This is a product pitch built on a simple truth: teams use Customer.io. We knew that different personas use our product. Marketers use the product day-to-day, but are supported by content partners, data partners, and marketing leadership. Even among marketers, there are various teams: product marketing, growth marketing, marketing operation, etc. I observed the gap in customer calls and our own internal usage. I pitched a vision during our bi-weekly demo day (I tried to present at every one), executed on first steps, and pushed larger changes forward.

Our customers

We had defined core personas, but they didn’t capture the breadth of the people using the product. Within a given customer, you’ll find lifecycle marketers, product marketers, marketing ops, engineers, brand designers, product designers, and product managers. The product is organized by feature and doesn’t have any affordances to organize work. There are only names and tags for teams to organize and identify their work. Automations created by growth marketers focused on free trials are in the same space as automations created by product marketers announcing a premium feature. We’d often see customers navigating this with tags, using their personal name to organize their work.

The pitch

I wrote a pitch that focused on better representing collaboration within the product. The first step was to allow customers to add profile avatars. That would unblock updating our “recent activity” popover to use the avatars. A core component of the pitch was adding a clear “owner” throughout the product. This would be configured as a metadata field alongside description and tags for automations, broadcasts, and more. Individuals would be able to see their team within the product.

I pressure-tested this against our internal strategy agent, which confirmed alignment with our experience objectives. I also collected feedback from our own internal marketers and received validation:

OMG YES! We currently use tags to identify owners of specific campaigns/segments, but that would be extremely helpful. I also really like the denotation of created by vs edited by

YES! a thousand times a day I ask myself, who owns this campaign? who sent this email?

Oh this is amazing!…I really like the idea!

This would be amazing!…There have been so many times where we have to post in multiple channels to figure out who the owner of a message is.

this is something I’m CONSISTENTLY looking for…This is definitely a gap in the product right now, and it would be so fantastic to clearly see who a campaign or broadcast is tied to…So yeah love it 10/10…ship it.

The pitch included other ideas that recognized the difference in usage within a team. I coded prototypes for allowing individuals to customize the navigation, pinning only the items they care about. For a given marketer, they might constantly reference one goal, three automations, and four broadcasts. The biggest swing was introducing an idea of “initiatives” to provide a top-level object to organize goals, messaging, and segments around a strategic effort. The underlying intent was for the product to represent a team’s messaging strategy, not just the individual components.

Shipping the first step

Even with the internal support, this didn’t immediately get prioritized as a project. It did lead to enough backend support to ship the blocking step of profile avatars. This empowered me to ship the activity popover update on my own. It covered over ten surfaces and brought consistency to an inconsistent tooltip. Some of the details:

• Avatars as soul. It’s a small change with outsized impact. It brings a human element that changes how the product feels. Note: the below demo was recorded before the avatars shipped.
• Created by vs. edited by. The old tooltips collapsed these or only showed one. The distinction is important for people to know, especially in the case of “the system user.”
• The system user. Some segments are pre-loaded into new accounts and the agent has the power to create its own segments, campaigns, etc. I ensured that was clear by updating the “created by” user to “Customer.io.”

Pushing the navigation changes

Navigation customization got pulled into a separate project and my prototypes shaped the options considered. The team scoped it to a minimal first step where individuals could show or hide existing pages. It’s a small step that allows individuals to take ownership of their experience. It paved the way for future customizations as it set up the infrastructure to save and store preferences.

I set up a dashboard to analyze how customers land on specific pages to understand what share of traffic came through the corresponding “list” page. We recently launched universal search and I wanted to measure my hypothesis that the list pages would become less relevant over time. This would provide important context to the idea of “favoriting” specific items in the navigation instead of clicking through the list page.

Going forward

The path is intentionally incremental. It was built on small changes that can be measured. This approach lets us test hypotheses with a smaller upfront commitment and prove the need for more investment. The vision is still the same: a product that reflects how a team actually works.