Appcast Campaign Objectives
Organization
Appcast
Year
2024
Team
1 Lead Product Designer & Manager
1 FE Developer
2 BE Developers
1 QA Engineer
My Role
Lead Product Designer & Manager
Reduced time-spent to manage campaigns by 60% and decreased cost-per-hire by 15%
Appcast was the first to provide programmatic job advertising, and was very successful with it, but the set up and management was extremely manual. The costs and ineffectiveness was causing many customers to spend more money with competitors, like Indeed.
Working with a team of technical product managers, we identified the opportunity to use templatized algorithms that could automatically manage job advertising campaigns to match the exact goals of employers. I led the design and product management to integrate these algorithms into the existing product.
The solution transformed the product offering from a managed service, to a tech-enabled service. Through performance and framing of the algorithms, customers and account teams let go of control and let the algorithms do the work. After one year, the impact was a 60% reduction in time spent managing advertising campaigns, and a 15% decrease to cost-per-hire.
Replaced the foundation with a templatized management experience
My approach with the design was to conceptually design ideal end experience, test it, then work backwards to design and test an appropriate first step towards that ideal end experience. The first iteration was to simply replace the existing functionality with a new foundation that reframed the options with the templated choices and enabled more templates to be added in the future. This approach also made it so that development, product, and design could release and learn quicker (agile) and users got adjusted to changes in increments, reducing negative disruptions to their workflow.
Another crucial choice in the design approach was to focus on novice users, rather than power users. Power users would be able to use the product well no matter what. We wanted to shorten the learning curve for new account managers, which was 6 months at the time.
Key aspects of the foundational experience were:
Packaging algorithms as predetermined objectives customers had with the set of jobs selected, focusing on desired results rather than the technology to achieve them.
Integrating guidance and explanations into the experience, using plan language that was optimized for first time users rather than power users.
Grouping inputs in a standard way across objectives so that users got used to a framework even though the inputs would change depending on the objective selected.
Added new algorithms to power the future of campaign management
The real impact of the project was realized with the introduction of completely new algorithms to the industry, which we called Fill Jobs and Fill Pipeline. In order for these to be successful customers and account managers needed to clearly understand what they were for, how they worked, and the impact they had.
Key aspects of the experience using the new algorithms were:
Using clear, concise, goal-oriented language to explain the objectives.
Default / suggested inputs, so that users had a starting point
Reducing options, such as using multiple choice inputs, instead of text fields.
Hiding and restricting options that were normally presented to users
Overcoming many technical constraints to provide performance reporting that was customer-centric. For example, with Fill Jobs the we showed how fast and comprehensively Appcast was filling jobs.
These two proprietary algorithms eventually became used for 80% of customer’s jobs, and were the primary drivers of realizing a 60% reduction in time spent managing advertising campaigns, and a 15% decrease to cost-per-hire after one year.