Reversing product decline to growth
May 2024 - August 2025
Summary
The problem
Paying customers were at risk of churning due to a growing list of unaddressed pain points.
Freemium customers were increasingly, not activating or converting during their trial of Workflow for targeted acquisitions.
My design process
Diagnosing the root cause
The set up process to just get Workflow™ prepared for a targeted acquisition required over ~317 clicks and decisions.
The friction was simply too much and time to first value, too slow for adoption to happen; which resulted in the increasing, negative compounded growth rate of Workflow.
Backstory: In July 2023, Workflow was revamped to help Google’s corporate development team run targeted acquisitions after a successful MVP trial.
However, due to significant business changes in Ansarada, Google’s pain point in 2023 were left unaddressed for months.
Validate with key customers
With the problem clear - setup friction and slowness, my goal here was to revise and redesign a solution that could resolve:
1. Our top paying customer's 3-4 pain points.
2. Improve the efficiency of other customers running targeted acquisitions.
Operating on a short timeline and multiple objectives, I worked tightly with Product and Engineering to explore multiple feasible, concept designs that could eliminate the setup friction and, also meet the security measures required in a M&A deal.
To ensure what we proposed was desired and valid, we ran 7 interviews with customers to investigate whether our approach to bring automaticity and security met their needs in preparing for a targeted acquisition.
Delivering a solution that scales
Leveraging what we learnt from the validation sessions, I made adjustments to designs to ensure the solutions were maximally desired yet feasible.
With the value clear and our team confident, the next action was sequencing how we delivered our series of improvements to customers. The first and highest priority was to eliminate setup friction with automated workflows.
My design process
Diagnosing the root cause
The set up process to just get Workflow™ prepared for a targeted acquisition required over ~317 clicks and many decisions.
The friction was simply too much and time to first value, too slow for adoption to happen; which resulted in the increasing, negative compounded growth rate of Workflow.
Backstory: In July 2023, Workflow was revamped to help Google’s corporate development team run targeted acquisitions after a successful MVP trial.
However, due to significant business changes in Ansarada, Google’s pain point in 2023 were left unaddressed for months.
Validate with key customers
With the problem clear - setup friction and slowness, my goal here was to revise and redesign a solution that could resolve:
1. Our top paying customer's 3-4 pain points.
2. Improve the efficiency of other customers running targeted acquisitions.
Operating on a short timeline and multiple objectives, I worked tightly with Product and Engineering to explore multiple feasible, concept designs that could eliminate the setup friction and, also meet the security measures required in a M&A deal.
To ensure what we proposed was desired and valid, we ran 7 interviews with customers to investigate whether our approach to bring automaticity and security met their needs in preparing for a targeted acquisition.
Delivering a solution that scales
Leveraging what we learnt from the validation sessions, I made adjustments to designs to ensure the solutions were maximally desired yet feasible.
With the value clear and our team confident, the next action was sequencing how we delivered our series of improvements to customers. The first and highest priority was to eliminate setup friction with automated workflows.
Outcome
I redesigned Workflow over a year for targeted acquisitions, relaunching the experience officially as Acquira in August 2025.
6 months later, there's been a +7.7% change in the selection to conversion rate and customers are increasingly activating and converting to paying customers.
BEFORE
Manual activation: Huge set up friction requiring users to activate a feature one-by-one.
Lack of collaboration: Comments are completely hidden even though it's a function.
Poor information density: Type too large, and spacing too wide for easy scannability.
AFTER
Automatic activation: Documents move automatically without manual activation (before).
Collaboration capability: Comments are visible at a glance from this view.
Higher information density: Reduced type size and brought in text wrapping for better visibility.
Connect with me anytime on Linkedin or email (chan.heiron@gmail.com)
Reversing product decline to growth
May 2024 - August 2025
Connect with me anytime on Linkedin or email (chan.heiron@gmail.com)
Outcome
I redesigned Workflow over a year for targeted acquisitions, relaunching the experience officially as Acquira in August 2025.
6 months later, there's been a +7.7% change in the selection to conversion rate and customers are increasingly activating and converting to paying customers.
BEFORE
Manual activation: Huge set up friction requiring users to activate a feature one-by-one.
Lack of collaboration: Comments are completely hidden even though it's a function.
Poor information density: Type too large, and spacing too wide for easy scannability.
AFTER
Automatic activation: Documents move automatically without manual activation (before).
Collaboration capability: Comments are visible at a glance from this view.
Higher information density: Reduced type size and brought in text wrapping for better visibility.