20 Minuten turns monthly surveys into a “central brain” to answer product questions on the spot

20 Minuten is the most visited news medium in Switzerland. People go to their website and app to stay on top of news – whether local or global. With more than a million daily active users, their Product team had a vision: bring the Voice of readers into every product decision, to create meaningful features that users love.  

Curious to see how they achieved it? Read on.  

Highlights 

• 20 Minuten centralizes user survey responses within Caplena as their "Central Brain"

• Adoption was led by the Product team. Now, quantified user insights are distributed across the company, and accessible to any team that needs them, resulting in faster product decisions.

• Beyond dashboards, 20 Minuten has quickly adopted Insight Chat as a new way to discover insights and instantly answer product questions.

The Challenge  

 
What if user feedback was fully utilized? 

Before Caplena, 20 Minuten conducted monthly surveys which usually generated a couple hundred responses. As the Product team did not have time to analyze them down to the last glimpse of an insight each month, they would often just read through answers for inspiration, gaining only a general overview of user feedback.
But this was still a lot of effort. They knew they were not using survey responses to the extent they could if they systematized this process. 20 Minuten saw this as an opportunity: what would happen if they could bring the voice of their users to the center of their workflows, and organization?  

A bias for unbiased open-ended questions.  

20 Minuten purposely asks open-ended questions. They formulate them in the least biased way, such as “What do you think about 20 Minuten?”. 

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If you ask very open questions, then you’re getting unexpected insights. It makes it easier to collect feedback. People enjoy telling you their opinion. You collect a large amount of answers. But then you’re left with unstructured data.

Matthias Strodtkötter

Head of Product

AI as a game changer (not a nice to have)  

They knew AI could analyze unstructured data really well, at a speed humans can’t. While they tried to analyze their survey answers using ChatGPT, they felt too much got lost, and found more value in reading the answers themselves. They were looking for a game-changing solution, not a nice-to-have.  
 
They knew about Caplena as part of the Zurich-based startup ecosystem. When exploring a proof of concept, they discovered it could do so much more than text analysis: perform advanced segmentation, combine new with past survey responses, analyze trends, build user-friendly dashboards, and chat with their data. Quickly, they realized Caplena could act as a “central brain” for their user feedback. 
 

Transition to Caplena
 

From the start, 20 Minuten was looking for a solution that anyone can use without technical knowledge.  Ease of implementation and use mattered most—they wanted anyone in the company to be able to easily “talk” to their readers.

A Designer started to import monthly survey responses into Caplena. Running across the 20 Minuten website and app, they include a couple of standard questions, and a couple of special questions, allowing the Product Team to run agile user research, gathering 200-300 answers in less than 2 hours.

As they imported their responses into Caplena - instead of skimming through answers - their team started to understand:  

• What was working and not working  

• What they might build into their product 

From now on, they could make every product decision with the user in mind, grounding them with quantified insights. 

Using advanced insights elements like Driver Analysis (see below) and Topic Breakdown, they were able to quickly identify their biggest opportunities, and what mattered most to different user groups.  

Their Product team now has a simple process to make the most of their monthly survey results, or to import other ad hoc projects, and analyze them with speed and precision.  
 

Results
 

Surprising insights

By asking very open questions, the 20 Minuten Product Team discovers insights they did not expect.

Users will share the good, the bad, and the ugly.  

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Survey responses can be a “hard-to-swallow pill dispenser”. If there’s a thing people don’t like, they will tell you. It’s not comfortable but it’s necessary for us as product managers and designers. Caplena helps us discover these hard-to-swallow pills.

Matthias Strodtkötter

Head of Product

Their Product team knows such customer truths can be turned into opportunities. Here are some examples of their findings. 

 
Users were frustrated with video autoplay and ads 

As a news publisher, video is a strategic format. 20 Minuten knew some users were complaining about video experience, but they needed to pin down the major issues.  

Once they used Caplena, friction points became clear: these users were frustrated with video autoplay and ads. Specifically, the length of the video is often perceived as disproportionate to the length of the ad. 

As a quick win, the 20 Minuten Product team started to display the length of the video on thumbnail to better manage expectations. More importantly, the findings shaped discussions internally to focus on the right questions when improving the video experience. 

Users had clear wishes to improve push notifications 

Notifications are critical to help users stay on top of news. But if used the wrong way, the threat is that users can pause them, or worse – uninstall the app.   
 
Using Caplena, 20 Minuten was able to identify precise, actionable areas: 

• Friction points: push notifications were sometimes considered too excessive.  

• User delights: users want a regular dose of global, but also local notifications. They really care about what is happening around them. If something occurs in their town or village they want to be notified. 

Based on the findings, the 20 Minuten Product team is working on new notification settings where users can fine-tune the topics they want to be notified on.   

And by combining survey answers with quantitative data, 20 Minuten could understand what the big opportunities for notifications are, which groups of users interact with them (or don’t), what they are really thinking, and identify targeted improvements. 

A central brain for speed to insights (and decision-making) 

On top of dashboards, 20 Minuten quickly adopted Insight Chat to answer questions around specific features or product areas on the spot, hence speeding up their product development lifecycle.  

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We operate like a startup: we want to make decisions fast and not wait for a long-winded analysis for every decision. Caplena makes insights available in seconds. Now, we can always make decisions based on insights.

Matthias Strodtkötter

Head of Product

Stakeholder teams were surprised that achieving this was possible. They are impressed that they can ask questions to Caplena, which acts like a central brain that has learned all the answers from their users.

As more survey responses are imported into this central brain, Caplena helps 20 Minuten’s Product team listen to their users' evolving needs and expectations. 

 Users at the center of every product decision  

Using Caplena has fostered new ways of working, each aligned around the idea of bringing the Voice of the Customer to the center of the company’s workflows.  

• Monthly videos: the Product team creates 30-minute videos to present the features they shipped. Not a boring video, but an update that brings value to the people who watch it. Now, monthly videos also include user insights.  

• Company updates & workshops: in each meeting format the Product team is involved, they made it a ritual to present user insights 

• VoC in the room: the Product team can bring information wherever they go. During a meeting, they can get instant answers to inform decisions. 

• Self-Service Insights for everyone: as Caplena is easy to use for non-technical people, other teams can access the data whenever needed or ask questions to Insight Chat.
  

Future Direction 
 

Beyond continuing to feed their “Caplena brain”, the 20 Minuten Product team is focusing on enhancing video experience on their app and website, taking into account the collective voice of their users and the insights discovered with Caplena.  

While they enjoy using Caplena dashboards, they increasingly rely on Insight Chat to answer questions on the spot and inform continuous product improvement with quantitative and qualitative insights.  

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I can see a future where all the dashboards aren’t needed anymore, maybe someone sets them all up and people look at them, but I feel the agentic part is the transformative part.

Matthias Strodtkötter

Head of Product

Photo credits: 20 Minuten