Strategy and vision for the Dropbox mobile product

2022

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Dropbox’s mobile growth slowed in 2019 and was plateauing by 2021. Top-of-funnel and retention were both declining. In response, the Mobile leadership team overhauled our strategy—prioritizing quality, mobile-first experiences for creatives and in-the-field professionals, and diversified plans. These shifts led to strong churn improvements and renewed revenue growth.

Our goal for 2022 was to develop an impact-driving strategy and product vision to drive growth on the mobile platform.

Led by myself and Marley Spector with support from Steven Nguyen, Michael Margolis, and Grace Cho.
Design contributions by Kevin Tunc, Aska Cheung, and Andrew Mocny.

Context

► Play

Vision video for Dropbox Mobile in 2022 to inspire and establish direction to match our product strategy.

Above: All editing and voiceover was handled by myself. Planning the storyboards and writing the script was done in partnership with my PM partner, Marley Spector, and my Marketing partner, Steven Nguyen.

Structuring a strategy

My product partner and I drew from strategy leaders like Marty Cagan and Good Strategy Bad Strategy to create a custom framework for the Mobile team. Partnering across research, data, and marketing, we synthesized extensive data and market expertise to define financial goals for growth and product goals to improve quality and customer value.

Clear customer segmentation

Ensuring the decisions and investments we made we customer-focused was a top priority. With the help of design research and product marketing, we narrowed our priority customer down to the creative professional who was active on Mobile. This primary customer was supported by two secondary customers that helped support key business growth.

Developing a customer-first story

Often strategy documents are filled with overly business-oriented language and lack a considerably opinionated point of view on where a product is headed. We wanted to develop a forward-looking vision that clearly highlighted customer value along with setting a high bar for the quality we expected to deliver.

Example designs and prototypes available upon request.

Above: Storyboards were developed with my product partner to highlight key value moments in a small business customer story.

Below: Detailed storyboards through multiple rounds of iteration.

Product principles

We developed an opinionated set of product principles to guide our decisions and bets throughout the year. This provided structure for the team to understand the why behind our decisions and move more quickly.

Mobile-first

Native devices provide specialized value for users, take advantage of it i.e. building on the camera, widgets, app extensions.

Content not chrome

Visualize the content and don’t let the structure of the system get in the way.

Meet people where they are

Follow natural workflows, even outside of our app, magically anticipating each next step without getting in their way.

Quality yields trust

Experiences should be elegant, fast, and follow interactions customers expect so they retain for years to come.

Personalize control

Maintain the feeling of control for our customers, unique to their preferences and assistive when they choose.

Win-Win growth

Value for customers (and their customers) leads to value for Dropbox. Bet on long-term value creation, focusing on outcome before effort.

Executing with rigor

To align the team we build a 4 part execution strategy tied to a core mission. Each element of the strategy had leading and lagging metrics to measure success.

Mission

Build high-quality, mobile-first value that is easy for customers to discover

Evolve and modernize our apps; build differentiated, mobile-first value that is easy for customers to discover; and continue to invest in our foundation to grow existing and new mobile products—all while protecting and growing our core business.

Business outcome: $NNARR (Net-New Annual Recurring Revenue)
Leading Indicator: MAU (Monthly Active Users)