The ceiling was always there. Finding the next signature move meant looking past it.
Ancestry had built one of the most remarkable consumer products of its generation. Hundreds of millions of historical records, a vast DNA network, a loyal base of dedicated researchers. And a ceiling. The core audience, retirees with time, disposable income, and a tolerance for meticulous archival work, was never going to grow dramatically. The opportunity wasn’t to give existing customers more to do. It was to find the people who weren’t Ancestry customers yet and build something worthy of bringing them in. Leading the New Products and Innovation team, that was the assignment.
Insight
We started with research, interviews with current customers, lapsed customers, and people who had never considered Ancestry at all. What came back reframed the whole strategic question. People’s definition of family had changed. Chosen families, friends, communities, networks of people who showed up, carried as much meaning as biological ones. The opportunity wasn’t just to serve a younger demographic. It was to serve a fundamentally different idea of what family means.
From there the process was generative and deliberate. Over 600 concepts across workshops and co-creation sessions, with users in the room for card sorting, concept prioritization, and collaborative ideation. Two ideas earned the right to move forward.
StroryStream
Family storytelling hadn’t meaningfully evolved in decades, even as the technology around it changed completely. Families were losing stories, not because they didn’t care, but because the tools weren’t built for the job. Everyday moments, handwritten recipes, family artifacts, the smaller things that don’t make it into reunion photos, all of it slipping away without a place to land.
What research made clear was that people didn’t just want to capture memories. They wanted to craft them. Context and intention can turn an ordinary moment into something worth passing down. StoryStream was the answer: a platform for real family stories, built around tools to capture, craft, and share across a diverse range of storytelling styles. Families could collaborate, contribute, keep things private or open them to the world.
The strategic insight underneath it mattered as much as the product itself. Ancestry could shift from relying solely on expensive, finite historical records toward an ever-growing stream of user-generated content, stories people know right now, documented in a way that’s fun, shareable, and open to the whole family. That’s a platform transformation, not a feature addition.
Reunion
The connection problem was just as clear. Families were less connected digitally than they wanted to be, not from lack of trying, but because nothing was built for them. Public social platforms created context collapse: posting a photo of a new baby in the same feed as global news felt wrong. Group chats were scattered across WhatsApp, iMessage, and Facebook. For older family members and younger kids, the whole thing was overwhelming.
Reunion was a private family social network, posts, shared albums, group chat, event planning, designed so that everyone from grandparents to kids could actually use it. More than a communication product, it was built as a gateway into the broader Ancestry ecosystem, creating frequent touchpoints and drawing more of the family into the platform over time. Ancestry’s position as a family-centric brand made it uniquely credible to build this. No other platform carried the same trust.
The Outcome
The work changed how Ancestry thought about its own future. The “me to we” shift, from a product built around one researcher digging through records to a platform where the whole family participates, became the organizing logic for what came next. Concepts from both StoryStream and Reunion influenced the core product roadmap directly, inspiring a range of experiences built into the main product. More fundamentally, the work established that Ancestry’s next audience wasn’t a smaller version of the existing one. It was a different kind of person entirely, someone who cares about family not as a research project but as something living, ongoing, and worth building together.