CitrusAd

CitrusAd's current Brand Page offering was severely outdated. It lacked fundamental functionality and required a large amount of manual effort to use. Due to these limitations, customers were turning to 3rd party tooling and/or even competitors (who could offer a better brand page solution) to help solve this problem for them.

We wanted to limit the need for external tooling, and decrease that manual effort needed when it came to helping our users create a diverse set of advertising campaigns utilising custom, pre-designed retailer-specific brand pages (it was taking up to 10+ weeks to build, approve and launch a brand page).

It was taking up to 10+ weeks to build, approve and launch a brand page, so we set a goal to achieve the creation/approval of a Brand Page campaign to be completed within 2 weeks. By increasing the number of brand page offerings built and served, we were allowing speed to market for brands whilst increasing the revenue for retailers due to more brand ad spend.

To guide our approach, we established a research plan centred around our problem statement. This gave us the foundational framework that would help shape our project.

Further customer, retailer, and internal team interviews led to collaborative workshops with stakeholders that I facilitated. In these sessions we conducted a thematic analysis of user feedback, identifying key insights, recommendations, and actions. We explored our user journeys more, using design canvases like user flows, interaction design diagrams, decision mapping, and jobs-to-be-done/mental models. All this research allowed us to pressure test our hypothesis – which confirmed that brands would be more willing to utilise our brand page offering, if the experience was smoother and less cumbersome.

With our initial research synthesised, I created low-fidelity wireframes of the proposed journey. We quickly validated these through feedback from internal stakeholders, cross-team members, and ran some preference testing/usability testing with select customers. The feedback shone a light on areas of confusion for the customer, and allowed us to iterate and re-test improvements in the flow.

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Progressing to high-fidelity designs and a working prototype, I led usability testing sessions to obtain critical feedback, around actually building the page itself and  streamlining the approval process for brand pages. We integrated a lean messaging system within the brand page dashboards, enabling retailers to submit feedback and approval messages. Brands could then see these messages, make necessary changes, and resubmit their brand pages quickly and efficiently.

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We encountered a significant challenge late in the project when several team members either resigned or transitioned to other squads, reducing our team from 10 to 6. Despite this setback, we were determined to meet our deadline and ensure the product was market-ready by the end of 2023. Thanks to the team's collaborative spirit and a clearly defined, achievable goal, we successfully united to deliver a functional MVP on time for release.

We delivered an MVP version of the Brand Page builder, that was launched at the start of 2024 with our Pilot retailer Sainsbury’s (UK) being the first adopter (apart of the Nector360 loyalty program group). We received incredible feedback saying the integration was so successful, that they had taken their brand page build and launch time from 16 weeks end to end, to just 10-14 days.