Monetizing content for media companies
Company
Organic Ventures
Role
Lead Designer
Timeline
2021 - 2023
Background
Organic Ventures builds software for media companies to better monetize and manage their content. When I started at Organic, I was the first design hire and sixth employee, and we had a single MVP - The Organic Ads app. It did exactly what it sounds like, helped media companies manage ads on their websites and social channels.
As time went on, our customers were asking for more functionality beyond just managing ads. So my role in all of this was to figure out what it is they needed, and to meet those needs while scaling our product, and building out the Organic design system and design team in the process.
The Organic team at our San Francisco office in 2022.
Our product development
& design process
When I first joined Organic, I worked with a team of three or four engineers. Eventually the company grew to product, design, and engineering making up about 60 people in less than a year. So naturally we had to evolve our design and product development process.
I worked with product & engineering leads to define our end-to-end process, prioritizing building the right thing. This meant spending time up front doing user research and hammering out technical details, while also moving quick since we're a startup.
High resolution version found here.
Ultimately our process allowed us to move much faster, as a lot of user research and design system work compounded our productivy, so in any given sprint we could focus the majority of our time thinking through solutions to the right problems instead of moving pixels around in Figma.
Scaling our product
The Organic Ads app was a huge success, in some cases tripling revenue for our customers. Our customers were traditionally technology-adverse, so they loved how our app was essentially plug and play. We began thinking through what other functionality we could provide beyond Ads.
The original MVP, the Organic Ads App - Main Dashboard
Campaign builder
An interesting dichotomy was that our customers were terrible at using technology, and hated using it, but also used 10 different apps to do very basic tasks when managing their advertising campaigns, which were tied to the ads we were managing anyways. So it seemed like an easy win to build them functionality to create and manage campaigns directly within the Organic app.
Early information architecture & wireframes
Affiliate marketing app
Since we were so successful tripling our customers' ad revenue, they wanted a similar solution for their affiliate marketing programs. This was a similar situation where they used 10 different apps to do 15 different things, and the UX for all of it was atrocious.
Step one was documenting their current workflow and then identifying ways a single app could streamline it. Once we got designing, we figured out how to dynamically change product offerings on their website based on which merchant was paying the most.
High resolution user journey found here.
I worked closely with product and engineering teams to iron out experience details and understand technical requirements.
Audience segmentation
We were cookie-ing our customers' customers since we were running ads on their sites, so we had the ability to gather a ton of user data that our customers typically wouldn't have access to until further downstream. Naturally it made sense to make this data availability to our customers, so we built functionality to see who their audience was, where they came from, what they were doing etc.
This brought on a whole new set of challenges we had to design for, because we essentially had too much data to display at any given time, so I focused on creating complex filtering to allow our users to segment their data.
Results
In some cases we tripled our customers' ad revenue as well as saw a 61% increase in affiliate revenue for the holiday season. Organic recently raised another round of funding and the company grew 300% in less than a year.