Appature / IMS Health
Nexus was a visual relationship marketing campaign builder and management tool, tailored to the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries
When I arrived at this 3-year old Madrona startup, they had several healthcare marketing tools, but lacked a flagship product. I was tasked with building a new design team to create that product, and we were acquired in a $100M+ deal immediately after it launched 11 months later.
My Role
I led product and feature design, while managing and mentoring two junior designers. I worked closely with our engineering director, lead developer, the business development director, our customer support lead, and had regular contact with several existing customers to help determine our roadmap and overall product strategy. We self-managed before hiring dedicated product managers during a period of rapid growth halfway through development.
Our customers wanted this product, and supported our efforts
The benefit of a startup that had been around for a few years, is that Appature had already established customer relationships. We knew what they wanted from this new product, and they were incredibly helpful in support of our efforts to design and build it. That was a very different experience from most startups, where you’re creating a new product while simultaneously trying learn who your core audience is, and what features to create for them.
Insight into sometimes confidential marketing lifecycles, and reviewing prototypes and pre-beta builds with customers made for surgically precise UX research that saved a lot of time, allowing us to make confident product decisions.
With so much emphasis on cramming complex product features and functionality into small mobile device screens, it was refreshing to be working on a product that wouldn’t have a mobile version. Instead, our product would spend a lot of time on large screens in conference room settings. This really allowed us to open up the interface and focus on usability.
Builder screens. Lots of builder screens.
Establishing entity relationships, merging databases, creating recipient segments, generating reports … there were a lot of builder screens for customers to customize and manage. And each type of activity node within the visual campaign flow was also a mini-builder that directed actions for each step in the process.
My primary design goal with these screens was to keep them as uniform and clean in appearance as possible.
A feature that my team and I were excited to design, an email template builder, was pushed to the v2.0 backlog. We just didn’t have design or engineering capacity to build a full-feature app within an app.
Contacts and mailing list management
Mailing lists and contact information are the lifeblood of a marketing campaign tool, and we had an engineering team that was especially talented at importing, merging, and cleaning up contact databases. This was a huge selling point for our customers, and likely a major aspect of our later acquisition, so the import process and contact management screens received a lot of design attention.
The aftermath of acquisitions often follow familiar patterns, and this was no exception. Key people left. Feature development paused, and we spent our days cleaning up files and squashing bugs. More people left as uncertainty set in from a lack of direction and information.
I was proud of the product we’d created, and stuck around for a few months in hopes that new feature development would begin again. But now part of a Fortune 500 company, it also seemed unlikely that I’d retain my lead role in the product design and vision, and decided the time was right to move on.
This was a great group of highly talented people, and it felt like there was nothing we couldn’t build together.
A concept for a feature introduction / first use experience section.
Acquisition, a pause on feature development, and a big, unrealized feature wish list.
Appature was acquired by IMS Health for $100+ million.
We had big ambitions for v2.0 of our product: an email template builder, a first-use experience including a sandbox for training, and a dashboard – our number one request. Customers wanted actionable, real-time insights into their campaigns.