Building an App Strategy to Increase Customer Engagement With Products and Bose Brand

How can we help customers stay informed about the latest features and updates to their Bose products?

The Context
Ever think about the notifications you get from apps on your phone? Maybe a push notification from Headspace gently suggesting a ten minute meditation to start off your day? Or an in-app message from Spotify informing you that your favorite artist released a new album? Turns out there’s a whole host of tools, systems, processes and regulations enabling and managing those notifications.

Bose wanted to develop the internal capabilities to communicate with its customers via its apps, to increase customers’ engagement with their products and the Bose brand. As the Product Manager for Customer Engagement, a new and high priority focus area for Bose, I was responsible for developing the strategy, vision, business processes and technical capabilities required for timely and relevant app communications.

The Outcome
Bose now has the ability to quickly send timely and relevant push notifications and in-app messages to customers, whether to prompt firmware updates, to inform them about the latest features and functionality, or to share news from Bose.
While exact numbers are confidential, Bose has seen an increase in product engagement as a result of this Customer Engagement strategy, as measured by campaign CTRs, new features adopted, and timely firmware updates taken.

The Deliverables
Strategy document, product roadmap, product requirements document, KPIs

The Team
Product Manager (me)
App Technical Lead
Cloud Technical Lead
Data Technical Lead
Design Lead
Scrum Team
- Product Owner (me)
- Designer
- iOS and Android Engineers
- QA engineer

Notable Contributions
Creating alignment across partners and leaders in the Product and Marketing organizations to choose the best-in-class customer engagement tool over the entrenched, legacy option.

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01
key tasks

• Defined a ‘governing structure’ for in app communications to be used jointly by the Product and Marketing organizations at Bose

• Developed a prioritization framework to determine what types of messages warrant in app communications, and defining campaign success metrics

• Developed guidelines for in app communications: frequency, content, channel (push vs in app vs inbox)

• Wrote detailed requirements for a Customer Engagement Platform to ensure proper platform selection and integration into 6 Bose apps

• Evaluated and chose a new mobile messaging platform

• Navigated organizational silos and politics to gain executive alignment for the customer engagement platform of choice, Airship

• Led a technical scrum team to build the capability to send push notifications and in-app messages based on hardware and software triggers such as product owned, firmware version, app version etc.

02
example app screens