I have a four-year-old daughter. If you me asked me today:

• her favorite color
• her best friend
• her teacher’s name
• her favorite stuffed animal

… well, I’m not saying that I’m Father of the Year or anything — but I’d nail all four EASILY. 💪

That said, if you asked me the same questions about my 4-year-old in 10 years… would I still remember?

Amid all the anxieties of parenthood, there’s the fear of forgetting — that amazing things are happening, right in front of you, that will slip away into oblivion forever.

Yesterday, my child told me to “pull yourself together,” and I laughed out loud. That’s way too funny to risk forgetting!

And so I opened the Qeepsake app, a company I worked with at the end of 2023 that quickly became one of my favorite clients.

The customer and the problem

Qeepsake is a journaling app for parents.

They got their start nearly a decade ago with a simple concept: Parents are too tired to remember to journal, so let’s remind them. In the beginning, Qeepsake sent a journaling prompt every day via SMS, and you could respond right in your messaging app.

They still do that, but they’ve expanded — a mobile app, a baby-book marketplace, an editorial newsletter, and more.

Tracy Cho, Qeepsake’s CEO, came to me because she had a (very good!) problem. With some fundamental tech debt finally squared away, she had the luxury of an open pipeline — and she wasn’t sure how to fill it.

The brief: Help Qeepsake’s executive team find the right product opportunities, and build out the plan to pursue them.

The process

I always tell clients, I can come up with ideas all week through Sunday — but the best ones will come from you.

So my first move was to run a pair of workshops.

• The first workshop was with the executive team. We ran through Qeepsake’s competitors and collectively filled out a SWOT(Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) diagram. That gave us a firmer picture of what made Qeepsake special and what our 2024 business goals were.

• The second workshop pulled in a wider group of staffers. Together, we brainstormed different features that could appeal to different classes of Qeepsake users — parents of newborns, parents of older children, and the kids themselves. I’m a sucker for sketching by hand, which forces off your internal quality filter and just get ideas out.

We ended these workshops with a lot of raw material.

Leaving the brainstorming phrase always feels like a kick in the pants — you’ve got so much energy and enthusiasm from the team, but now you have to go sit in a quiet room and actually synthesize **it into something.

The deliverable

What was resulted was a 37-page strategy report that hit these points:

• Defining the goal: Why does this report exist?
  • “Find Qeepsake’s product vision for 2024 and plan the steps to get there.”
• The state of play: Analyzing Qeepsake’s current business and where it was seeing challenges.
• The vision: The central statement of product principles that should guide Qeepsake in 2024.
• The Must-Do List: A set of steps Qeepsake should take to immediately improve.
• The Could-Do List: A broader list of features and strategies, keyed to our earliest business discussions, that pointed smart directions for the business to go. Qeepsake could do any of them, but it couldn’t do all of them (an important distinctions).
• Provocations & how-to-pick guidance: A few wireframes and prototype concepts to demonstrate the Could-Do list, and recommendations on how to decide which to pursue.
• Where does this get us: Showing what 2025 could look like for Qeepsake.

The response

I’ll let Tracy speak for herself (borrowed from LinkedIn):

Andrew worked closely with us to develop a clear and concise roadmap, which not only addressed our immediate needs but also set us up for long-term success. He has an exceptional ability to distill complex problems into actionable steps, making it easy for our team to understand and implement his recommendations.

Two of the many impressive aspects of working with Andrew: efficiency and a joyful attitude. Despite our tight timeline, he managed to deliver a robust and well-thought-out plan in a remarkably short period. And his positive attitude fostered an environment of open communication and trust with a team he met only a handful of times.

Part of the reason I found my work with Qeepsake so rewarding is because they’re obsessed with solving a niche problem extremely well. They’re not trying to be everything — there are no time-manangement hacks, productivity widgets or loot-boxes sneaking into their app.

They want to help parents build better memories with their children. That’s it. And that’s inspiring.