Until recently, anyone who was aware of Squarespace (probably via a podcast ad) would refer to it as a web builder. Internally, the product strategy needed to represent our customers in a way that better reflected recent growth (organic and through acquisition.

Execs broke out the user base into three primary areas: Halo, Nurturing and Core (“Enterprising Dreamers”). This was highly tied to how they viewed our Website user base, but it didn’t immediately resonate with the Scheduling product team at the time—we didn’t consider our users as Enterprising Dreamers.

As the org moved to focus on seller transactions and scheduling’s nascent role in the platform as a legitimate revenue driver, we needed to see our users reflected in the corporate strategy. So the question became:

How does a Scheduling user map to the larger product strategy of Halo, Nurturing and Core users?

We knew from our own data where the market segments lived, regarding who came in the fastest, who left the most, and who seemed to stick around. At the time, we still maintained a Freemium model, and looking at the segments within that bucket gave us a pretty clear view of what our Halo looked like—orgs who needed appointments but not the premium features like transactions.

Establishing the Core group enabled us to extrapolate multiple things layered on top of corporate strategy, including selling progression, tooling support (and cost), and what their primary concerns were—mapped alongside a business’s maturity.

This gave the Scheduling team a source-of-truth for who we build for and what their journey may look like as it maps to the larger corporate strategy of Squarespace.