Driving Feature Adoption and Plan Upgrades

Plooto is a B2B payments automation platform that streamlines payment workflows

In January 2025, I joined Plooto's 5-person product team as a Product Design Intern on the Growth and Monetization pod. I contributed to design audits, took part in design reviews, and led design for in-product experiments and A/B tests.

This case study covers the contextual in-app experiences I designed to boost feature adoption and support the company's growth strategy.

Revenue now, engagement over time

Our pod's Q1 KPIs set the direction for this project: one aimed at driving immediate revenue, the other at deepening user engagement.

• Revenue: Acquire 50 Pro plan subscribers by the end of Q1.
• Engagement: Increase Pay by Card feature adoption by 20%.

One initiative for each goal

I led design for two initiatives, one for each KPI: nudges to set up Pay by Card for engagement, and a series of experiments to grow Pro plan subscribers, ending in a limited-time offer, for revenue.

Pay by Card launched, but adoption fell short

Pay by Card lets businesses pay their suppliers by credit card, even suppliers that don't normally accept cards. After launch, adoption fell short, and the biggest drop-off came at the very first step: adding a credit card. That's where I focused.

Reaching customers while they're already paying bills

My approach started with auditing the platform, looking for both high-visibility and high-intent moments in the bill payment workflow, where a nudge to set up Pay by Card would feel relevant rather than random. I built two touchpoints into workflows customers used often. Each explained the feature and offered a simpler path to the first step: adding a credit card.

The banner sits on the dashboard, the first thing customers see.

The chip and tooltip appear on the Pay by Card option, right when someone is choosing how to pay.

The dashboard banner brought in about two-thirds of new cards

I A/B tested the two touchpoints, splitting users between them. They differed in both placement and copy: the banner led with “Pay Suppliers with Credit Card Today”, while the tooltip asked “Tight on Cash? Utilize Your Credit Card”. Tracking card additions in Pendo, I found roughly two-thirds came through the dashboard banner.

Together, the touchpoints lifted credit card activations by 26% compared with before they launched.

Pro plan subscribers weren't growing fast enough

Before I joined, the product team had set a Q1 2025 OKR: grow Pro plan subscribers from 26 to 50, through new sign-ups or plan upgrades. About a month in, during a weekly product sync, we saw that Pro had only gained 4 subscribers in January. At that pace, we'd miss the goal.

Who upgrades to Pro, and who doesn't

I couldn't interview customers directly, and running a new survey would have taken longer than we had, with no guarantee of responses. So I dug into customer account data in Databricks, and asked the customer experience and sales teams what they were hearing, since they talked to customers every day.

An earlier survey the team had run with existing customers pointed the same way. Given the features listed, customers felt the Pro plan wasn't worth its $99 price, and said they'd value it at $40 to $60 a month.

Turning insights into ideas we could test

Engineers had bandwidth at the time, so I prioritized ideas that would be quick to build and ship, leaving room to iterate. What began as a push to hit the OKR also became a way to validate what we'd learned about Pro customers. Here's where each idea ended up:

Recommending Pro at sign-up

Sign-up is the first, and often the last, time customers see the plan selector. The manage subscription page got almost no traffic, so if we didn't reach them at sign-up, they likely wouldn't change plans later. I designed a chip recommending Pro to businesses that said they had a team of 5 or more, to see whether a more personal touch would get them to look closer at Pro.

Learning Pendo on the fly

In a design review, engineers pushed back. The company already paid for Pendo, a product experience platform, and they felt experiments belonged there, with its built-in analytics and tracking. So I pivoted.

Within a few days, I'd learned Pendo's visual designer and found workarounds to match our design system, even with far less flexibility than Figma, and rebuilt the design almost exactly. But testing with QA showed Pendo couldn't segment users before they created an account, not without help from engineering or the data team. The experiment was shelved.

Messages at high-intent moments

I went back to my list and kept the ideas Pendo could support: in-product messages targeted at specific user segments. I ran 3 variants for about a week each, testing different placements, triggers and copy.

Dual controls was the most used Pro feature, so one message appeared to Grow plan users while they edited approval rules.

Another appeared on the user management page.

The results weren't statistically significant, and the messages brought in 4 upgrades. With a month left in the quarter, we were at 37 Pro subscribers, still short of the goal.

Testing whether price would move the needle

Making Pro more visible and explaining its benefits hadn't done much, so the last idea was bolder: a limited-time promotion, which Plooto had never run before. I'd been planning it with the PM intern. The product team loved it, senior leadership approved it, and finance was on board, since the company wouldn't lose money even at a discount. The catch: with no engineering resources, it had to run manually.

It launched in-app on March 10, to admin users at businesses that weren't on Pro. The offer took 40% off the Pro plan for six months, bringing it to $59.40 a month. That tested the top of the range customers had named in the survey. It also listed the plan's key benefits right in the offer: more control over permissions, single sign-on, and priority support.

A second screen confirmed the upgrade, to prevent misclicks. Clicking through registered interest, and the customer experience team upgraded each business manually. It wasn't a polished engineering solution, but it was clearly communicated and it worked. Launching it took design, product, QA, sales, marketing and customer experience working together.

Making sure every admin could find the offer

An email campaign went out to the same segment. Soon after, support started getting emails from customers who couldn't find where to upgrade. Session replays showed why: the offer only appeared to the first person at a company to log in, and once they dismissed it, no one else at that company saw it.

I added two quieter placements that stayed visible for the whole promotion, so anyone could come back to the offer. I kept them low-key to avoid frustrating users, and they disappeared as soon as a company upgraded. One sits at the top of the sidebar.

The other sits next to the plan in subscription settings.

Helping the product team beat its Q1 KPIs

• 57%: lift in Pro plan subscribers from the limited-time offer
• ~$13K: in incremental annual revenue from those upgrades
• 26%: lift in credit card activations for Pay by Card

The Pro plan promotion ran from March 10 to 31 and brought in 21 upgrades, taking Pro from 37 subscribers to 58, past the goal of 50. In the first month after it ended, no one downgraded, a promising early sign. It also showed that price sensitivity really was holding upgrades back.

The Pay by Card nudges ran from mid-March to the end of April, and 106 cards were added through them. Over the same two months, the number of transactions also rose, and more in April than in March, which suggests the extra cards were being put to use.

Adapting quickly when the plan changes

When engineers wanted experiments to run in Pendo, I taught myself the platform from scratch, built and launched the guides myself, and ended up as the team's Pendo expert by the end of the term. It's hard to keep a design consistent in a tool with less design flexibility, but it's possible.

The promotion taught me to think outside the box, and to confidently propose an unconventional idea when the usual ones aren't working.

What I'd do with more time

With engineering support, I'd have tested delaying plan selection until after the free trial, and reworking the plan cards to show value before price.

The promotion's direct lift was 21 upgrades, but the downstream effects were still open when my internship ended in April. Will anyone downgrade before the six months are up? What does retention look like after the discount ends? Was it only the lower price that drove upgrades, and are the Pro features sticky enough to keep customers? I left those questions with the product team to track over time.