Saga Exceptional

Inspire, help, and monetise 20-million older adults with a product reviews website that delivers a seamless user experience, highly relevant information, clear guidance, and in-depth buying advice.

As the Chief Product Officer at Saga Media I built the product and engineering function from scratch.

Working closely with my Head of UX Design and Senior Lead Engineer I devised the team structure and set the rhythm, rituals, and processes for innovative, agile product delivery.

We hired and worked with some of the most talented designers, engineers, analysts, editors, managers, and sales professionals in the media industry.

Within just eight months Exceptional.com went from zero to 1.8M monthly sessions and we were tracking ahead of targets.

It was a privilege to experience how fast, efficient, and successful products can be produced when you adopt talented team members and effective processes, and it was a golden age.

IMPACT

Blank canvas to launch of the lifestyle web product Exceptional.com achieving 0.25M monthly users within three months having managed strategy, objectives, budget, resource, and agile development processes.

Traffic growth exceeding 1.8M monthly sessions, 2.7M monthly page views, 70% engagement rate and 5:25 avg. engagement time within 8 months.

Growth of organic search sessions to 500k per quarter (11% over target).

Core Web Vitals consistently above 90, with best-in-class monitoring and workshops to restore TTFB drops caused from 3rd party ad integration issues.

Growth loops such as Newsletter Sign-up mechanism achieving a 25x lift of subscriber rate resulting in 50k yearly signups worth £250k pa. see more here

SKILSS/METHOD

There are a few variations on Design Thinking’s classic Double Diamond process, but this is one that worked really well for the team at Saga Media.

The first diamond in our triple diamond build process concerns the divergent thinking involved in research for the overall product. And then converging on the most valuable ideas using a Value / Effort framework.
The second diamond takes items from a prioritised backlog / roadmap, and carry out the discovery work to define and a design a feature that is user-centred and valuable.
The final diamond addresses delivery, and is typically a handoff to product owners to facilitate the Build, Measure, Learn process with the engineering team.