With 100 million users worldwide, Mentimeter has established itself as the leading provider of interactive presentation software. Have you ever felt like a meeting could use a bit more pizzazz and engagement? Mentimeter allows you to get real-time input from remote teams and online students with live polls, quizzes, word clouds, Q&As, and more. You can create a presentation with different slides and formats, from multiple choice to quiz games to open-ended questions. You also have the option to add a leaderboard!
Using Data to Drive Growth
Jakob Nettelbladt, VP Product at Mentimeter, wanted to create a data-driven organization. He explains that, prior to using Split, Mentimeter mostly made gut-based decisions, not always supported by data. The product engineering team only ran small-scale experiments, hardcoding everything in the front end. However, this quickly became unscalable. After searching for the right experimentation platform, they came across Split. Mentimeter chose Split for the ability to combine feature flags and A/B testing in one platform, helping them to advance their development and feature rollout processes.
Now Mentimeter runs multiple experiments at a time and can scale up their experimentation to meet their development pace. The range of experiments is quite large, too. They test different onboarding experiences, internationalization experiments with different languages and currencies, and run different banners for different user types. They are then able to measure changes to conversion, retention, and other metrics.
“Mentimeter is a better product due to the experimentation we are able to do with Split.”
Jakob Nettelbladt, VP Product
Adapting to Changing Customer Behaviors
Like many companies, Mentimeter was affected by coronavirus. Their traffic and usage went through the roof because as people started working more and more from home, their product was able to complement calendars full of video conferences. For example, if there is a town hall with 100 people in a Zoom meeting and you ask everyone how they are feeling, it’s not logical to think that all of them will unmute themselves and answer. With Mentimeter, you can easily get this interaction with a quick poll. These interactions and small work-from-home changes created a sense of participation with the audience and made it easy to express your feelings while not in the same room. With this increase in usage, they relied on Split to support them to grow their business.
Simplifying the Release Process
With the intuitive Split UI, the release process has been made super easy to adjust the percentage of customers involved in an experiment. The Mentimeter product team can easily manage releases, which takes away stress from the engineers. They use the Split UI to get an overview of which flags they have created, and what their status is. This visual summary makes feature management easier than their previous use of database tables with little visualization. Not only does this new release process with Split reduce stress, but it also increases clarity, which makes it more intuitive for Mentimeter to run tests. For example, Product Managers can start, run, and adjust tests without involving engineers.
As part of their release process, they first only allow internal users to experience the change, then expand internally to different teams, and then expand to their beta users, and then start with a 10% rollout. At this point, they make sure their support team is not flooded, and that there are no error logs. Then they roll out to 50% and start measuring against the existing experience.
“Split has made us more confident in our release process and also more confident in our data decisions.”
Jakob Nettelbladt, VP Product
Learning and Iterating with Experimentation
To power experimentation, Mentimeter has connected all of their existing KPIs to Split, meaning that analyzing an experiment result is no more difficult than checking your normal daily dashboards. In this way, they can easily map a KPI to a flag and measure its progress. They are able to track distinctive trends, figure out where in the funnel a user stopped, and analyze their metrics between different experiences.
One particularly successful experiment that Jakob’s team ran was with their mobile onboarding experience. Being a full-fledged presentation editor, the experience is more powerful on desktop than on mobile – something that also showed in retention differences between devices. Through Split, they experimented with a tailored onboarding for mobile users, which significantly increased the mobile retention rate. They experimented with different ways of highlighting paid features. “What you think will work is not always what ends up working. Through Split we can quickly identify slight nuances and adjust on the fly. Exactly how (and when!) to communicate paid features is definitely not trivial, and using Split has become essential to us”. One of the most important metrics they measure is activation rate. They wanted to see the difference between the people who just simply sign up for the product versus the people who actually use Mentimeter for their presentations. With Split, they were able to run different experiments that track the different stages to optimize the user flow.
As Mentimeter has grown, Split has helped them keep pace with data-driven experimentation. The team is now concurrently running 10-20 experiments at a time, gathering valuable customer insights and creating impact with each new feature they build.
Switch It On With Split
The Split Feature Data Platform™ gives you the confidence to move fast without breaking things. Set up feature flags and safely deploy to production, controlling who sees which features and when. Connect every flag to contextual data, so you can know if your features are making things better or worse and act without hesitation. Effortlessly conduct feature experiments like A/B tests without slowing down. Whether you’re looking to increase your releases, to decrease your MTTR, or to ignite your dev team without burning them out–Split is both a feature management platform and partnership to revolutionize the way the work gets done. Schedule a demo to learn more.
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