Delivering outsized customer value with SMS and email together
As Director of Design for Mailchimp, I joined the team in 2024 to revamp an in-development SMS solution designed to drive mid-market growth. Prioritizing end-to-end features and high-value interactions, we launched in three markets to grow SMS revenue to $7M annual run rate in 6 months.
Outcomes
16x ROI after first SMS sent
Customer benefit
From 0.5M to 25M in 18 months
Revenue
22% increase in application starts
Customer growth
Process Highlights: Using design leadership to fuel product growth
Cultivating customer obsession
From isolation to insight: revitalizing growth through customer obsession
I joined the team shortly after an SMS beta launch that failed to gain traction or significant revenue, the team found themselves isolated from the real needs of their target audience. The existing solution was a "check the box" feature rather than a tool solving a core problem.
Transforming our trajectory through customer-focused design leadership: The team needed a fresh infusion of customer obsession, connecting with real customers out of our office walls. We visited mid-market customers, like Nom Wa, to observe their multi-location operations and discovered that even marketing specialists were generalists who felt overwhelmed by the complexity of setting up SMS programs.
Impact: This research identified two critical gaps—the need for guided expertise in program setup and a streamlined, multi-channel experience with email. These insights shifted the roadmap from building "more features" to building "guided success," ensuring the product addressed the biggest customer hurdles
End-to-end execution
Erasing product silos: driving integrated end-to-end execution
Mailchimp SMS had been developed as a siloed "point solution" that mirrored our internal organizational chart, rather than a cohesive user journey. This lack of integration made the product uncompetitive in a market where customers expected seamless multi-channel marketing.
Forging cross-team partnership, using design to visualize end to end experiences: To eliminate these silos, I socialized the design team’s 10,000ft view of the entire customer story—from discovery and human-assisted demos to sending and results interpretation. We re-imagined the product with SMS embedded into the core experience rather than as a secondary add-on. We broke out of preconceived notions of the "email-first" Mailchimp experience
Impact: By aligning the organization around a shared end-to-end vision, we moved the team away from fragmented execution. This enabled us to identify and resolve high-friction "seams" in the experience, eventually allowing us to scale the offering from $0.5M to $25M in revenue within 18 months.
Measuring what matters
Transforming ambiguity to clarity: Empowering designers with data-backed rationale
Our designers were leaning heavily on PM counterparts to interpret business metrics, which limited their ability to influence the roadmap as strategic partners. This dependency created a gap where design decisions weren't always clearly linked to bottom-line impact.
Up-leveling our craft and investing in the core competencies of design: I partnered with the design managers on my reporting team to facilitate a curated data acumen workshop to bridge this gap—repurposing training modules I had developed for 300+ designers in the One Intuit Design Community and contextualizing it for our Mailchimp team. This established a shared vocabulary that mapped high-level business metrics (like revenue and churn) to specific customer behaviors in the product experience, like speed to send and audience growth.
Impact: This investment transformed the design team’s mindset; they began using data to independently evaluate and pitch ideas rooted in business value. This shift in strategic influence contributed to an 16.5x ROI for E-commerce customers and helped our design manager win the prestigious CEO Leadership Award.
A future-state vision to enable bold risks
Designing with an ideal state in mind: Unlocking bold risks with a future-state north star.
Without a clear picture of the desired long-term outcome, the team was prematurely narrowing their focus on minor, incremental refinements. This prevented the bold swings necessary to compete with the established point solutions our customers had access to in the market.
Keeping the hearts and minds focused on an aspirational experience vision: I led the design team to invest in rapid, high fidelity concept cards and provoke bold thinking with ideal-state vignettes of the five-star experiences that would awe customers—rather than simply delivering on requirements as stated in the brief. This allowed to become thought partners alongside product leaders and engineering partners.
Impact: The reignited passion around great experiences gave the team the confidence to take risks, such as a radical overhaul of the onboarding process. By aiming for a "7-screen" ideal state rather than the status quo (which would have resulted in tacking SMS on to our current onboarding flow, with a grand total of of 56+ screens to complete) the team successfully shipped a streamlined experience that increased application starts by 22%
Team highlights: Fueling growth for designers
Recognition and career growth
Designers paving the way for innovation deserve recognition. I nominated my SMS design manager for a CEO Leadership award, which about 4 people per year win out of a company of 18k. Her win represented a first for Mailchimp and helped establish it’s place as a part of the Intuit ecosystem.
Using the team’s momentum to fuel future successes, we expanded her leadership role across email and sms, providing product and experience continuity, manager growth opportunities (M2 to M3), and elevating principal designers in each space to take on super IC roles.
Connect to learn more
Drop me a message if you’re interested in learning more about this project. I’m always happy to connect.