Zelas Conecta: From discovery to a validated telecom marketplace

Business Challenge

After years of working as a partner to Brazil’s largest telecom operators, we had a problem: Escale urgently needed to reduce its business dependency on telecom companies.

This was a project where I worked as both Product Designer Lead and Product Manager.

Discovery

With a clear business objective, we started with desk research, bringing together everything we already knew about telecom users.

With the business objective clearly defined, we conducted:

• Qualitative research through exploratory interviews with 12 participants, recruited based on a persona study conducted before the squad was formed.
  
  • The goal was to identify pain points in the purchasing process that, if solved, could align with Escale’s business goals.
• Quantitative research through a survey based on questions and hypotheses that emerged from the qualitative research and needed quantitative validation. 
  
  • The goal was to collect quantitative feedback about purchasing behavior, the most relevant information during the research phase, factors that created friction in the process, and other related topics.

Price and lack of transparency stood out as the biggest problems in the research and purchasing journey.

Design Sprint

We decided that running a Design Sprint would be the fastest way to generate ideas and test them. I brought all the insights from the previous phase, along with a few people who had gathered relevant data on the subject.

We worked on our product vision, with transparency as one of the core principles.

The result was a telecom plan comparison platform focused on complete transparency around pricing and conditions.

I defined the participant profiles, recruited users, and ran two rounds of user testing. In the second round, 5 out of 5 participants associated the product with convenience and transparency, and 5 out of 5 felt confident purchasing through the platform.

By the end of the Design Sprint, we had delivered:

• A long-term vision
• Key questions we needed to answer
• A failure scenario exercise focused on what could cause the project to fail
• A collaboratively designed prototype
• User testing of that prototype
• Test results
• Sprint 0 planning focused on defining the MVP

MVP

What was the minimum experience we could deliver that still represented our value proposition, and how could we learn from it?

MVP:
From this  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------> to this

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We built the basic experience around a set of hypotheses we needed to validate:

"Will people purchase through a telecom plan comparison platform?"

"Do visitors to the platform have high purchase intent?"

• Acquired users through paid traffic
• Set up Google Analytics with custom events and Hotjar
• Had the PM and me personally answer calls so we could better understand users’ main motivations
• Defined our metrics 
  
  • NSM: conversion rate
  • Other metrics: CAC, Average Ticket, CSAT
• Monitored metrics through Google Data Studio

Design System

We created the design system together with the design team, working closely with the front-end guild and the UX chapter.

Visual refinement

We redesigned pages that had not yet received proper design treatment, using heatmaps, session recordings, and usability tests as input. The new versions already incorporated the new visual identity and the components from the design system.

Purchase Experience

After comparing plans, the next step in the user journey was the purchase itself.

1 - Digital purchase experience

2 - Purchase experience through the call center

Jobs to be done

Another interesting initiative was applying Jobs to Be Done theory to advertising.

The first step was interviewing nine people and identifying their desired outcomes. In other words, what jobs were they trying to accomplish when hiring a telecom service?

We identified 18 different desired outcomes. I then ran a survey to quantitatively understand:

• How important each desired outcome was to the market
• How satisfied people were with their current ability to achieve each one

This allowed us to identify desired outcomes that were largely underserved by the market.

Results

We had three main goals:

• Achieve a conversion rate ≥ 7%
• Achieve a contact rate ≥ 15%
• Keep CAC at or below R$350

We achieved all three targets, turning the product into a strategic advantage for Escale.

• The product was financially profitable
• Escale could sell virtually any telecom product through its comparison platform
• We had greater flexibility in business rules because we were no longer operating through an alias website
• Previously, if someone entered a NET website and rejected the offer, they would return to the SERP and likely visit a competitor. With Zelas, users could remain within our ecosystem and continue comparing other options

Legacy

Due to contractual restrictions with telecom operators, Zelas Conecta later became a website called Portal de Planos.

The comparison model developed for Zelas was then replicated by Escale in the healthcare market, which led to the creation of Zelas Saúde.

Later, Zelas Saúde was spun off and sold by Escale as an independent company, generating millions in returns for the company.