Lifecake, a Canon Europe company
Head of UX, then Head of Product, 2017–2018
- 2m+
- users, double the base when I joined
- 4×
- increase in engagement
Context
Lifecake is a private photo and video timeline for families. Canon Europe acquired it in April 2015 to accelerate its move into digital consumer services. I joined in February 2017, nearly two years after the acquisition, as Head of UX, and was promoted to Head of Product six months later.
Problem
A printing company had bought a photo app, and the two had not yet been connected. Lifecake had users and no business model. Engagement was the immediate problem and monetisation was the unspoken one, because an acquired consumer product that never earns anything eventually stops being funded.
Underneath that was a behaviour problem. Parents upload photos of their children constantly and look at them almost never. Storage was solved. Retrieval and occasion were not.
My role
Head of UX, then Head of Product from month six. Responsible for iOS, Android and web, and for engagement, growth and monetisation. I established the product and UX frameworks the team worked to, and hired and mentored into it.
Team size is the one number I am not publishing. My own records disagree with each other on it.
Insight
The moment worth designing for was not upload. It was the moment a parent went looking for something specific and had to scroll through four years of photographs to find it. Fix retrieval and the app gets opened; fail it and the app is a backup service people forget they have.
The monetisation answer was sitting in the parent company. Canon prints things. A timeline of a child's life is one of the few digital artefacts people genuinely still want on paper, and the app already knew which photographs mattered.
Product decisions
Fix retrieval before adding anything.
Fast scroll through years of timeline, so finding a specific month stopped being a chore. Unglamorous, invisible in a feature list, and the thing that made every subsequent decision work.
Monetise through print, contextually.
Automated photobooks generated from the timeline, offered at the point the memory is being looked at rather than behind a store tab. This aligned the product with why Canon bought it, and it monetised an emotional moment instead of interrupting one.
Grow through invitation, not acquisition.
A family timeline with one person in it has almost no value. Invitations and shared access were the growth mechanism, because every new member both increases the value of the product to the existing member and is themselves a new user.
Build a design system for a three-platform team.
iOS, Android and web with a small team is where consistency normally dies. A component library and a set of rules meant the tenth screen cost a fraction of the first.
Execution
A product research and persona programme first, because the team held strong and conflicting beliefs about who the user was. Then onboarding, invitation and retrieval, then the print surfaces. Design system alongside, so the work compounded rather than accumulating.
Outcome
| Result | |
|---|---|
| User base | Doubled, to 2m+ |
| Engagement | 4× increase |
| Business model | First revenue surfaces, via contextual print and automated photobooks |
| Role | Head of UX to Head of Product in six months |
What I learned
The promotion is the part I think about. I was hired to do UX and given product because the UX work kept running into commercial decisions nobody owned. If you follow a design problem far enough it stops being a design problem, and someone has to be willing to say so.
The other lesson is about acquired products. Lifecake was not short of ideas; it was short of a reason to exist inside Canon. The best available answer was already in the parent company, and it took an outsider two years late to go looking for it.