Muck Rack (Core Product, B2B)

What to expect?

The case study emphasizes the user-centric methodology, the specific problems identified, innovative solutions implemented, and the tangible business impact achieved.

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Overview:
Muck Rack is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool designed for folks working in Public Relations. A series-A funded company servicing users across US, Canada & the UK.

Muck Rack serves 2 audiences:
PR Professionals - who pay MR to get access the software.
Journalists - who use MR for free (and are really important in this ecosystem)

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Understanding PR Professionals and How Muck Rack Supports Their Success
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At its core, PR professionals shape and maintain a company’s public image. They craft and share strategic messages to foster strong relationships with stakeholders, media outlets, and the general public. Think of them as the bridge between a brand and the world.

Of course, this definition barely scratches the surface of the role. PR professionals juggle a diverse and demanding set of responsibilities. To simplify things, here are four essential buckets that PR teams focus on—and how Muck Rack helps them get the job done.
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1. Finding the Right Journalists

PR pros need to identify journalists who align with their stories. This involves extensive research to match topics, beats, and media outlets. Muck Rack streamlines this process with powerful search tools that let users filter journalists by coverage area, location, or even the content they’ve recently published.
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2. Pitching & Building Relationships

The next step is pitching stories and maintaining relationships with journalists. This isn’t just about sending emails—it’s about tracking outreach efforts, understanding what works, and nurturing connections over time. Muck Rack’s CRM-style features make it easier to manage these interactions, ensuring pitches are relevant and relationships are authentic.
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3. Analyzing Efforts

Tracking the impact of PR campaigns is critical. Questions like Who’s writing about us? What’s the sentiment of the coverage? are top of mind for PR teams. Muck Rack offers analytics that break down brand mentions, coverage volume, and sentiment, giving teams the insights they need to refine their strategies.
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4. Measuring and Communicating PR Impact

Finally, PR professionals must prove their value internally, especially to leadership. How did a campaign impact brand perception? What measurable outcomes were achieved? With Muck Rack, PR teams can easily compile and share metrics that demonstrate the ROI of their efforts.

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‍The Challenge

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The Muck Rack Reporting Suite, particularly its Dashboards feature, plays a pivotal role in enabling customers to harness the full power of their PR analytics. By aggregating key metrics into one place, Dashboards empower users to track campaign performance, showcase PR value, and make data-driven decisions. However, despite its strategic importance, dashboard adoption was well below expectations, signalling untapped potential.
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Mandate

Increase product adoption for the Reporting Suite Dashboards—a critical but underutilized feature within the platform.
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Initial Landscape

• Total Customers: Approximately 5,300.
• Dashboard Usage: Fewer than 20% of customers were engaging with dashboards.
• Dashboard Status: Over 2,000 dashboards were empty—a "create and forget" scenario where users set up dashboards but never populated or used them.

This underperformance not only impacted the perceived value of the Reporting Suite but also hinted at friction points in the user experience and onboarding journey.

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Strategic Approach

To tackle the adoption challenge, I spearheaded a multi-pronged strategy focusing on user-centric research, competitive analysis, and actionable insights to drive measurable impact.
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1. User-Centric Research

• Evaluative Research:
  Partnered with the UX Research team to conduct in-depth user interviews and surveys. The research identified usage patterns and correlations between customer behaviors and dashboard engagement.
• Competitive Analysis:
  Collaborated with Product Marketing to benchmark our reporting tools against competitors. This helped uncover key value drivers of successful reporting tools in the market.
• Insights Validation:
  Contextualized findings to inform a clear execution plan. Worked closely with the engineering team to validate the feasibility of proposed solutions and ensure alignment with technical capabilities.

2. Solution Execution

• Designed and launched dashboard templates pre-loaded with relevant metrics tailored to customer needs.
• Simplified onboarding workflows to guide users through dashboard creation and engagement.
• Introduced bulk management features to streamline repetitive tasks, saving users time and effort.

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Measurable Impact

The initiatives led to substantial improvements in dashboard adoption and engagement:

• Dashboard Usage Increased: From <20% to over 60% of customers.
• Empty Dashboards Reduced: Dropped from over 2,000 to under 500.
• Template-Created Dashboards: Accounted for ~60% of new dashboards.

These metrics demonstrated the value of addressing user needs with data-driven and outcome-oriented solutions.

Key Learnings

1. User Research is Critical for Understanding Product Friction:
   In-depth research revealed specific pain points driving low adoption, enabling targeted interventions.
2. Modular, Outcome-Driven Design Reduces Cognitive Load:
   Simplifying workflows with templates and targeted features significantly improved user engagement.
3. Bulk Management Features Enhance the User Experience:
   Streamlining repetitive tasks led to higher adoption rates and increased user satisfaction.

By addressing user pain points with thoughtful, data-backed solutions, my team & I successfully transformed Dashboards into a standout feature of the Reporting Suite. This success not only demonstrated the power of user-centered design but also reinforced the importance of cross-functional collaboration to achieve product excellence.

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