Cariloop
Helping a healthcare startup client re-think their product and positioning and then joining their team to scale through a $24M Series B raise.
Overview
Cariloop got its start in July of 2012 when its two Co-Founders experienced both the personal and professional challenges that come with caring for family members. After bootstrapping the company over the first couple of years while they ran prototypes and did some market testing, Cariloop took part in the Health Wildcatters accelerator program in 2013 and raised about $600k of seed funding in early 2014 to finalize V1 of the product and take it to market. Cariloop successfully launched in 2014 as a B2B2C marketplace where senior care providers could upload and manage their information, inventory, and other pertinent marketing information so caregivers and families could use their assessment tool to get "matched" with the right types of providers for their loved one's care. They quickly saw just how challenging it would be to scale the unit economics on the demand side of the marketplace without substantial funding. With only about half of their seed funding left, Cariloop had a critical decision to make...either continue testing down the current marketplace path, or explore a different type of product experience and go-to-market strategy based on some of the early data gathered. This is where I came into the picture.
Objective
Re-imagine the Cariloop offering, lead the redesign of the new product and positioning, improve the impact of work being done across the org’s teams, expand the product and brand teams to support the continued growth toward the company vision.
My Role
As Chief Empathy Officer, I provided design leadership across the org and directly oversaw the work done from a Product, Branding, and Storytelling perspective between 2016 - 2021. My role required me to regularly navigate between leadership and being in the weeds to serve people in a way that supported the business..
Collaborative Leadership
Vision & Strategy
Team Building & Management
Skills
Brand Identity
User Research
Product & Service Design
Mapping & Blueprints
Wireframes
Prototyping
Creative Direction
Comm Design & Illustration
Copywriting
>90% of members reported more confidence, lower stress levels, and indicated they would recommend Cariloop to other caregivers, parents, and families
Corporate clients reported higher levels of retention, employee engagement, and productivity
Over 500,000 hours were returned to the working caregiver members and families
Helped company successfully pivot at an important time from a B2B2C to B2B company
Supported the sales team in bringing on the first ~100 clients including GE, Pfizer, KPMG, Proctor and Gamble, American Cancer Society, and many others
Supported the effort to raise $24 million from venture investors
Results
Empathizing & Defining
I first started with Cariloop by interviewing all members of the team to understand them and their jobs-to-be-done and desired outcomes looking for patterns and pain points. Interviews, Journey Maps, Workflows, etc. Lots of time spent listening to and collaborating with people from colleagues, customers, members, and loved ones. I also analyzed of all the touch points across the organization to determine if they were valuable, consistent, and setting the right tone for the brand. This practice continued throughout my time there - things change quickly and we need to keep up with the changes.
Mapping, Wireframing, & Documentation
Below are example documents created to help align the team on the people we were supporting, jobs being done and the service ecosystem.
Caring Deeply About the Cariloop Experience
As a highly collaborative organization we approached everything we did with the mindset of it being an experiment. Supporting caregivers, collaborating with client partners, and even telling our story was an opportunity to ideate, prototype and test which experiences we created delivered the most value. I provided all the product and communication design and supported the storytelling efforts for the first few years until we could hire a team of Communication Designers, Product Designers, Copywriters, and Content Strategists.
Product Experience
The core product was a web-based communication platform that enabled caregiver members and their care teams communicate and collaborate with the Care Coaches supporting them on their caregiver journey. Over time we included native mobile apps, a customer portal, and internal admin portal.
Customer Experience
Cariloop worked closely with the Benefits Directors of our customer companies and provided communication materials as well as on-site events to help spread word to employees about their new caregiver support benefit Cariloop. The Engagement Manager I regularly collaborated with fully embraced designing experiences and the idea of experimenting and iterating from the learnings. He regularly created highly considered employee events that were regularly attended, increased employee signup, and made it very easy for the Benefit Directors to coordinate. He would consider the experience from the customer’s perspective right down to learning what the local favorite snack food items were to be sure to have them at events as he visited client offices across the country. With this mindset he achieved his goal of being “the benefit company our clients loved working with the most” in short order.
Branding
The first thing I did with Cariloop when I started consulting in 2016 was review their brand identity. I was happy they chose a name that nodded to “care”, had a compelling creation story, and could be uniquely owned. I was also happy they had hired a graphic designer early on to create a logo and visual identity. Good design earns trust and they had set a solid foundation for leaving good impressions. The bit of cleanup I did initially was to smooth out rough edges and create visual and written consistency in their story. Shortly after the cleanup the sales team started hearing “Wow. You come across bigger than you are.” Bam. Trust was being earned, contracts signed, and we were growing the company. When we had the budget I hired an experienced Director of Communication Design that took the visual identity to a whole new level.
Original Logo
A Little Cleaner
Much Better
We moved from a photography focus to illustration which was much warmer and provided flexibility in how we represented the diverse nature of caregiving.
During our last brand update we took a good look at our overall brand strategy and worked on our brand essence. The team nailed it with “Care Deeply”. It perfectly captured the soul of what Cariloop was all about inside and out and became a great north star for how we designed experiences. We found ourselves often asking “What does it mean to care deeply about (insert challenge)?” which resulted in more valuable, human-centered solutions.
Creating a Culture of Care
The Cariloop team started as a remote team when they launched in 2012 and are still remote today. Company culture is incredibly important and I enjoy helping the team create a positive work environment and Culture of Care. As one of the few companies at the time with fully remote teams we didn’t have many of the little moments that create personal connections and gel a team like happens when building something together in person. I came up with the idea of Flair - stickers to celebrate and commemorate the funny/touching/milestone moments we were having as a company. We’d take suggestions of key moments from colleagues and the design and storytelling teams would collaborate on the creation. Each sticker has a story, was revealed at the monthly full-team meeting, and mailed out to employees (who doesn’t love stickers or getting something in the mail that’s not junk?). It became something we all looked forward to.
Reflection
The opportunity to combine the various design skills collected over twenty years to apply experience design, holistically, to a startup with an undeniably human mission was incredibly rewarding. Not only were we designing a great experience for our customers, partners and caregiver members we also took great care designing our culture with the understanding that a great customer experience is the direct result of a great employee experience. I jumped at the rare opportunity to be a design executive and learned much about the importance of stakeholder alignment, the empowering effect of well-defined problems, and the important role design leadership needs to play in bridging the gaps that inevitably form between the team silos to ensure the whole organization is serving people in a way that benefits the cause.