Hatch: On a Mission to Help Families Sleep Better
What Was My Role?
Hatch is a True Ventures-backed sleep technology startup on a mission to help families sleep better. Hatch's main product suite includes 3 smart sleep devices ranging from baby to adult products. I was able to work on features for all 3 products.
In the Summer of 2020, I worked as a product management intern at Hatch as a True Entrepreneur Corps (TEC) Fellow with True Ventures. My main projects included building out an internal company wiki and redefining a push notifications strategy for all 3 smart sleep products on the Hatch Sleep app.
As a product management intern at a startup, I was able to wear many hats in addition to the two main projects I focused on. Some my other responsibilities included: completing a UX/design audit of the iOS and Android apps, benchmarking notifications and onboarding flows of other apps, analyzing data with SQL to understand how users consume Hatch's content, assisting with user interviews, and writing QA test cases.
As a bonus, I was able to help the web engineering team by reengineering React components for and deploying a 404 page for Hatch's website.
There still many components of the job and details that are confidential, please contact me to learn more!
Results I Helped Drive:
- Completely scoped and built an internal company wiki used by the entire 50+ person company
- Spearheaded technical requirements and content strategy to redefine a push notifications strategy on the Hatch Sleep app
- Established a post-internship plan of action including wireframes and a sample implementation plan for push notifications
- Completed a comprehensive UX/design audit of the Hatch Sleep app to ensure a consistent user experience across platforms and accessbility settings
The Internal Company Wiki
Solving the Problem and Generating Buy-In
Before the internal company wiki, to find answers to various questions, employees would either spend lots of time digging up the information themselves, or bug HR or their managers with these questions; triggering a chain of unproductivity. Employees needed a centralized location to find information to complete a task and clarify questions about company policies.
When I was gauging the requirements for this product, I first spoke with the key stakeholders, aka the managers of each team and HR. Through these meetings, I was able to gain a clear picture of what features and information to prioritize on the wiki.
Next, to generate buy-in from the users of this product, aka the entire company, I sent out a survey to understand how users wanted to use this wiki. I gained responses from ~90% of the company.
Pushing the Product
After gathering all the requirements and use cases, I was able to create a clear plan of action to tackle this project. I decided to use Google Sites for the domain, as it was free, secure, and easy to use. With this plan of action, I was able to contact each stakeholder that I needed information and resources from to organize on the wiki.
The internal company wiki was rolled out to the entire company of ~50 people. I wrote documentation detailing a maintenance structure and identified contact points for each section of the wiki in a hand-off document.
During my last week, through a survey to the entire company, I gathered that this wiki increased the productivity of finding resources by 72% for Hatch employees.
Push Notifications Strategy
Scoping
Currently, the only way for a user to interact with the Hatch Sleep App is to manually find the app in their device and use it from there. Other than email and unless the user opens the app on their device, Hatch has no direct communication channel with the user. In recent user feedback sessions, users have even been requesting notifications. Push notifications are a great way to increase communication and engagement with users.
While I wasn’t able to fully implement and release this feature during my time at Hatch, I was able to help set the groundworks and completely scope out the technical requirements for push notifications on the Hatch Sleep Android and iOS apps.
To scope out the technical requirements, it was important to understand how the technologies involved worked. I created a set of guidelines taken from the developer and design guidelines for Android and iOS notifications, as well as guidelines for Airship, the digital engagement platform we would use to send notifications to users.
I then met with the iOS, Android, and backend engineers to discuss the limitations and capabilities of each platform and Hatch’s tech stack. From there, I was able to refine these guidelines and start to formulate of a plan of action.
Creating a Plan of Action
Even though there was not enough time to develop and push out this feature during my 10 week internship, since this was a completely new feature from scratch, it was important to create a plan of action so this could easily be picked up by other PMs after I left.
During my time at Hatch, we were able to develop with the engineers all the deep links necessary for the notifications to lead to on the app as well as the trigger conditions. I was able to finalize the user stories to start development on the push notifications. I benchmarked notifications across other apps to help identify common industry trends and determine which types of notifications were the most effective. These helped me in developing the content strategy for Hatch’s notifications.
In the plan of action, I was able to determine the different notification channels or groups for the different notification types, create a plan for bedtime reminder notifications (including wireframes), and determine a phased implementation plan to ease users into Hatch's push notifications while prioritizing the most requested type of notifications by users.
Key Takeaways
As a True Entrepreneur Corps (TEC) Fellow at True Ventures in addition to working as a product management intern, I was able to see the two sides of entrepreneurship by working directly at a startup and getting a behind the scenes look at the venture capital side through True Ventures. I’ve really enjoyed working as a PM, and grew so much from this experience. Here are some things I’ve learned:
- Always ask questions. Asking questions for clarity or simplify just to learn more will enable you to work more efficiently. Curiosity and the drive for knowledge are healthy habits to have. I was able to work on a project with the web engineering simply because I had been learning web development on the side and was interested in the opportunity.
- Communication is key. As a PM, you have to interface with so many different people doing different things. Staying organized and clear communication is essential in smooth and effective product development. No one will ever fault you for “overcommunicating”.
- YOU define your internship experience. At first, I was apprehensive about this summer because of the remote setting. Since I knew this internship had an expiration date, I made the most of everything by setting up 1:1s with people from around the company and the other fellows in my TEC Fellows cohort. 1:1s allowed me to create a close relationship with folks I worked with even though we were all remote.