To book a groomer on Rover, just pick a date and time and you'll be matched with a groomer instantly. They'll bring the equipment to your house, groom your pet, clean up, and leave. You don't even have to be home. It's that easy.

But it wasn't ALWAYS that easy. We started from an idea and iterated piece by piece to reach this point. I was the Product Designer responsible for growing this business from the ground up with my Product Manager counterparts.

Rover spun up a team to discover new opportunities the company could pursue. Through market research, we believed grooming to be a viable option. It's a multi-billion dollar industry. We wanted to start quickly and scrappily to identify how Rover could best position itself to enter it and verify its viability for us. What value could we bring to a largely untouched industry ripe with opportunity, and how could we do it in a way only Rover could?

We needed an angle. Research and competitive analysis indicated notable pain points around lack of online booking, travel, stressed dogs in the car, long wait times, cages, and proximity to other dogs.

Those insights led us to our first idea: mobile grooming, where the groomer brings a grooming van. It's a simple way for groomers to travel with their business and great for branding opportunities. Companies exist today that deliver this service, we found potential partners to get started, and we quickly generated an experience concept.

We appreciated the concept but quickly discovered the logistics at this stage weren't appropriate for us—specialized vans are expensive, for example. We needed to better leverage our existing infrastructure to scale.

It would be much simpler to create an MVP where groomers travel to the owner's home or vice versa. It would also better enable grooming in urban cities. Groomers now needed to travel with their equipment, however; something we'd need to keep in mind.

We moved fast, interviewing groomers, gathering research from pet owners, and ran surveys with our prospective customers. We found ways to leverage infrastructure we'd already built for Rover Now on-demand dog walking. Our operations team could serve manual communication between the owners and groomers. We had the data, the infrastructure, the operations, and now the design for the MVP after a few iterations.

Launching in two test markets with two slightly different models meaningfully narrowed our focus. Markets where the groomers traveled to the owner performed favorably. And most importantly, our users were very enthusiastic. Some groomers already had repeating clients, a great indicator of platform stickiness.

Our roots planted with the MVP, we took a moment to consider how we should move forward. Since we'd move quickly to launch, time spent identifying impactful improvements would be wise. Scaling in our current markets was also a priority to spur growth to more cities.

Through the MVP build process, we learned groomers are notably different than other pet sitters on Rover: they require more professional experience and tend to rely on grooming as an income source. Groomers and clients prefer recurring relationships, despite our desire to keep supply fluid for platform fulfillment. Operations fielding communication between parties was a big block.

My team and I reviewed analytics at each step of the grooming process and interviewed customers further. This yielded additional insights. We prioritized and narrowed our list of improvements based on our build learnings and funnel analysis to guide our v2 effort:

We wanted to bring more users through the landing page. We knew we had about 8 seconds to sell the service, and platform, based on bounce times and scrolling behavior. And the story itself was important for potential customers to understand as it greatly increased comprehension throughout the booking experience.

The narrative needed to achieve product clarity, service trust, and a solid sell. Based on our data, customer insights to date, and extensive competitive analysis, I broke that down into these abstract pieces:

I also felt photos and livelier copy, where possible given branding constraints, were easy wins to bolster trust, warmth, and sell power.

Given 8 seconds of screen time to effectively sell, I planted key information at select eye saccades down the page to convey the above points for those scanning and skimming. After wiring a few options, we tested them with users to see which narrative pieces and what ordering performed best.

We incorporated the improvements described above, and then some. Each was an individual iteration we launched with a tight user feedback loop.

Our users have been very happy to date with our changes, and much of our focus has shifted to how we can further scale the business, but we've got a backlog of experience issues we'd like to continue improving. I'd particularly have liked to also construct a narrative experience in the funnel itself as it's currently a bit sterile and lacking context—especially for users that skip the landing page.

This project built upon what we'd learn to date, and the project went very smoothly. We understood our market, asked the right questions, iterated our funnel to ask questions and react to feedback, and understood the direction we wanted to scale. The service has expanded to even more cities since v2 launch.

Rover is a very business and data oriented company. The best solutions are born through a marriage of user needs and business needs. This project really tested my ability to help my team marry user needs with business goals.