Zero, an intermittent fasting app with 1M+ monthly active members, used Ditto to manage personalized in-product content across eight segments.
Company: Zero
Interviewees: Jordan Manning, Product Designer; João Lopes, Engineer
Use cases:
Zero is a mobile app that helps its 1M+ monthly active members build healthier habits around diet and exercise, grounded in the science of intermittent fasting. Scientific guidance is embedded throughout the product experience. The team saw in-product copy as one of the clearest ways to communicate with members and differentiate themselves through a commitment to the science.
Zero manages a large volume of content across different member cohorts. As they worked across engineering, design, science writers, and other partners, the team found themselves repeatedly copy-pasting between Google Docs, Figma, and developer environments.
It was slow, and it introduced risk.
On the engineering side, those workflows created constant QA overhead: debugging, reimplementing, and re-interpolating text across different mobile formats and screen sizes. Even after trying various CMS solutions, the process stayed time-consuming and error-prone.
When Zero took on a new initiative focused on content personalization, it became clear their existing workflow wasn’t built for what came next. It wouldn’t handle scaling collaboration across a distributed team and scaling the quantity of personalized text they needed to ship.
“We're going to do [personalization] again but better… No one really wants copying and pasting to be a part of their job, right?” — Jordan Manning, Product Designer
Working async across time zones and continents, the team also needed clearer visibility into ownership and change history.
Zero implemented Ditto to manage user-facing text end to end: writing, design, QA, and deployment.
With Ditto’s support for personalized content, Zero developed and launched holistic daily coaching for subscribers, serving personalized insights and guidance across 8 unique user segments. That coaching evolves day-to-day, adapting to members throughout their lifecycle.
The feature drove:
And Zero’s use of Ditto extends beyond user-facing copy. They also manage in-app URLs and text fields used for colors and animation files.
For Jordan Manning, integrating Ditto changed how the work happened day to day: the team could move from curriculum outline to rough draft to edits to final copy without pasting between tools. Developers were no longer manually updating copy to match the latest version.
"Ditto unlocked collaborative writing inside of the designs themselves: able to go from curriculum outline, to rough first pass, to edits and final copy without ever needing to paste between documents or requiring developers to manually update to the latest copy." — Jordan Manning, Product Designer
Engineer João Lopes echoed the change from an implementation standpoint:
“We no longer have to create content twice. Designers use the real content on Figma with Ditto as the one place to store it all.” — João Lopes, Engineer
Since using Ditto, Zero saw a major shift in two areas: time saved and confidence to ship.
Instead of relying on bi-weekly releases or quarterly content pushes, the team can monitor what users are engaging with most and ship updates daily. With product data in Looker and content in Ditto, they have visibility into user states and can rapidly tweak and deploy content.
“Numbers aside, the biggest thing is that I just have way more confidence in the content. With Ditto, we have this level of validation so that we can see problems way faster. It does save me a ton of time, but I never really cared that much about the time as long as I can bring value to our members. I know exactly where things are.” — Jordan Manning, Product Designer
On the engineering side, that confidence showed up as less QA overhead and fewer issues caused by copy/design drift:
"Bug tickets from content and design inconsistencies have been reduced by a lot. With Ditto, we know the designs will match exactly what we'll see on the products or mobile services. There’s less time spent worrying about edge cases because we know that we’re covered." — João Lopes, Engineer
For Lopes, Ditto also changed how cross-functional teams collaborate around product text. It has enabled them to ship new experiences at scale. Because the content is served in a way that’s easier to follow, understand, and debug, their entire team can validate personalized experiences and catch issues quickly — whether they’re managing 10 strings or 1,000.
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