How providing value upfront increased new client dashboards by 134%

As part of a small growth team, I led the design of an AI document generator that helps web designers and developers with early-stage client tasks. We shipped a product quickly that increased engagement and used customer feedback to gain buy in to expand the project to its full vision.

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User: Website designers and developers who build sites for clients as a living. "Pros" for short.

Product: The Hub by GoDaddy Pro is a variation of a customer's GoDaddy account with features and tools tailored for client management and site management.

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Observation These users have a clear project lifecycle: find a client, scope the work, build, launch, maintain. As a growth team we thought by building tools that support the start of a client project lifecycle, we could provide early value and build trust, driving better adoption and engagement throughout later stages.

Supporting research

• Finding and retaining clients is a top concern for this audience.
• 25-50% of project time is spent before any design or development begins
• Competitor products like Dubsado and HoneyBook already support these early-stage tasks.

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This project started as a well-thought-out vision: a new dashboard with multiple document-generating tools covering the full pre-build lifecycle. My goal here was to narrow scope so we could have a shipped feature in a short amount of time, but still commit to the bigger concept.

How we would do that

• Focus on a core single document generator tool within the existing client dashboard. This reduces the amount of end to end flows to manage and introducing a new dashboard.
• Create a feedback loop to signal test for value at every stage, including a live feedback module post-launch. This helps gain buy-in for more time to expand.
• Mid-fidelity vision for the full client management space. This also gains buy-in by showing how it could look in the future.

Main metrics to track

• clients added (new client dashboards)
• engagement within the client’s dashboards.

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A tool that generates market research for the client project, part of "scoping the work." A Pro enters a brief description of their project and our AI system generates market research on the client’s industry. This document was rated the most time consuming and tedious from a survey of our Pro users.

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For this project I explored what the client space could evolve into: a full client-project lifecycle management experience, with multiple tools supporting our users at every stage of their work.

Check it out in depth by expanding or moving around in the figma:

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Quick task-based prototype tests for signal, live demo account tests for quality of AI outputs, and a feedback module for continued learning.

Successes from this strategy:

• By running signal tests early and often, then sharing back with stakeholders, we were able to gain momentum for the bigger vision and get buy-in for more resources to expand.
• Testing with real AI outputs (not mocked data) caught quality issues we never would have found in a prototype test, and gave stakeholders something concrete to react to before launch.

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A barrier to using the tool was needing a client dashboard first. As a fast follow, we added the ability to spin up a "sample client" so Pros without existing client dashboards could try the tool immediately. That single change drove an 800% increase in new client instances, and became a key learning for future work on activation and entry points.

Reflection: Discovery on the tool was low, and it would feel awkwardly placed until we could change more of the client dashboard around it. We knew this might happen in the early stages of planning but took the chance anyway. In retrospect with some extra vision work up front we could have scaled faster post-launch.