Adapting in a Pandemic (Growth Design Monthly)

November 2020

Hi Everyone,I hope you’re holding up alright. I don’t know about you, but I’ve found it a strange experience to be a growth designer during a pandemic. I started out the year looking forward to all the crisp hypotheses I’d write, the experiments I’d run, the learnings I’d gain. But then COVID hit, and the world turned upside down.In this issue, I’m sharing how Gusto’s Growth Team adapted our focus during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic to help provide financial relief to our small business customers. I urge you to think about your own customers in this pandemic, and how you might use your growth skills to help them too.Always adapting,Sara BerryGrowth Designer at Gusto

Gusto’s Growth Team is responsible for signing up new customers and getting them fully set up to run their first Gusto payroll. When COVID hit in March 2020, many small businesses, including those that Gusto serves, were in crisis: their operations were put on pause and hiring halted. Our customers (lovingly called “Gustomers”) needed more support and help than ever, and they needed it fast. So, my team stopped our sprints, turned off our experiments, rolled up our sleeves, and shifted our focus. 

The Growth Team’s focus became helping our Gustomers survive in a time of uncertainty. We used our growth skills to design, instrument, and ship lean solutions quickly. However, we applied these skills in the unlikeliest of projects: we built functionality to let our Gustomers not pay us.

Designing for Anti-Growth?

As the pandemic took hold, businesses were shutting down temporarily and needed ways to save money. At the time, Gusto didn’t offer a temporary solution, and the only alternative was account cancellation. 

My team put our heads together, and in two days, we designed and shipped functionality to allow our Gustomers who no longer had employees to pay the ability to pause their payroll and waive their account fees.

Entry point into Gusto's first "Pause Payroll" flow

After we launched the pause feature, we recognized that many of our Gustomers who were still running payroll were also facing extreme financial hardship while trying to stay afloat. The ability to pause wouldn’t help in this case. We got to work and expanded the pause flow to include a fee deferral option, which allowed customers to defer their account fees for up to three months. 

Revised flow that offered pause or defer functionality, depending on the customer's situation

While building our pause and defer features, we didn’t have time to make a long-term plan. In both cases, we shipped before we even knew when or how we’d enable people to unpause and pay us again. We recognized that the moment required action, so we shipped quickly to deliver value to our Gustomers faster.

Gusto exists to serve small businesses, and our empathy for our Gustomers guides our decision-making. During this time, we embodied our company value of “doing the right thing”. We made these features visible, discoverable, and self-serve, and we emailed all of our Gustomers to tell them about our new pricing relief options.

Our Impact

The Growth Team’s work on pause and defer helped provide the financial relief that Gustomers needed to survive the initial impact of COVID and resulting economic crisis. Of the thousands of Gustomers who used our financial relief options, nearly 100% of them continue to use Gusto today.

The Growth Team wasn’t the only Gusto team to shift focus during COVID. So many of my colleagues outside of Growth also stopped what they were doing to build and ship COVID relief features. We adapted our business to meet the new needs of our customers in these unprecedented times, and it’s been incredibly rewarding: we’ve all been moved by notes from Gustomers letting us know that the features we built have helped them stay in business and continue supporting their teams and communities. 

It’s because of this commitment to our Gustomers, and the combined efforts from teams across Gusto to design, build, and support COVID relief features, that our NPS is at an all-time high. It’s also likely why we’re experiencing more new customer signs ups than expected. As it turns out, our efforts weren’t so anti-growth after all.

Reflections for Growth PractitionersI believe most growth teams tend to concentrate on generating new customers and finding new revenue streams. Since adapting to focus on COVID relief features, I’ve learned that customer loyalty and retention are also important growth levers that shouldn’t be overlooked. Growth teams should look for ways to provide their customers with real value in moments that matter, regardless of their normal focus area. 

Consider your own team, product, projects, and customers. Is it time for you to adapt too? What can you do as a growth practitioner to help your customers and provide them with real value, especially during times of uncertainty?

Guest Editor BioSara Berry is a growth-focused product designer at Gusto with a background in illustration, animation, and technical publications. In her free time, she enjoys watching television with her husband and dog.

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