Leader Spotlight: Enabling users to make confident decisions, with Rachel Chukura

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Rachel Chukura is Head of Consumer Product at The Weather Company. She began her career in management consulting and worked for companies such as Agility Solutions, LATRO Services, and Deloitte. Later, she led the customer success team at Idibon before moving over to strategic partnerships at The Weather Company, where she’s moved up the ranks in product management over the past eight years.

In our conversation, Rachel talks about how her team’s work enables users to make the best decisions for themselves, including around health management, lifestyle, and activities. She discusses how influencing user behavior is especially difficult in products like theirs because using them is a habit for the majority of users. Rachel also shares how she uses data to tell stories and to supplement the “why” behind every decision.

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How data tells a story

Earlier in your career, you worked in management consulting. What skills did you take from that experience that you’ve found most valuable in product leadership?

Management consulting gave me a breadth of experience working with different people and on various problems to solve, which is very similar to what everyone in product management experiences. In product management roles, you need to be able to influence decisions, collaborate with stakeholders, and get to the crux of any problem — whether it’s business- or user-related.

The transition from management consulting into product has been pretty seamless for me because there are many transferable soft and hard skills. From a soft skill standpoint, the ability to communicate, summarize your thoughts, present to key stakeholders, and leverage your ability to influence is key.

I worked within a data analytics practice specifically, so in terms of hard skills, I learned how to use data to tell a story. That was a huge part of my role at Deloitte, as well as in my positions within product management. To this day, I’ve continued to leverage this skill because behind every problem is a set of data and trends that tell a story.

Using data to supplement the ‘why’

You mentioned the benefits of having data analytics experience. I’m curious to hear more about how your prior role in this area, as well as customer success, set you up to lead consumer product and subscription strategies.

Being able to take data and translate it into a story or a business outcome is a rare skill. Data, to me, is a bridge that enables me to tell a story that will reach those with a data-analytical mindset and those with a business-and-driving-result mindset.

Very tactical solutions can come from data, but so can business strategy. As part of that transition into my current role, I’ve noticed that every decision I make comes from what we know about our audience or our business. What is our audience doing on our properties? Where are there opportunities for us to lean in more and why? What outcomes are they seeking to drive? I can package that into a roadmap or a strategy for our business to guide where we go next.

Do you tend to modify your story when you have a less technical audience or one that isn’t as proficient with data analysis?

Absolutely — I always consider, “What is the story I want to relay to a stakeholder?” My advice is to lead with the possibilities of the scenario or where we want to take the product or business. Then, data can be used as a supplement to the “why.”

I really think it’s important — as part of persuading people — that you take them on a journey with you and bring them into the experience. How do you get them to understand the what, why, and how as part of the decision? How can you bring data in as facts — whether it’s research-based, behavioral-based, etc., to justify the “why?” I always lead with the story and allow the data to boost the story as I tell it.

Not everybody understands data the same way, which is why telling a story is a stronger approach. It’s easy to get into the weeds with data and become lost in it, but if you flip it and start with the “why,” you can be more effective in that communication.

Contextualizing information for users to make decisions

Could you talk a bit about your approach to balancing business and user value?

It’s one of the greatest challenges companies face. The Weather Company is user- and customer-led; this approach spans our consumer and enterprise lines of business. When we look specifically at our consumer business and our flagship brand — The Weather Channel — we believe that if we truly understand and prioritize our users’ needs, the business value will follow.

An example of this is thinking about how advertising and marketers can “come along the ride” as we create product experiences. We think about this in terms of how we can integrate these components more seamlessly into the user journey. Some of our most impactful advertising solutions are looked at through the lens of, “Well, what are our users already doing?” One of the hardest things we can do is shift user behaviors, especially in a product like ours that has become a habit for the majority of our users.

That’s why, first and foremost, we look at the user problem and journey to understand their mindset and needs. Then, we allow the business outcomes to layer on top of that. When we do this successfully, everyone wins.

What’s your approach to identifying the need behind the need?

We leverage research extensively within our business. Weather is one of those fundamental topics that impacts everyone. But, although experiencing the weather is universal, the things that we’re trying to make decisions on with respect to weather could be very different. These things can vary based on the time of day and individual person, their lifestyle, and location.

Lots of external variables impact your personal needs, which is why we leverage consumer research to help us identify the mindset of our users, their interests in checking the weather, and the core questions they have when they come to our digital experiences. This allows us to identify where there are opportunities for us to lean in further.

An example of this is our developments in health and wellness. We knew, through research, that over 67 percent of our users were coming to us to manage at least one health condition. They would use one of our products each week to do this, whether it was for themselves or a loved one. Even before we offered any direct experiences or features to help with health and wellness, they were using our data to make decisions related to health management.

So, we decided to lean into this and help contextualize the information in a way that’s easy for users to consume and action. We do a lot of that now, and you’ll see it reflected in our product experience today. We try to provide better tooling for people who are coming in with a very specific user need and make the product more approachable and accessible. Ultimately, by contextualizing the weather, our goal is to help people make more informed, confident decisions — rain or shine.

