Commsor

Commsor

Status
Published
Created
Sep 8, 2021 6:22 AM
Notes

Commsor

In the summer of 2021, I took on the mantle of Commsor's first ever intern. The italics punctuate the nuance this role brought about — we labeled the role an internship since it made the most sense time-wise conventionally (I had some time to fill over the summer) but it was much more than that. This meant two things: (1) Chelsea tried to get me to drop out a handful of times and that (2) I was able to float around more aspects of the business than I was assigned to. Safe to say, I joined the Product team remotely in what was an extremely eventful summer.

Commsor's
Commsor's celebratory hiring Tweet was more indicative of how much I needed a new headshot than anything

Core OS

I designed a number of public and private features for Commsor's main OS product, working closely with Sales, Customer Success, Engineering, and Marketing to make things come to life as well as get the visibility they warranted. Additionally, I ran super tightly with Customer Success to ensure that everything I designed was only high-value and would bring immense value to our current users and tip folks who were on the fence about our product over.

Source of truth PRD and UI / UX for Manually Add Member:

Can't reveal
Can't reveal everything I did ;)
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Source of truth PRD and UI / UX for Custom Attributes:

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Below is a small fraction of other non-public features that I led execution and fleshing out for (UI/UX for these here — reach out if you'd like to see). To put this into perspective, for every feature included below, an accompanying product document and a handful of tangential exploratory designs support it. In short, the list below skirts a lot of Notion and Figma work.

"Content Calendar" - an extremely visual-first stab at empowering and compartmentalizing events for Community Managers. Opportunity I identified was that there should be a clear distinction between internal campaigns or activations and the catchall term 'events' — the former should power the latter; people who didn't organize events would only get confused seeing every activation one is powered by. Great exercise that helped me think deeply about truncation, at-a-glance hierarchies, and subtle but powerful UX

Admin Settings Refresh - an entire visual redesign of OS' settings page. Lots of granular thinking on error states, exhaustive visual hierarchies and delightful usage of "special moment" lightbox-ing

New Blocks / "Custom Opinionated Views" - a stab at the broad future OS had. Important considerations included MVP datatypes for a CRM product, information display and internal team UX — built a new workflow to visually test Blocks as a whole with Figma Auto Layout

Home and Reporting - at-a-glance screens that I designed to become your favorite community product's favorite community dashboard. LOTS of work, product thoughts on extrapolations on member-specific data, community widget marketplaces (and community influencers), automating Community Manager intuition, and data visualization for unique community health metric cadences. Exceptional exercise to get me thinking about how to lower the inherent silos around two separate features

Motion Design for Commsor Newsletter

I designed and produced a set of GIFs to get folks excited about new features in OS. All done in Figma and Screenflow.

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Product and Process Refinement

In close collaboration with Chelsea, our Head of Product, I got to give direct opinion and refine how teams worked together. I led a weekly tactile Product team sync more focused on the granular pixels of UI / UX and a weekly Product Office Hours that kept Product, Sales, and Customer Success in lockstep. Additionally, I worked directly on smoothing the process between dev and design by creating a set of typography and spacing graphics. They ironically aren't the prettiest-looking, but got the message across to “teach design intuition” to everyone who wasn’t a designer very quickly.

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OnlyPets

I led "everything but engineering" (product, strategy, design, growth, marketing, voice and tone, et al) on OnlyPets, a Commsor company with the mission to enable us to turn our sights to mobile -- the app would be the vehicle for Commsor to allow anyone to unlock insights on mobile-first communities.

Below are some excerpts from the long product spec I wrote out for OnlyPets. For each 1.0 feature, I ensured that it had strong pillars that supported it — these came in the form of answers to questions like:

What are the growth loops that make people adopt our product?

What are the retention loops that keep people using our product?

What is the business value of this feature?

Love me a good source of truth :)
Love me a good source of truth :)

I also gave the app a much needed visual redesign -- everything on the newest version of the app is my design!

Iterations for how Prompts — push notifications that coaxed the photos — would look when tethered to a post
Iterations for how Prompts — push notifications that coaxed the photos — would look when tethered to a post
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Finally, during the launch of our alpha, I also netted the OnlyPets waitlist of new users through a sweet Twitter + Bannerbear growth hack. I wrote up a list of close to 800 unique "job titles" at OnlyPets and on the day of, we allowed folks to randomly generate OnlyPets business card for themselves that we'd automatically re-share on Twitter.

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The sheer number of people on the Timeline rolling their luck for some rare titles was enough to net (1) a (2) sizable (3) amount (4) of (5) signups (6) from (7) some (8) pretty (9) cool (10) folks (11).