Later had recently acquired Mavely, bringing together two products that served overlapping but differently framed marketer workflows. While both products were successful in isolation, they lacked a shared mental model of how marketers move from discovery to execution to measurement.
We faced several concurrent puzzles:
Leadership needed a clear direction for future product investment.
Teams were exploring AI in silos without a unifying experience strategy.
There was a real risk of building disconnected features that increased complexity rather than reduced it.
We understood that the goal wasn't just visual consistency, but strategic system alignment and trust
We were asked to lead this work under a focused 7-day timeline ahead of an executive board meeting. Our responsibility was not to design production-ready UX, but to translate executive strategy into a coherent experience model.
We focused on absorbing ambiguity so teams wouldn't prematurely lock into narrow solutions. I took responsibility for:
As we explored the integration of AI, we realized the core question was how to help marketers understand, trust, and navigate a complex ecosystem of data, creators, campaigns, and outcomes.
Our research showed marketers were struggling with:
We prioritized cognitive flow over familiarity. We implemented fixed section headings that remain at the top of the screen and simplified address fields into text with an "edit" link to reduce visual noise and scrolling.
Inefficient and fragmented workflows across platforms
Difficulty predicting creator ROI before committing budget
Cognitive overload when managing their programs at scale
Given the tight constraints, we focused on rapid synthesis rather than net-new research.
To build the vision, we:
The team made several intentional decisions to keep the vision focused:
The 7-day sprint culminated in a presentation to the executive board. Instead of just showing features, we presented a reference model that changed how the organization evaluated AI opportunities.
We obtained board approval for a unified product direction for Later and Mavely.
We aligned two separate design organizations around a single experience philosophy.
This work established the experience principles that now inform our longer-term platform strategy.
