“ Repeatedly, through user and market research, we’ve learned that users need more guidance and support to reach their goals. We have billions of data points about users to deliver a personalized experience…”

Taking a step back…

Losing weight is hard, and staying consistent is half the battle. With this in mind, we aimed to understand how people achieve goals successfully, regardless of the focus. We developed what we lovingly called the UJC (User Journey Cycle) – our user centered approach to behavior change. Mapping the existing Fitbit software offering against it would not only help us understand our areas of opportunity, but also provide a foundation to plan our future product ideas against.

So much data - what do we do with it?
How do we create value AND generate revenue?

By looking holistically at our wellness offering we were able to come up with a multi-tiered approach that focused on varying levels of accountability. People often try to DIY hack their way to their goal on their own, but it’s pretty hard to not fall off track along the way. Users wanted guidance and help from Fitbit! This was our opportunity.



“ If Fitbit were a person, it would be a friend or my gym buddy. I’d like it to be more like a coach: tell me what to do rather than just coming along for the ride.”

Who is our user and what do they need our help with?

We set out to understand our current users and how they use our products. Through reviewing our team’s research, we developed 3 different personas. Leah focused more on health condition management, Lauren (our primary) focused on weight loss and healthy habits, and lastly Luke our active high performance user. It was important to keep all 3 in mind throughout this process but Lauren became our primary focus for the 6 month user narrative we were challenged to create.

Hey Lauren, let’s get to it.

Over a short 2 week period, our user journey grew from 2 weeks to 3 months to 6 months as it was reviewed by executives and they were eager to see more. We worked closely with product and various stakeholders to develop a narrative and well designed mobile and device screens to help illuminate the concept and it’s potential impact. We walked Lauren through the highs and lows of her health journey and were there to help get her back on track both in app and on her wrist when she struggled along the way. Lauren set a weight goal, learned more about her body via personalized insights, tried out a guided program, earned rewards for her engagement and even worked with a personal coach 1:1 for increased accountability when times got rough.

This is great, now let’s make it happen!

Lauren’s story gained momentum with the founders and at various executive level meetings. Energy was building behind our vision and before we knew it we were asked to present our thinking at QBR. The vision was received with excitement and quickly green-lit. We handed off more of the logisitic details to the Product Management team to help create an iterative plan with engineering to roll out the vision to the public in feasible phases. The first of which was Fitbit Premium, championing the mission “Your body is unique. Your guidance should be too.”

"Data is great at making the invisible visible. But it’s really about how well we can drive behavioral change.”"

– Eric Friedman, Fitbit CTO
Forbes Magazine