Awards, Podcasts, and Quotes

 
 

Ep. #4, Data Stewardship with Claire Armstrong of Fender

In episode 4 of The Right Track, Stef speaks with Claire Armstrong of Fender. They unpack the digital products Claire’s overseen at Fender, how her career has interwoven her passions for both music and tech, and tactics for approaching data with user empathy in mind.

Amplitude Pioneer Data Culture Award Winner

I was presented an Amplitude Pioneer Award in 2022 for promoting Data Culture at Fender Musical Instruments.

Claire Armstrong instilled a data-first culture for Fender Digital.

Why Claire won: Claire Armstrong, Director of Digital Product at Fender was instrumental in creating a data culture for Fender Digital. In mid-2021 she took over as the Data team product lead and made Fender’s data ecosystem clean, usable, reliable, and available. She leveraged a framework outlining a three-phase approach to cleaning up and building a long-term path to better data.

Since those initial steps she has helped others with creating tracking plans, auditing broken or poorly instrumented tracking events, shepherding fixes through the process, and reliably communicating progress against the goals set for the data initiative. She’s led internal seminars to explain data and the proper processes to stakeholders across the organization, created Amplitude dashboards for learnings and features, helped implement tracking plans for new properties and features, and has made data “make sense” to people at all levels across the Fender Digital world.

Claire’s efforts in cleaning up the data and creating tracking plans have made Fender capable of running reliable reports in Amplitude to gauge the efficacy of products. For example, she worked on a tracking plan and audit for the sign up process. Afterward, the team was able to implement “Sign in With Google” and found that they decreased sign up abandonment by 10%. This is huge, as nearly 40% of accounts were created with that method.

Featured in data innovators series

“Educating ourselves about our users in a responsible way – to give them the ideal learning and shopping experience – is what's going to help them become players for life.”

Fender Play App Icon

Fender Play

Fender Play is an iPhone, iPad and Android app with accompanying web app that teaches users how to play guitar, bass, and ukulele with original video content and reference materials. The Play platform relies on a subscription model that keeps user data in-sync across all clients.

  • Featured by Apple in the App Store Today tab multiple times.

  • Released new features such as: in-app purchases, iPad product launch, Android product launch, ukulele content, tablature feature, GDPR support, practice reminders, search, bass content, additional product SKUs, Facebook Connect, fullscreen tablature, Intercom integration, dynamic SKUs, Practice Mode: interactive tablature, Home screen

  • Maintained a 4.7 star app rating

  • 21.7M users have entered the funnel

  • 4M user accounts created

  • 3M+ app downloads

  • 2.5M lifetime trials

  • 755k APUs lifetime

  • $15M ARR

  • 10% DAU/MAU

 
Fender Play App Icon

Fender SONGS

Fender Songs is an iPhone app, based on Riffstation auto-chord-detection technology, that allows users to Practice, Play Along, and Perform with chord charts & lyrics synced with streaming audio. It took many years of planning and development so it could be delivered as a fully legal product.

I assisted with support & sunset of Riffstation, as well as the launch of Fender Songs for iPhone on Oct 22, 2019.

My Contributions

  • Prioritized features & tasks based on stakeholder, user, and engineering needs

  • Assisted with two major designs/redesigns of the Songs app

  • Worked with a team overseas to facilitate agile development of complex backend and Swift front end of app

  • Coordinated with legal department to negotiate deals

  • Coordinated with marketing department to go to market, including performing interviews at our press event, and doing app demos for social media

  • Negotiated with partners to provide lyrics, streaming audio, metadata, royalty reporting, clearances, and other services crucial to the product

 

Press

Fender Tone

Fender Tone is an iPhone and Android app that allows owners of certain Fender connected amps to control their amplifier settings and effects wirelessly over Bluetooth, as well as download community-made presets. We also built an accompanying website to promote the app, amps, and community presets.

  • Led internal training of sales people, retailers, Fender Academy, and support teams on the software product and physical product

  • Helped establish a new support site and knowledge base system to provide better technical help to these customers, and wrote majority of support content (internal and external)

  • Developed features and communications to ensure that app versions aligned with compatible amp firmware versions

  • Established a beta program to try new versions of the app with users, and also amp firmware

  • Starred in a video demo-ing the app functionality (see below)

  • Released both iOS and Android apps at the same time as the physical product, while accommodating the launch date moved up 6 weeks.

  • Sold tens of thousands of Mustang GT amps, with approximately 70% of customers installing the app

  • Came up with the idea of a card-based navigation structure and set of gestures to communicate list of presets > preset detail > signal chain > effect/amp parameters, and worked with design staff to implement

  • Navigated a complex Bluetooth messaging protocol with the amp’s embedded software, and worked with teams in other locations to coordinate

 
 

Fender Tune

Fender Tune is an iPhone and Android app released in August 2016 (iOS) and January 2017 (Android) that enables users to tune their guitars and other instruments. I served as product lead on this project from December 2015 to today.

