
Completed migration a month ahead of schedule
Supports 1000+ users and growing, sending 4.4 million emails per month
Restored client relationship: client feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and people are knocking down our door to get onto access to the new Email Direct.
To give an idea of the impact and relationship we’ve fostered with our clients, here’s an email we received after a client immediately sent her first campaign through the new Email Direct.