About Founder Support Coaching Product Writing Archive Resume
← Back to Product Portfolio

Babylist · 2023

Baby Registry Checklist

Built an interactive checklist feature to answer registrants' most common question: what do I actually need, and what am I missing?

RoleStaff Product Manager
Team1 designer + 4 engineers
Timeline6 months
OutcomeUsers' favorite feature & increased profitability
Checklist feature showcased on the Babylist homepage: Add Anything from Any Store, with the Registry Checklist app screen

1

Problem

Who are we solving for? Registrants, especially new sign-ups.

What is their problem? Users don't know what they need on their baby registry. And they want to know what they actually need versus the nice-to-haves.

Users had to look for these answers outside of Babylist.

How do we know this is the problem? UXR of first-time users

  • 100% of users interviewed cited wanting clear product categories
  • 70% of users who chose Amazon's baby registry cited loving their checklist as a starting point
Competitor baby registry checklists

2

Proposed Solution

A dedicated Checklist page that lists themes and product categories.

  • Product categories link to a selection of products
  • Categories automatically check off when a user adds that type of item to their registry — no matter what store on the internet they add it from
Card sort exercise results from 34 recent parents

3

Deciding the Taxonomy

I drafted the themes (e.g. "Sleeping," "Feeding") and, looking at competitors and collaborating with our Parent Slack channel, listed the product categories for each theme.

To determine the order themes would appear in, we ran a card sorting exercise with 34 recent parents.

Babylist is a "universal registry" — its key value proposition is the ability to add anything from any store.

It was a P0 requirement for me that the checklist auto-check off the relevant category, which meant our system needed to categorize every product.

To provide training data, I dogfooded it myself: creating a registry, organizing it by our defined categories, and adding 20–60 items per category from various retail sites.

My Instagram poll on progress bar preference

4

Design Iterations

God bless designers. Here are a few sound bites of my feedback:

  • "That gradient feels too hot. It's alarming. I'm pregnant. I want to feel calm and grounded."
  • "That progress bar feels like a health tracker. Can we try something else?"
  • "The illustrations are cute, but can we Babylistify them? Can they be cuter?"

5

Checklist Goes Live

  • Essentials badge helps users focus on what's most important
  • Progress indicators give users a feeling of accomplishment
  • Theme icons change from gray to color when a theme is complete
  • Celebratory moment when a user completes the checklist
Shipped Registry Checklist screens showing category progress bars and a Checklist = Complete! celebration moment with confetti

Adding a crib from Amazon, then watching the crib category check off and the progress bar update.

6

But We Had a Problem

People weren't discovering the checklist.

Despite having 3 entry points within the app, during our A/B test only 1 in 4 users in the test group viewed it. Still, that 25% drove a 127 basis point increase in users with 2+ sessions in their first 5 days.

We needed users to discover this feature, so we put an entry point front and center on the home feed of the app — the purple half-bar below.

Checklist views by entry point, including the new home feed entry point

7

Results

  • Users love the checklist so much it's mentioned in most of our 5-star app reviews
  • Transformed the business: drove a dramatic increase in registry items sold through the Babylist Shop, capturing far more purchase value than affiliate retailers
5-star app review: 'Thank you Babylist... The checklists are heaven sent!!' 5-star app review: 'I also like the checklist since I find the process overwhelming as it is.'

8

Maximizing the Success

I proposed an SEO landing page that incorporated the actual interactive checklist we'd built for logged-in web users.

This was Growth team territory, and their roadmap was already committed — so I approached the lead Growth PM and offered 3 weeks of my own roadmap and 2 engineers from my team if she'd take on the project.

The new Checklist landing page became the #1 organic search result for "baby registry checklist."

Baby Registry Checklist SEO landing page hero Baby Registry Checklist SEO landing page preview of the interactive checklist
Reusable Feedback Modal feature on iOS

9

Bonus

Historically the product org hadn't gathered feature-level qualitative data at scale — we typically took a small qualitative sample size.

During the A/B test, my qualitative success metric was that at least 75% of users cited the checklist as "extremely useful" or "very useful."

To get there, I introduced a new, reusable Feedback Modal for our iOS app that any PM could leverage.

The component only required a surface area, the trigger logic, and one question to ask — event tracking was automatically hooked up!