Could you give a specific example of how you’re empowering users to make decisions based on your product and the data you provide?

One example is our allergy experience. You could look at wind, humidity levels, and pollen count individually, but we’ve actually implemented a forecast around your risk of experiencing allergy symptoms using all of these variables. So many variables contribute to how you feel and experience allergies that go beyond a single data point, such as pollen count. Giving users a more nuanced, precise allergy outlook helps them better anticipate and plan; it gives them greater control.

Adapting to shifting consumer behaviors

During the pandemic, you saw a big shift in the number of desktop users as people stayed at home. Have you seen that behavior revert as more people transition to an in-person or hybrid work environment?

Surprisingly, not really. We still have a strong desktop audience. Behavior-wise, however, people continue to be mobile first. Generationally, that’s just how we are, because our phones are always in our hands. There is still a decent amount of desktop engagement that exists because people are at home, so we foresee that behavior being maintained for the future and continue to innovate cross-platform.

Have you noticed a rise in any other trends that impact your product strategy?

One trend that I’ve noticed recently is around how people are consuming content. It’s not necessarily about what platform or device they’re using, but because there’s such an inundation and commoditization of content in the ecosystem, it’s even harder to get people to want to consume content on our owned and operated properties. I’m sure all publishers are facing this right now because of the distribution of content through social media, aggregators, etc.

There’s also a recent trend with Gen Z looking to TikTok as their new search platform. That is where they consume news and information instead of using Google, which is still a search platform for most other generations.

You can start to see how these behaviors are shifting, and it’s leaving publishers in a place, generally, where they’re trying to identify the role they play in that type of ecosystem.

Inserting meaningful touch points into the subscriber life cycle

What are some of the strategies that you’ve implemented during your tenure as head of consumer subscriptions? Do many of them still resonate with today’s digital consumers or do you feel like there’s been a shift there as well?

Specifically on the subscription side, there has been a little bit of a shift. Consumers are generally still very interested in things that add convenience and value. But I know that the industry trends, at large, show that acquisition into subscriptions is starting to slow down. It places greater emphasis on what we’re doing to retain the users that we do have versus aiming for mass acquisition and hyper-growth like we did early in our subscription strategy.

In general, our strategy is still the same, but where we focus on that subscriber life cycle has begun to evolve. We will always emphasize acquisition, but it is also important to have meaningful touchpoints throughout the subscriber life cycle. That way, they’re reminded of the value that they are paying for and why our product is meaningful to their everyday lives.

The power of personalization

What’s your approach to leveraging personalized content as a means of boosting engagement?

In general, users expect experiences to be tailored to them. Streaming algorithms and social platforms have trained us to expect that digital experiences know us individually. That’s very important for us. We’ve always been contextually personalized, so a user’s experience will evolve based on where they’re located, time of day, weather conditions they’re experiencing, etc. That reflects how the overall experience manifests and flexes itself throughout those different condition changes.

What consumer KPIs are most important to you in terms of measuring and tracking engagement?

There are a couple of things that we are very laser-focused on optimizing. The first is app stickiness — looking at how many users we can convert in our funnel from being monthly active to weekly active to daily active. We have the benefit of being a daily habit for a large population, but there’s always room to continue to drive that, especially on our web platforms.

The other measure that we look at is the frequency of visits. Visits per UV are important because we want to drive sunny-day behavior just as much as we want to instill decisions and confidence during active or severe weather. We look at how we can get more people to return to our site even if nothing is going on outside. How do you become as valuable during the sunny day moments as you are during a hurricane?

Showing up in the moments that matter the most

Is it common for people to check the weather app multiple times throughout the day?

Absolutely. On average, we get 28 visits per month. That assumes that everybody checks at least once a day, but it’s the bell curve. On average, there are plenty of people on the other side of that bell curve who are visiting with greater frequency — especially if they are the head of their household. Those who are responsible for the majority of household decisions tend to visit more frequently.

In the context of active weather events and climate change, how does The Weather Company’s product strategy address the increasing demand for accurate and actionable weather information?

It’s part of our responsibility to help people understand what’s normal in their environment, as well as show up in those moments that matter the most. I see it as being threefold.

First, how do we help people stay informed about the trends and information that exist today? We do that a lot through our editorial content and how we tell stories about why a particular event happened. It’s a little bit of a retroactive in nature response.

Second is how we help our users answer questions like, “Is this normal?” There are a lot of high-heat days, for example, but is that normal for this area? Is this just a heat wave or is this our new benchmark? Being able to contextualize those moments and help users understand how to answer that question and whether this is a new baseline for their community and for themselves is really important.

The third one revolves around an erratic nature event. We are seeing hurricanes strengthen at unprecedented rates because of the sea level temperatures. This year, the hurricane season is likely going to be the worst in almost 200 years. We have a duty to the world to ensure that people are informed because the weather’s not going to go away. It’s only going to start becoming more impactful for everybody regardless of where they live, and it may manifest itself in different ways. It’s on us to make sure that users are informed with that data, understand what’s going on, and can put that data within the context of their lives to make confident decisions.