Product Marketing & Product Management
For years, I worked in marketing. I was good at evangelizing our products and services, but I also heard from customers that our products could be better. I got involved with talking to users, developing requirements, building interfaces, designing for usability, managing customer beta testers — and then launching new, improved products to our customers.
ALC Schools: VIP app for parents
ALC has been providing alternative transportation for special needs students for two decades, but the company hadn’t developed an app for parents to track and manage their student’s transportation. We researched, developed, and launched this mobile app in 2021. Read more about the app (I also wrote and built the web page).
The marketing challenge has been an unusual one. ALC’s clients are actually the school districts, not the parents. While the districts generally support the app, communicating it to parents is not their top priority. The solution has been a text message campaign directly to parents to get them to sign up for the app (it’s free). Response rate is >20%.
Early in the launch cycle, I surveyed our first 200 customers. The response was overwhelmingly positive. “I simply love this app,” said one parent.
I’ve done everything from creating wireframes to setting up the Google Play store — and all the product marketing! My current role is as chief evangelist, trainer for everyone from clients to parents to our own support department, and of course, everything marketing.
ALC Schools: District Portal
When I joined ALC Schools, the company had a legacy application to allow clients to track passenger transportation. It was built with sophisticated technology, but it was hard to navigate and confusing. Worse, almost no clients actually used their own Portal — they called or sent emails, rather than check the Portal for answers.
I led the complete redesign and rethinking of the District Portal. We were working on it when COVID-19 shut down classrooms (and student transportation) all across the U.S. We officially launched the new Portal at the beginning of the 2020-21 school year. Most classrooms were remote, so the company’s clients had little need for a new set of online transportation management tools.
Not all marketing is a printed flyer or PDF. In this case, the primary method for getting Districts to begin using the Portal was demonstrations and training on their own portals. I set up an entire faux school district, complete with faux schools and faux students. This allowed me to provide demos at any hour of the day and not worry about PII. Once a district was interested, I’d provide training on their actual portal, set up their users, and send over the “how to” user guide that I’d written.
In 2022, about 2/3 of our clients use the District Portal, and all of our largest clients use it. We received 300+ new student transportation requests weekly through the portal (previously sent by fillable PDF and fax — seriously, by fax).
Here’s a look at a recent update to add new features to our transportation request form (TRF). I created the graphics and the writing.
There is a lot of complex information about student transportation in a single interface, but our new Portal design makes it easy to understand and navigate. Here’s a look at transportation in progress (using faux data) for a single school:
