👷 You’re watching chaos become order in real time! This portfolio is rough around the edges because I’m rapidly building RIGHT NOW to fuel a job search. Thanks for your understanding.👷
Project “Multipass”
In by far the most complex and wide-sweeping project of my career, I led over 38 colleagues over several years to replace our outdated platform architecture with a flexible solution that would not only improve the success of our customers, but set our business up to deliver on a long term vision.
All while keeping the lights on.
A case study
Background
The business
Verblio is a subscription-based content creation marketplace that facilitates the relationship between digital agencies or enterprise businesses with skilled SEO-oriented writers in every niche.
The constraint
Sure we might need to revamp the entire backend architecture of our platform… but our business needed to continue functioning while we did it. How to minimize experiential change and scope, while replacing the guts?
The challenge
When the Verblio platform was originally architected in 2011, it delivered a single 300-word blog post to a customer every Thursday. The way that word length was tied to billing meant as customers began wanting different word lengths, they had no option other than to spin up an entirely separate subscription for the length. Picture Enterprise customers managing dozens of end clients who needed a variety of word lengths resulting in their needing to manage sometimes hundreds of individual subscriptions…
My role: leadership & UI/UX
Product management / strategy and ownership
Organizational leadership / stakeholder buy-in
Cross-functional collaboration / internal research
UX research / user interviews
Product design / UI/UX deliverables
“I have length requirements that change from month to month. I saw on your website that if a person needs content at different lengths then they need to get multiple subscriptions.”
“Is it possible to mix content sizes in the same subscription package (it seems impossible with your calculator)? I find this model very limiting and have run into this problem time and again.”
Customers said…
170 help tickets proved this as a top pain point that increased churn of customers
Lorem ipsum
I love an Intercom to Product Board integration for its ability to give the product/design teams the ability to monitor user insights and link them to opportunities for prioritization in real time.
Cue the UX research & design process
-
![]()
Inspiration
How were other scheduling features designed? What could they teach us about recognizable patterns or pitfalls to avoid?
-
![]()
Heatmaps
As an essential feature that would make both customers and writers more successful in our marketplace, what was the smartest place for it to live?
-
![]()
Lowest-fi
Starting with paper sketches helped our senior designer and I work quickly to brainstorm ideas and edge cases.
-
![]()
User flows
All of our learnings informed a user flow for each audience, outlining the happy path and transitions to inform what UI states needed to be mocked.
-
![]()
Customer UI
In a world where a writer could be unavailable now or in the future, how could we empower a customer to confidently set deadlines and assign writers?
-
![]()
Writer UI
How could we make the “away scheduler” a prominent feature that writers would use consistently? And how could we make it easy on ourselves to allow a writer to set multiple periods at one time?
-
![]()
Eureka!
Eventually, we settled on a dynamic customer feature that would allow a customer to choose whether a specific writer was more important or whether the deadline was.
Anatomy of the juicy part
Under construction: I’m going to add a graphic of the most interesting design solution we created as part of this project. There will be arrows and fascinating insights (in addition to a zoom-in on the pretty UI). Come back soon!
Or just email me at mandirao@gmail.com so I can just talk you through it live. ;)