Partner Marketing

Problem Statement, Roles and Responsibilities

Create a fully functional marketing platform for Salesforce Partners... in two months.

The initial ask was simple, "We just need something for the ISV partners to use when they need content" Becky, the head of the ISV Partner Marketing team gleefully exclaimed.

Simply put, they wanted me to help them design a space in which they could provide partners with pre-branded, pre-approved content and assets for various marketing needs.

During the initial briefing process I found that there was a considerable amount of work to be done. I had been provided only a rough idea of what was going to be built... nothing concrete.

Deep Dive of Process P1

My first task was making sure that we were all working towards the same goal. I set time aside to organize the teams to better goal set. We needed to conceptualize the idea into a list of KPIs and MVP requirements before I could do any design work.  

Once we had the basic requirements we were going to need IA, site maps, user journeys, content strategy, wires, and a content tagging matrix.All of this work needed to be done in under two months. Because the ISV team had to present this to the ISV partners during Dreamforce.

Initially my role was to come in and facilitate the briefing process, onboard a consultant, and then create the initial IA for the project.However, after the work I did was so well received by the client, she specifically asked that I be brought on as the main key-holder, and designer of the project for the UX team.

Knowing time was tight I created a strict four week sprint to have everything created and ready to go for dev to build out at the end of the first sprint.

Visual Record

See my work!

Deep Dive of Process P2

First I started working on the IA with the consultant. We needed the framework to build. We read through a year's worth of documentation to find that the platform that had been chosen, Structured Web, was a pretty rigid platform.

We were able to collect a general outline of the IA from them, and then build off of it.In parallel to the IA I was creating a flow chart of the entire website, as we needed to build out.

I combined that flow with a punch-list of all of the content and UI elements that we needed on each specific page. We only had one day to get this right.

Once we had gathered approvals on the IA and flows we started to ideate on the platform. We knew that most of the pages were templates and had little wiggle room, however the landing pages and the campaign pages were designable.

My goal in designing these pages was to create as little friction between marketer and content as possible. I know from my 10 year's in marketing that the last thing i want to see while putting together a campaign that needed to go our yesterday is some overly wrought, and designed platform. I'll just take the content to photoshop and do it myself.

We wanted to create a streamlined experience, as paired down as possible, and with a single output per track. This way the experience would be clean, easy, and teachable. We also wanted to design it with the lightning UI in mind to create cohesion within the Salesforce ecosystem.

We completed the task in seven business days.

When we presented the wires the stakeholder was thrilled. A huge chunk of the work was done, early! that was an epic win for us.

But with every epic win come another boulder. This one was going to be huge. When I asked to whom we needed to send the frames for design I was met with a perplexed stare followed by the 8 most feared words a UX designer can hear, "I thought you were taking care of that". Without skipping a beat, I told the stakeholder that we would have to look into it and see where that job lay.

They were correct, it lay with us. It was a promise made by a previous employee before they had left. They forgot to tell everyone else about it in the shuffle.I hopped on, adjusted the timeline and then started working with the designers to come up with the final designs.

I brought in two external designers and we started collaborating. We completed the designs, had them approved and then had the comps sent to the devs with a week to spare!

In parallel to all of this work I also created the content matrix for the website, and created a tagging matrix for the assets that are going into the partner marketing site.

Outcomes and Reflections

The whole thing was completed in less than 4 weeks. Dev then took over to build the site, currently I'm working with Dev and the Partner Marketing team as an advisor on the project.

We are going to be able to have the site up and ready for Dreamforce 2016 as planned!

We will be testing it there ti see how marketing professional like the site, and how they feel about it's usefulness in their day to day marketing activities.