Bernadette Fisher is Vice President of Product Management at ButcherBox, a direct consumer meat brand. She began her career in project management and transitioned into product while working at TomTom, a geolocation company. Bernadette then worked in various product management and leadership roles at companies such as Apple, TripAdvisor, and Amazon.
In our conversation, Bernadette talks about ButcherBox’s product offerings and how they have changed over time to meet customers where they are. She shares the challenges of working in the subscription space, including finding a sweet spot between frequency of delivery and people’s ability to cook through their freezer, as well as articulating the product’s claims and value to first-time users.
There are two paths you can take: you can create your own custom box or choose from a curated box. The contents of the curated box is chosen by us on a monthly basis and if you go the route of creating your own custom box customers can fill their box with whatever proteins they want. You can either have six or 12 proteins, depending on what size box you want, and that is delivered frozen to your front door. Subscriptions can be monthly, every six weeks, or every eight weeks, with two different price points on the subscription.
As a member, you get access to weekly deal items, whether they are at a discounted price or are limited-time product offerings, that you can then add in addition to the base box products. Once you’ve picked your first box, we take you through the flow of add-ons — full-price, additional items that you might want — and those will come with every subscription thereafter. Another perk is when the customer only wants a specific add-on one time and it’s a deal, it gets added to the box at a discount.
We walk the customer through that journey. They create a subscription and once they have their first box, we do a lot of interactions to see how they’re doing with it. We also send reminders along the way, like “your next box is coming,” to encourage them to either fill their box more or try something new. We also offer subscription service recipes and ways to cook so that people can work through their freezer faster. That’s one of the challenges we see with our customers — sometimes they get cuts of meat and they don’t know how to cook them. So, we offer recipes and give them a welcome guide to help them figure that out and become committed to eating better. That’s the overall mission: to help customers eat better through high-quality proteins.
One of the things that I love about ButcherBox is that we’re fully committed to the entire process in terms of animal welfare, farmer welfare, the quality of the proteins coming from our farmers, how we deliver it, food safety, and the customer. We want to deliver a high quality experience while considering the entire supply chain.
Right, so I manage the product managers who are in service to those teams. What we’re trying to get better at is seeing the three-year strategy and vision. I’m trying to really instill product process and rigor within the company across all of those verticals to say, “Here’s our mission and vision. What are our company and department-level objectives and key results?” I’m making sure that we are thinking through them from a business value perspective and also how they will help us grow the business against our KPIs for the year.
We are getting better at using frameworks and tools to say things like, “Our 48-hour delivery window sounds like a great idea. Our customers are telling us they want to be able to say for certain that they’re going to get their box in this 48-hour delivery window.” But, we have to also make sure that we don’t deliver boxes thawed. We’re trying to help the company learn new frameworks and how to prioritize against business value. Then we allocate our resources accordingly.
Because we are so mission-driven and this business was created and founded because of an actual problem that our founder’s wife had, the culture that we’ve built around the mission is remarkable. We want to really highlight our story, why we were founded, and how we deliver a product that cares about the entire ecosystem. We want to stay really true to our mission.
That said, we’re a business. We’re going to meet our customers where they are. A lot of our influencers started on the trend of keto and paleo because they are high meat consumers. We leaned in there to start the business and grew it that way. After that, we understood our customers and potential customers more. We realized that it’s not just keto and paleo who are interested in this mission, it’s also somebody who just likes a great steak and wants a high-quality one. Maybe they don’t realize that there are quality differences depending on how the animals are raised and butchered, and how the meat is delivered into your home.
Our hope is that we are identifying the customers correctly, that we understand their problems correctly, and that we’re offering a service to them through a product that we feel very proud of.
We’ve always taken customer feedback very seriously. A lot of new products that we’ve launched or ways we’ve rolled things out were because a customer said something like, “I’d love it if you had wild-caught shrimp.” Then our procurement team could go find a wild-caught shrimp vendor that meets all of our specifications. That’s never lost on me. It’s so cool that we really do have a full feedback loop.