Fender Tune has been featured on Product Hunt.

  • Have yielded over 20,000 account sign ups for a passive feature usage

  • Coordinated a splash page to promote the app

  • Became a featured app in the Apple App Store, and our app icon was shown in an Apple Keynote

  • Implemented strategy to track events within the app to track usage of functionality, as well as prompt user for certain actions (app review, support request) at the right time.

  • Implemented Intercom early in the product for ongoing product feedback and detailed learnings about user base

  • Launched with an interim tuning algorithm with we later improved

  • After competitive analysis, decided to offer additional tunings for free, and allow custom tuning creation with free account sign up

  • Simple and intuitive design to break us out of older skeuomorphic music utility app traditions and appeal to a younger audience while not alienating our longer term dedicated fan base

  • Hit 1M downloads between both platforms within 1 year (iOS) and 6 months (Android)

  • Have maintained a 5 star rating average steadily

 

Cooler

An app for talking about TV

I worked for a short time at Cooler in 2015 as a Director of User Experience for their mobile apps that allow users to have time shifted conversations about their favorite shows. There I created user flows, wireframes, and high fidelity mockups for the first version of the mobile product. We were able to deliver a Minimum Viable Product to test a full end-to-end show selection, episode selection, and comment flow. I also established a beta testing program, and distributed builds and profiled our users as personas. I also helped set up initial marketing pages for lead generation. Cooler has recently been featured on Product Hunt.

 

Ubiquiti Networks

Software to help wireless internet service providers run their businesses and manage technology

At Ubiquiti where I was employed Dec 2013–Sept 2015, I took on many roles on many projects for web and mobile, for mostly enterprise platform applications. These tasks included product planning, product management, user flows, site flows, information architecture structuring, low & high fidelity wireframes, interface designs, UI specs, UI audits, style guide creation, design QA, user interviews, user feedback campaigns, and quantitative feedback. I also assisted with improving SEO, implementing newsletter campaigns (design, configuration, and HTML), and event tracking.

 

SunMAX

This was a web product meant for solar installers to manage their customers and solar installations. There were also a customer-facing monitoring web app and marketing/lead generation website.

airCRM

This was a web-first product developed for wireless internet service providers to manage their customer relationships.

mFi

This was a web app meant for users of mFi connected sensors and switches to manage their commercial or residential products.

UBNT.com

Ubiquiti also had their standard customer-facing website for promoting physical products and digital products.

The Little Knittery

The Little Knittery is a brick & mortar retail store in Los Angeles catering to crafters.

  • Customized a purchased template

  • Set up an event booking product and calendar for classes

  • Set up MailChimp and imported previous email lists

  • Drafted instruction documents for staff reference

  • Set up all new Shopify eCommerce website & in-store POS system
  • Migrated inventory and cost data from older system
  • Imported blog entries from Wordpress
  • Set up new taxonomy for product categories
 
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Mobile Roadie

I started at Mobile Roadie as an interactive designer in June 2011, then starting doing front-end development, then went on as product manager, and finished as a director of product in December 2013.

I've led teams and performed design & development work on the following projects:

  • Custom app themes for high profile clients
  • Spear-headed a complete redesign of our customer facing CMS, beginning with user research, information architecture, wireframes, prototypes, and scheduling
  • Did initial rounds of development on our platform-controlled mobile web product
  • Involved with redesign of public site, multiple times, including making the entire site responsive to all device sizes
  • Migrated our issue tracking to JIRA and configured it to suit our needs and instituted Agile development processes
  • Instituted a thorough Quality Assurance process with other team members
  • Began robust Google Analytics tracking of our products to determine successes and improve conversions
  • Writing detailed product requirements for iOS and Android bugs, improvements, and features to present to stakeholders as well as developers
  • Maintained a product road map to establish themes for upcoming sprints
  • Defining statements of work for custom work with high profile clients, and project managing the launch and success of their mobile apps
  • Improving internal company communication by writing and maintaining workflows and processes and reference documentation, especially for new employees
  • Defined and launched several new products and updates, such as: geofencing, interactive maps, in-app purchases, customer analytics, app user onboarding, CMS customer onboarding, updated pricing, polling, golden tickets, marketing wizard, etc.
  • Various miscellaneous tasks involving company morale, copywriting, social media, email marketing campaigns, language translations, A/B testing, maintaining a product updated blog, performing user research, etc.
 

BeautyBooked

BeautyBooked provided users with 24/7 access to top salons and spas

As an advisor to BeautyBooked, I've provided pages of feedback, critique, and explanation for changes that could be made to their site to improve the user experience via user interface and new technologies.
I've also performed production work by providing high-fidelity wireframes to explain concepts and help their design and front-end team get started. Rather than simply give answers, I feel it's important for the people producing the product to understand the reasoning and data behind each decision.

BeautyBooked sold to Style Seat in 2016.