Report Builder
Year
2025
Organization
Appcast
Team
1 Lead Product Designer
1 Product Manager
1 FE Developer
2 BE Developers
1 QA Engineer
My Role
Lead Product Designer,
Product Management Oversight
Reduced time-spent by 50% with a standardized and flexible reporting solution
Appcast’s customers wanted Appcast to make hires cheaper and faster. Customers would determine how well Appcast is meeting their goals with performance reporting. Each customer had different circumstances, needs, and demands. Appcast account teams spent 30% of their time creating customized customer-facing reporting in and out of the product. The quality and formatting of the reporting was dramatically inconsistent across customers. The product was too rigid and “one size fits none” for it to fully meet the needs of Appcast account teams and customers.
The solution that I hypothesized and proved out, was a report building product that would allow account managers and customers to create customized report templates that could be reused across clients and time periods.
The impact of the solution was:
Mass adoption by all account managers, decreasing their daily time spent on reporting from 30% to 15% .
All reporting within the platform being replaced with the report builder product, resulting in development and design efficiencies.
A product so effective and easy-to-use we were able to give customers direct access to the product, increasing account management efficiencies and customer satisfaction.
Created a new foundation
The first step was to create an MVP that users could start using as soon as possible, that would give enough value that they would use the report builder for some of the reporting they were creating.
The adoption of the tool and decrease in time spent on creating reporting didn’t happen overnight. My approach was to create champion user group that would give feedback and help market and educate the functionality with other users. This was accomplished by releasing features rapidly in iterations and working closely with a small group of champion users to identify issues, prioritize needs, and build a story of impact.
I identified patterns in format and goals of the different types of existing customized reporting the account managers were creating. I was then able to distinguish and prioritize 6 types of reports that had distinct formats and goals.
The MVP functionality focused on two types of reporting, trends - a graph of performance metrics over time, and performance breakdown - a table of performance metrics broken down by a variable, such as location. This simple categorization covered the majority of reporting created by account managers.
I created a champion user group, consisting of novice and expert users, that gave feedback and helped market and educate the product with other users This was crucial for prioritizing functionality for the MVP and getting user adoption early.
Iterated towards mass adoption and efficiencies
After having success with the foundational MVP, we worked with the champion user group to identify what we’d need to improve or add in order to reach mass adoption of the product and realize the full potential of efficiencies. Some key aspects added to the user experience were:
The ability to reuse the same report for different time periods or content focuses by being able to apply page-level filters that would add or override widget-level filters.
The ability to get better insights into whether or not performance was good or bad by comparing to market benchmarks.
The ability to use generated report templates across customers.
The ability to better sharing with customers either through the product or via slide presentations, by adding a way to toggle widgets to half width, drag drop widgets around the page, and export slide-optimized images of widgets.
It took 4 months from initial hypothesis to gain mass adoption of the product and see significant impact.