As a product leader, I look for companies that care about the customer and live and breathe that. As product people, that’s what we’re here for — to solve customer problems. We love working with customers. I’ve worked in some organizations where I rarely felt like we were solving customer problems. We were solving business problems or internal people would say, “I think that the customer wants this,” and they considered themselves the customers. We work really hard at ButcherBox to not take our own opinions as the opinions of our customers, and we make our decisions for our business based on what the customer needs, as well as what the business needs.
We have lots of mechanisms that we use. We have a member insight team whose job is to track, measure, and understand member satisfaction. They get NPS insights based on how our existing customers feel about us. For those who are detractors, they lean in heavily to understand why they aren’t promoters of ButcherBox and what we might be able to do differently to support them. We also talk to customers directly. A PM on my team is passionate about that and does it all the time. He’ll post insights to everybody and explain them to us.
In terms of new market potential or outreach, we’ll either do our own market research or we’ll partner with specific firms that can help us do that. We just went through a process of that in the last six months of trying to understand more concretely who our buyer personas are and could be. The market share is still very massive for us so we need to think about how to market better to those folks and to reach out to them differently.
The obvious things that we know that customers have issues with are things like leakers in packages. We’ll do post-purchase engagement with the customer on why they would or wouldn’t recommend ButcherBox to somebody else, and we’d hear about packaging issues. As a result, we have a big initiative underway to improve our packaging to eliminate those kinds of problems.
One challenge, especially in the food and meat industry, is around the frequency of delivery and people’s ability to cook through their freezer. We need to make sure that a customer understands upfront the amount of meat that they’re getting and that we can help them use it. Another challenge is moving from more of a product-delivery company to a service-oriented company. If we really want to help you eat better, dropping food on your door is not actually going to help with that.
Along the packaging side of things, we need a model where if a customer just wanted to get their holiday cuts, how do we allow them to do that where it’s still profitable to our business but also meets the customer’s needs? We need to make sure we articulate that to potential customers upfront because it’s really hard to know what you’re getting and if it’s going to be worth the value. A $169 box — how much meat is that? Is it going to take me through my whole month, and therefore replace my grocery budget, or is it over my grocery budget because it’s going to sit in my freezer? People can be hesitant to commit when they don’t really know what they’re getting the first time around.
We’re starting to test some theories around doing a trial box, whether that’s from an existing member or if we run some other sort of marketing offer. That’s definitely been some feedback from customers: “I don’t know what I’m getting, so I’m a little nervous about committing to a subscription.”
We make it really easy for you to unsubscribe, which is a different problem and one that we want to try to deal with. There’s some happy medium somewhere where we’re 100 percent customer-obsessed, so if they just do not want to be a part of it, we don’t want to make that hard for them. But, from a business-minded perspective, you worked really hard to acquire that customer. You paid a lot of money to acquire them. Letting them go super easily is going to make it really challenging to get them back.
We think about it in that we absolutely let them cancel, but as they go through that, make it as quick as possible. What is the value we can offer to them based on that initial reason about why they didn’t want it? We’re testing this new way to shop because if we worked hard to get them and then they want to cancel, we want to say, “Sure. But did you know you can shop this way from now on and don’t need to be a subscriber to do that?”
We just bake in a certain percentage of time to each order to resolve any required tech debt. 80 percent of the effort from engineering is going to go toward customer-facing problems, whether they’re internal or external. For example, we’re almost done with a big migration. We did a lot of push without thinking much about tech debt because we needed to get the one-click checkout out the door. But we’ve committed going forward to the allocation of resources for that tech debt. That’s in the hands of the engineering leads.
One of our core values is relentless improvement. We are working with the teams to teach them how to articulate the business value of the tech debt, so that as product leaders, we can prioritize correctly against customer facing problems.
There are only so many cuts of meat that you can create or come up with, so, from a product standpoint, we need to think about meeting customers where they are. We’re thinking about those products that are convenience items. Are they fully cooked? Are they already seasoned? How do we iterate on the raw product that we’re already selling?
New ways to shop with ButcherBox is a big theme. We’re looking into going into adjacent categories, like pet food, which we just soft-launched. We know 50 percent of our customers have a pet, and if they’re eating healthy and prioritizing how they source their food, chances are they’re probably doing that even more for their pet. We’re really excited about that.
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