Promotion Designer

Context

Second Street lets media companies and brands run audience promotions: email campaigns, ballots, quizzes, surveys and more. Each promotion type came with a fixed set of templates. They were fast to launch, but almost impossible to make your own.

The problem

Every promotion looked the same, whoever ran it. A radio station's contest and a newspaper's reader poll were visually interchangeable, so brands lost recognition on the very campaigns meant to build it.

Customers who wanted their own look needed a developer to override the CSS. That meant [support tickets / CS hours / paid services / customers simply giving up], and it put a ceiling on how professional the product could feel.

What I learned

• Task evaluation. I walked through the current creation flow to find existing issues and opportunities. [Where customization broke down, e.g. brand settings scattered across screens and limited to logo and primary color.]
• Customer interviews ([N] customers). The core frustration wasn't a lack of options. It was [insight, e.g. they didn't want a design tool, they wanted their promotions to look like them by default].
• Competitor analysis ([names]). Competitors tended to [e.g. offer either rigid templates or a blank-canvas builder]. The gap was [e.g. brand control that stays guided, so non-designers can't break the layout].

Shaping the solution

From those insights I defined [the core concept, e.g. a brand theme layer: set fonts, colors, buttons and backgrounds once, and apply them across every promotion type].

Early feasibility sessions with engineering shaped [a constraint that changed the design, e.g. exposing a defined set of style tokens instead of free-form CSS, which kept templates stable]. I shared early drafts with my PM and Customer Success, who [what changed after their feedback], before moving to high fidelity.

Process

1. Understand. Task evaluation, customer interviews and competitor analysis.
2. Define. A solution direction anchored on the findings.
3. Check feasibility. Sessions with engineering before committing to an approach.
4. Explore with the team. Early drafts for fast conversations with PM and CS.
5. Refine. The high-fidelity version, based on internal feedback.
6. Validate. Concept testing with [N] customers confirmed [what held up] and surfaced [what you adjusted].
7. Ship. Handoff to engineering with [specs / component documentation / interaction states].
8. Measure and adjust. After launch we tracked [metric] and adjusted [what changed].

Outcome

Brands could finally create promotions that looked like their own, without filing a ticket.

• [Metric: e.g. X% of active customers customized a promotion within the first N months]
• [Metric: e.g. CSS-override requests to CS dropped by X%, or setup time went from days to minutes]
• [A customer or CS quote, or a renewal or sales mention]

Reflection