Foundational Charter Strategy / Lifecycle Retention / Onboarding
January 2024 - January 2025
Reframing the North Star, From Orders to Adoption
Drove 20%+ adoption of retention features
When I joined ezCater, I inherited two brand-new product teams: Conversion Rate Optimization and Loyalty. Because conversion and loyalty are two sides of the same coin, I merged their research using modular discussion guides. What started as two separate studies converged into one picture of the customer lifecycle: Visitor, Trial-er, Adopter, Advocate, each stage mapped by order count, emotional arc, and its own archetype of behaviors, motivators, and inhibitors.
That model became the shared frame both teams built around, and, in parallel, informed a proposed loyalty program's target audience and build-or-buy decision, pulling Marketing into the research from the start.
cross-functional research scoping
lifecycle segmentation & mapping
defined behavioral archetypes
usability testing & evaluation
guided charter definition & metrics
growth experimentation strategy
feature awareness prioritization
defined onboarding moments & levers
informed experiment brainstorms
I was responsible for...
The Ask
Neither team had a roadmap yet.
The assumption going in: Conversion Rate Optimization had a usability problem, and a loyalty program would improve retention through rewards. Neither held up, and untangling why became the actual work.
Approach
Across 18+ interviews spanning 0 to 20+ orders, I mapped customers into four stages: Visitor, Trial-er, Adopter, Advocate, each with a distinct emotional arc and a distinct set of behaviors, motivators, and inhibitors. This became the shared vocabulary both teams used to talk about the same customer at different points in the same story.
The moment of adoption: a behavioral challenge, not a funnel problem.
The lifecycle model reframed the real question. It wasn't "how do we get someone to place a first order," it was "what has to be true for someone to change their default behavior and come back to us specifically." That's a much harder problem than fixing drop-off in a funnel step. It meant asking what customers already do, and how can ezCater support an existing habit.
"How often do you find yourself going to a restaurant you've already gone to in the past?" "Oh, probably 80% of the time. We're all creatures of habit, aren't we?"
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-Orderer
The Story Arc of Loyalty
The Behavioral Gap
Using a Jobs-to-be-Done lens, the pattern underneath the habit became clear. Customers weren't browsing restaurants fresh each time. They were cycling through a mental shortlist of 10 to 20 go-to spots, remembered, shared in a notes app, or tracked in a spreadsheet.
I call this their "rotation".
BEHAVIOR
They think in terms of rotations. "What food can I trust for this event?"
Our marketplace wasn't built to serve the way people actually shop: it needed to either introduce restaurants customers already trusted elsewhere, and prioritize recurring vendors over new search results.
INHIBITORS
Trying something new is a risk.
"I hope this is good quality and reliable"
What converted customers fastest was proven reliability; through word of mouth referrals and on-site reviews. To gain their trust, we needed to demonstrate enough reliability to earn a spot in their shortlist.
MOTIVATORS
And what's in it for them?
"Why would I use ezCater?"
We did very little to communicate its own differentiators: customers didn't know why they should prefer us specifically. That's an awareness gap, not a usability gap, and it tips the scale away from ezCater by default, every time a customer defaults to habit.
The reframe, and the charter that changed
That combined insight, a habit problem hiding under what looked like a funnel problem, shifted the team's charter from usability fixes to product-led onboarding. The team's name changed too: Conversion Rate Optimization became Growth, and its north star metric moved from single-order conversion rate to a multi-order adoption rate, a direct acknowledgment that the job was changing behavior, not closing a single sale.
Sizing the opportunity and testing it.
To identify which features were worth prioritizing, I paired qualitative insight with analytics, correlating what customers said mattered against actual retention data, to size the opportunity behind each candidate feature rather than prioritize on interview sentiment alone. That triangulation fed directly into 11 Eppo experiments with Growth, surfacing value-adding features earlier in the lifecycle: app downloads, integrations, review prompts, sequenced to match the stage where each one mattered most.
Results
Onboarding & Growth:
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Winning sequence drove 20%+ feature adoption
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Lifted saved-caterer rate to 34%, worth roughly $11M in annualized bookings
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Renamed team, new north star metric (adoption over single-order conversion)
Naming the behavior of 'rotations':
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Shipped company-wide as a named search carousel
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Informed 8 additional experiments, 5 wins
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Every test on order rate or revenue moved favorably
Lifecycle Loyalty:
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Defined target audience and opportunity areas for a tiered loyalty program
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Translated findings into product requirements that informed a build-or-buy decision
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Work done in direct partnership with Marketing
So What?
Two teams came to me with two separate problems: fix conversion, and design a rewards program. The lifecycle model showed both were downstream of the same thing: customers already had a trusted rotation of restaurants, and ezCater wasn't doing enough to either join it or prove it deserved to.
That reframe didn't just change a research plan. It changed a team's name, its north star metric, and shipped as a feature used company-wide, and it gave Loyalty and Marketing a shared, evidence-based answer to who a rewards program should actually be built for.
