I managed a design team through two acquisitions.
This company’s marketing clients were dissatisfied with their SaaS work management product.
To close feature gaps, the company made two strategic acquisitions. Marketers were still unimpressed.
I used design to deliver a vision for truly integrated content experiences.
Team
4 senior practice leaders
6 directors (PM + ENG)
9 engineering squads
5 designers
3 researchers
Type
Integration
Platform
Responsive web application
Software as a service
Role
Manager, product design
Timeline
2022–2023
Constraints
Remote teams across 5 time zones
Culture and architecture clashes with newly acquired product teams
Rich capabilities, poor integrations
The new products were rebranded and offered as premium add-ons for enterprise marketing teams.
Content review & approval
Digital asset management
Content automation
Customers still weren’t buying it.
Enterprise marketing teams still weren’t interested for two reasons.
New customers couldn’t try content features without subscribing to a premium add-on.
Paying customers weren’t upgrading because of the poor experience.
The business needed a vision for seamless content experiences, and customers needed to see the value without having to pay up front.
I used design to deliver a vision for truly integrated content experiences.
The team followed the double-diamond methodology alternating between periods of divergent and convergent thinking.
1. Discover
How well was the project management platform meeting the needs of customers whose work focused on content?
Research
I met with UX researchers from all three product teams in content. We discovered a shared pain point in the content lifecycle: the review process.
Problem framing
To truly deliver value to users (and our business), product integration work needed to address these pain points for content workers.
Reviews rarely finish on time.
Feedback gets lost in email threads.
This leads to low-quality content.
I generated this customer-focused problem statement, which would orient product team work around the job of content review.
2. Define
It was time to get everyone strategically aligned to the content review opportunity.
Experience strategy
I wrote this to help everyone focus on addressing user needs in a way that would deliver the desired customer and business outcomes.
Rally around content review.
Deliver an end-to-end experience vision.
Drive partner integration.
The strategy included language that would resonate with product management, user experience, and engineering practices.
Jobs-to-be-done (JTBD)
The team mapped content review jobs to existing product touch points. The frame of reference would help integration conversations with partner teams.
We also prioritized the work using the MoSCoW* method. Above: deprioritized items are crossed-out.
* Must have, Should have, Could have, Will not have
3. Design
There were many content integration points across the platform. My next job was to envision the future of content experiences for the entire product organization.
Object-oriented UX (OOUX)
We had three different object models that needed to be resolved into one.
Entity relationship diagram
This diagram forced the team to think through what data objects are essential for the system to function properly.
Cardinality
The number of instances of an entity that can be related to another entity is called cardinality.
Wireflows
Another helpful conversation tool, this diagram places global content experiences in context with partner areas of ownership.
This framework for content successfully drove the global definition and interaction standards for the other data enrichment objects (e.g., conversations, requests, and people).
4. Deliver
The structure of our UX research and design work set the stage for ongoing collaboration and alignment with user and business stakeholders.
DesignOps
I divided design work into three categories based on delivery time horizon. Then, I allocated the five designers across the work.
Core experiences
The majority of design time was spent on core content experiences.
Content review: review anything anywhere.
Content library: modular interface for content.
Universal view: built with tokenized React components.
Platform integration
Designers led high-fidelity conversations supported by core experience design work.
Panel interface: content library next to the grid surface.
Comments: added responsibility required for reviews.
Requests: UX design for platform service.
Future vision
I supported leadership conversations paving the way for longer-term vision delivery.
Content generation: connected automation and grid teams.
On-grid display: drove tough grid team conversations.
Search results: supported content and search teams.
Stakeholder engagement
We kept users and practice leaders engaged through regular usability testing and design review sessions.
Usability testing
To create truly engaged customers, we made sure to get feedback from current and potential customers and translate it into action.
Feedback on content library: bulk actions were a top-requested feature as well as the ability to see an associated task list.
Feedback on file review: administrator users wanted to disable reviews for some team members. Also, allow marking something as approved ad-hoc.
Design reviews
With an all-inclusive attendee list, the weekly design review meeting quickly became a catalyst for strategic and insightful leadership conversations. Below are example discussions.
Leadership insights on the panel component - first implementation of the reusable library view pattern was on a task list. Design reviews brought stakeholders from partner teams to weigh-in early.
Leadership insights on task list - A common customer request to see content in the list finally started taking shape. Design reviews invited passionate cross-practice discussions between partner teams.
Impact
I am pleased to say that this work is in active development, and I am confident that it will be a success with enterprise marketing customers.
Product development wins
Identified and maintained focus on the highest-priority use case
Unified our functional team and integration partners
Hackathon winner: “Most marketable”
Executive review strengthened investment confidence
End-to-end UX showcased in CEO’s keynote
Design lessons learned
If the design practice does its job right, end-users should feel.
Delighted
Masterful
Efficient
Don’t over-index on operations.
Not every moment is a teachable moment.