✌️ Katie Marcus


Case Study: Mentoring at Mastered

By listening to the needs of our disengaged users, at Mastered we developed the tools to provide a personal career-transforming mentoring service to creative professionals at scale.

Mastered's online classroom, optimised for creatives

What I did

Problem: disengaged users who did not perceive ROI

Mastered's audience of creative professionals were stuck in their careers and disengaged from the Mastered online learning platform and community.

We had data that showed us that the students who engaged most frequently with the online platform were most likely to report postive satisfaction and achieve the most positive impact to their careers after the course had ended. However a large proportion of students were not logging-in weekly and we only found out about their dissatisfaction later down the line.

We also had qualitative data received via the customer success team that students felt the courses lacked personal attention and in particular in receiving feedback which would help them move forward in their creative careers. There was a perception that the courses Mastered offered, with their high price point, did not offer value for money with the current lack of personal attention.

Mastered customer success and a user's profile page on the Mastered platform

Discovery: research and data

We hypothesised that by creating tools for creatives to track their personal development and by offering personal mentoring, we would create a stickier experience that would lead to higher engagement and therefore higher satisfaction.

I spent time with internal customer-facing teams and our customers themselves researching the highest priority needs. I interviewed several customers who spanned the scale of highly satisfied to less satisfied, and those with more experience vs those just starting out in their career. From these I formed personas to use as we designed out the service enhancements.

I also conducted interviews with more experiened members of the creative industries, to verify that they would be willing to provide the feedback and mentoring service and what sort of tools would enable them to do this efficiently around their other commitments as working professionals.

To benchmark the improvements we were making and qualify the problem space, I captured data around current student engagement with the platform and other key metrics like self-perception of skill level and confidence, satisfaction that the course was good value for money, and NPS.

Ideation for the Expert and Student flows for booking feedback sessions

A lean build-measure-learn cycle

I ran a rapid, tightly-iterative approach to bring this feature to life. Collaborating closely with engineering and UX, we developed a simple 'MVP' interface to get students and experts using the system and continued to iterate based on feedback.

I guided the following areas of work within the team:

Collecting inline feedback after a mentoring call in the platform
"My mentor offered great criticism and thoughtful insights. She was able to cut through my work and see me as a stylist and person. I can't say enough good things about her. For once in a long time I feel clarity and passion for my next steps."
– Kelly Kruthaupt, Mastered student

Measurable results

We saw a clear correlation between the rollout of the mentoring system and positive engagement and satisfaction metrics.

The online learning journal in the Mastered classroom with completed expert feedback

Back