Membership programs
Hone
Est. 5 minutes
The problem
Hone's business had always centered around private programs: structured, cohort-based learning experiences where groups of 10–15 learners from the same organization took a series of classes together. These programs worked well for large customers who could invest in customization and coordination.
However, private programs were expensive and inflexible to run. Admins had to coordinate schedules, collaborate on customization, and potentially rerun programs for smaller groups if participation dropped. Smaller organizations, especially those with limited learning and development bandwidth, often balked at the effort required.
Meanwhile, Hone Membership — an ongoing slate of professional development classes open to any learner across companies — existed but was largely an afterthought. It wasn't sold as a distinct product, and internally, it lacked visibility and strategic focus.
We needed a more scalable offering that still delivered the structured learning outcomes our customers valued.
The solution
We had recently introduced a seemingly small feature: allowing private program learners to make up missed classes by joining equivalent sessions through Membership. The response was more enthusiastic than we expected.
Admins appreciated the boost in completion rates without additional coordination, happily sacrificing an exclusive, custom learning cohort in return. Learners loved the flexibility to attend classes when it suited them and reported feeling more comfortable engaging honestly when learning alongside peers from other organizations.
We decided to pivot Hone's core offering, making Membership the primary delivery model and reserving private programs for special cases.
The design challenge was clear:
- Preserve the structured learning journey that make private programs valuable
- Capitalize on the flexibility and scalability of Membership
The scope
Given a tight timeline that would allow us to announce Hone Membership at an October conference, I had to make careful tradeoffs.
My product manager and I decided to:
- build essential learner and admin flows using as much existing UI and code as possible
- launch with manual program configuration in which admins would submit setup requests via Typeform, which our Ops team would implement in Django
This let us move fast, align with Marketing's timeline, and gather early data before investing in deeper functionality.
The process
Research
I repurposed our regularly scheduled admin interviews to dig deeper around this topic.
- What were admins missing from private programs?
- What did they value the most about structure and accountability? What were they willing to sacrifice?
- What gaps still existed in their L&D workflow?
At the same time, our Sales team began socializing the Membership program model with prospects. Their early conversations helped validate market appetite and surfaced practical questions about implementation that directly informed my design work.
Ideation
To start, I mapped end-to-end flows for both admins and learners, identifying all the touchpoints Membership programs would require and flagging the areas we couldn't support with our existing patterns and components, including enrollment, waitlists, reporting, and email communications.
We were able to reuse a lot of the existing interface that allowed admins to report on program progress, which had the added benefit of maintaining design consistency across the product and allowing our current admins being able to quickly orient themselves within a new program type.
The time saved on program reporting enabled me to be thoughtful about the areas where the product's functionality needed to expand. In particular, we had no mechanism for learners enrolling in individual classes in a sequence, since learners in private programs chose only a single cohort.
Some of these new solutions needed to balance vision with practicality. For example, I designed a calendar-based class picker that would have been an intuitive way to visualize class scheduling options but our class liquidity wasn't yet high enough to support it. We opted for a simpler experience based on our existing rescheduling functionality, while keeping the more advanced concept in our back pocket for later.
Implementation
I worked closely with Product, Marketing, and our Executive team to make sure design work was delivered the conference launch in mind.
Our small working group met twice weekly to clarify open questions around program structure, communication touchpoints, and success metrics. Once we had buy-in on the core user flows and scope, we transitioned into a more traditional engineering handoff and implementation phase.
The aftermath
The pivot landed quickly. By May 2024, about seven months after launch, 82% of new bookings were Membership-first, and the high-touch private program customization that had made scaling difficult dropped to 9% of new bookings, well under the 20% threshold we'd set as a success marker.
The early cohort of Membership-only customers told a similar story. Of the first group to reach their renewal date, four out of six signed multi-year contracts. One of those customers tripled their learner count over the following year and became our first Membership-first customer to grow into a higher service tier.
This initiative also set the foundation for over a year of subsequent product work. Ask me about:
- Enabling admins to create Membership and private programs directly within the platform
- Adding due dates and learner communications to help learners track program progress
- Tightening up Membership program reporting to show more incremental progress toward completion
- Revisiting our assessment feature to measure Hone's impact across both program types