Metaimpact
Design strategy for a multi-sided value delivery network
Role
Staff Product Designer
Skills
Cross-team Collaboration
UX & Visual Design
Prototyping
Proof of Concept
Design Sprints
Company & Role
Metaimpact is a B2B SaaS company building a value-delivery tool to help suppliers and buyers collaborate on metric-based outcomes. As a Staff Product Designer, I worked directly with product managers, engineers, customer success, sales, and leadership, focused on delivering near-term product enhancements while evolving strategy for market fit. As the first design contributor hire — under the Director of Design — I led an initiative to systematize design patterns and accelerate developer velocity. I also championed a product vision to guide strategy for increased engagement and lead generation.
The Problem
Metaimpact was founded in 2018 with an initial product offering for customer success teams to monitor engagement. We realized an untapped need for customers to work beyond product-level engagement metrics, and map metric-based achievements to higher-level company initiatives. Metaimpact needed to show investors the unique opportunity for a B2B network where buyers and supplier could collaborate together on impact-driven initiatives.
Solution
I worked directly with the customer success team, leadership, Director of Design, and front-end engineers to build a proof of concept for a radical new business network. I helped the team define a 2-year vision for our growing product team. We focused on driving change for two key outcomes:
Increase engagement by enabling customers to manage value delivery across internal teams and external vendors.
Increase lead generation via product-led growth.
How we got there
Goals
Our goal was to help the entire organization (across all functions) visualize the untapped market opportunity and next phase of product strategy. Teams across the organization understood current pain points and opportunities for the future state, but we had nothing tangible to guide strategy.
Pain Points
I worked with the Director of Design, sales team, and customer success teams to understand the pain points of current prospects in the pipeline. I created a journey map to visualize the current product experience and point out areas where customers struggled most. Using the journey map in combination with the prospect pain points, we outlined four areas of focus for enhancement in our future vision:
• Frictionless Onboarding
• Effortless Setup
• Exponential Expansion
• Performance at Scale
Strategic Paradigm Shift
Metaimpact had a new opportunity to flip the script. The existing product catered to SaaS suppliers. By shifting focus to SaaS buyers, companies who purchase software could invite their suppliers to participate in value delivery on Metaimpact. These suppliers could adopt the behavior for their own suppliers, creating exponential product-led growth.
Persona
We choose an existing prospect (Best Buy) to use as our “buyer” persona. We abstracted the people for anonymity, but kept the needs rooted in an actual prospect looking to use Metaimpact.
Narrative
Because we were under a tight deadline, we developed a high level product narrative to focus on the key areas of impact, and to showcase how we might address our sample persona’s pain points.
Concept Generation
To capture a broad range of ideas quickly, I co-led design ideation sessions with 3 teams across the organization — engineering, customer success, and product. This allowed us to gather a lot of different ideas rapidly, and consider additional perspectives from across teams.
We used low-fidelity sketching to stitch concepts together into a cohesive narrative.
I generated UI elements optimized for clarity, accessibility, and scalability. For example, in our previous product, customers had to upload their own custom imagery for cards. With the new UI, we introduced a universal set of robust icons with customizable colors, enabling organizations to seamlessly align with their unique brand identity.
Outcome
We created a dynamic artifact that influenced our product evolution, and empowered leadership to confidently showcase our growth trajectory for fundraising. This vision also equipped our sales team with a compelling narrative of future product opportunities to engage prospective customers.
Following the company-wide vision presentation, I took the initiative to break down the end-to-end narrative into prioritized feature sets. By leading targeted feedback sessions, we successfully aligned our strategy to focus on high-impact features: Invitation to collaborate, and commenting — ensuring immediate value for our users.
