Design Director at Insticator / Location Manager Canada Region @ Insticator 🇺🇸 🇨🇦
AdTech / MarTech B2B SaaS — NY, NY, USA, then Waterloo, ON, CAN
Nov 2018 — Jul 2021
Design Management and DesignOps
Hired to build and scale a Design team and practice. Recruited, onboarded and managed different teams including product and graphic designers, UX researchers and content creators.
- Contributed to implementing and optimizing a recruiting process to identify and hire “A players” for any open position; customizing the process heavily for Product Design roles.
- Advocated for budget and adoption of tools such as Sketch, Abstract, Overflow, Mural, User Interviews (.com) and others, for cross-team collaboration and efficiently managing different stages of our Product Design process.
- Spearheaded the introduction of user research to the company’s product development process, with practices such as user interviews, prototype testing, user testing, and others; challenging cross-functional teams to adopt a more user-centered approach.
- On top of my Design Leadership role, I was the second hire in our Canadian office and shared the responsibility of helping the company establishing in Canada (recruiting, culture, office space, logistics) — eventually becoming Location Manager for the Canada region.
Product Design
Led product designers in the creation of B2B and B2C product features and enhancements by means of collaborative design approaches and user-centered design practices. In many cases I designed partial or complete features myself.
- Designed and enhanced many features of the Content Engagement product: poll & trivia questions, content recirculation, email capturing, etc.
- Designed and enhanced many features of the Commenting product: mobile experience, real-time commenting, user profiles, authentication flows, user notifications, emoji reactions, top commented articles and most engaged community members, etc.
- Redesigned the Moderation portal to support human and A.I. moderation on top of our Commenting product.
- Redesigned the partner-facing Publisher Portal: revenue and engagement analytics, account settings, advanced reporting, content creation, etc.
- Designed many complex features for internal management of the Revenue and Ad Ops functions.
Commenting Acquisition and Product Launch
Led the team to successfully adapt a recently acquired (early 2020) Commenting product into our own product ecosystem, and to on-board large Publishers that purchased the product in the first 12 months.
Learn more and read the full case study of the Commenting Acquisition
- Prioritized open-ended user research with 15+ Publishers and end-users to identify needs and opportunities, and subsequently built a 12-month product roadmap focused on those needs.
- Strong focus on the design of features that enabled early adoption by Publishers by reducing frictions during their on-boarding stage.
- Completely re-designed core components of the acquired product under Insticator’s design system; paying special attention to the end-user experience on mobile devices and real-time commenting experience.
- Played a key role in the adoption of the new product by high-profile Publishers, observing a 7,500%+ increase in unique users during the first year and supporting millions of new user interactions.
- Provided designs for quickly iterating our proprietary moderation tools with new features and A.I. capabilities; enabling our human moderation team to scaling their operations as user activity grew exponentially.
User Research Insights
Led product designers and researchers responsible for conducting the following multi-format studies (among others) and delivering detailed insights and opportunities reports to the executive team:
- Thorough concept testing for a full revamp of the Insticator Content Engagement Unit and the Analytics portal for Publishers.
- Effectivenes of incentivizing user behavior for answering Poll & Trivia questions in our interactive units.
- General perception of existing Partners & unbiased participants regarding our marketing website, and core products (allowing us to update our Personas documents and make critical decisions about features that were no longer adding value.)
- Brand perception of a fresh iteration of our marketing website released in 2020 (the new release included a new visual identity and updated core messaging with additional products launched that year.)
- Open-ended research on the needs & priorities for Publishers and end-users around Online Commenting, right after we launched a new Commenting product to the market in 2020 (informing a 12-month product roadmap based on user needs, with a pretty decent level of accuracy in retrospective.)
- Plus numerous ad-hoc, lean research projects aimed at validating prototypes and feature concepts during the design process.
Interim Marketing Manager
I absorbed the responsibility of creating an internal marketing function, as we moved away from working with contractors for our marketing and PR efforts. Although marketing is neither part of my background, nor my biggest strength, I managed to provide solid bases such as:
- Audited the brand identity at the time and providing lean brand guidelines to streamline the production of collaterals under proper brand consistency.
- Generated dozens of brochures, one-pagers and decks incorporating the updated brand guidelines and product imagery from new features designed by my team.
- Introduced basic Marketing Ops best practices such as weekly meetings with stakeholders, the use of an editorial calendar, and a streamlined process of collaboration between designers and content creators in the team.
- Shipped brand content and ad campaigns; measured results quantitatively on a regular basis.
- Led 2 redesign projects for the marketing website in a span of 2 years, working with stakeholders to define the communication strategy; then led the design, content and coding for each release.
- I eventually owned the role definition and recruitment of a Director of Design to replace me and continue scaling the function into a formal department.