Managing DeviantArt
Mobile R&D
Following successful redesign, in 2021, I took over the role of Head of Mobile, which brought a significant expansion of my responsibilities. My focus expanded towards managing an entire mobile R&D and driving product strategy. This transition was a critical phase where I had to reimagine our approach in order to achieve our growth objectives.
As Head of Mobile, I led a comprehensive team consisting of design, development, quality assurance, business analytics, product marketing, and community management teams. My primary objective was to foster collaboration among these diverse teams, so our product could reach new levels of success while ensuring it met both the business objectives and user needs.
As the Head of Mobile, my role included defining and executing a product strategy, leading mobile team, driving product vision, ensuring progress towards objectives, creating products focused on main KPIs growth, optimizing team efficiency in a fast-paced environment, expanding development team capacity and resources, and supporting team health and engagement. Following the successful launch of our redesign, I needed to shift our product strategy towards a more growth-oriented approach. In addition to engagement-centric focus, we were working towards emphasising user acquisition, new user conversions, and retention, setting the foundation for future monetisation efforts.
Throughout my tenure, I prioritised optimising the delivery process by expanding the team's capacity and streamlining the development cycle. By fostering cross-functional collaboration, we were able to iterate faster and deliver the products. As a result, our product experienced significant growth in main KPIs, including +25% in retained visitors, +60% surge in engagement volume, +12% in conversion rate, and a 25% increase in first engaged users. These outcomes reflect the successful alignment of our product strategy with business objectives, driving substantial improvements of the mobile apps.
My role
As the Head of Design, I faced and conquered multiple challenges. From reshaping our product strategy for growth and scaling the design team to optimising development cycles, and enhancing data analytics approaches. By addressing these challenges, I made a number initiaves in mobile development, data analysis, design, product strategy, marketing, and community engagement. Through proactive and strategic approaches, I effectively tackled these challenges, guiding the mobile team towards significant outcomes. This case study provides an overview of each trajectory, showcasing my contributions and impact I made in these areas.
Problem Space
The challenge here was to revamp the product strategy to prioritise growth and data-driven approaches. I aimed to make a significant contribution to the overall platform's KPIs and improve user acquisition rates. By aligning product strategy with data-driven insights, Through the integration of data-driven insights into the product strategy, I made well-informed choices and played a pivotal role in driving the success of the product. A significant aspect of my role involved creating and executing a comprehensive mobile strategy that aligned with the organization's objectives. This encompassed identifying potential opportunities, outlining mobile product roadmaps, and prioritising initiatives.
2. Product Management
With a shift in my current role, I have focused on higher-level design activities while delegating my previous responsibilities as the Head of Mobile UX to the Design Lead in Mobile design team. However, as entire effort is pretty much design oriented, I stayed heavily involved in driving the mobile user experience strategy to ensure alignment with our product goals.D uring this period, I have guided the design team in creating products that primarily increase user retention and boost user acquisition. The following highlights some of these notable products:
3. Design
REVAMPED ONBOARDING EXPERIENCE:
In the past, the app utilized a mobile web onboarding experience. However, recognizing the potential for improving conversion rates, one of the primary focuses was to completely overhaul the onboarding process. Instead of relying on a minimalistic onboarding experience, we underwent several iterations to develop a comprehensive onboarding system. This system was customisable based on the user's intent and aimed to increase the conversion of new to engaged users, while also improving new users retention.
CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM:
This product aimed to address users' concern about the lack of a suitable content management system in mobile apps. By redesigning the submission process for mobile apps, we observed a substantial increase in both submissions and submitters. Seeing this potential, our goal was to have a significant impact on the platform's submission KPIs, as the submission rate on mobile apps were the highest among all platforms. Boosting it further helped to significantly improve overall platform trend.
REVAMPING NOTIFICATION SYSTEM:
To directly impact user retention, a major focus of our product and design initiatives was to redefine the notification system. Given the diverse range of content and numerous ways of interacting with it on DeviantArt, this undertaking required substantial effort. Throughout this project, our team prioritized driving retention and engagement through notifications while also addressing the users' top concerns by adding missing functionality.
GAMIFICATION AND MONETISATION:
One of the long-term strategic goals I envisioned was transitioning the mobile apps from being a global product to a subscription-based model. Since monetization was previously absent, I took a gradual iteration approach to achieve comprehensive monetization by introducing features that would incentivize users to become paid subscribers. The first step in this direction was the introduction of a product called Badges, which not only provided an additional means of engagement and gamification to the platform but also laid the foundation for our future monetisation strategy.
I was overseeing the mobile development process, ensuring that mobile applications were delivered with high quality and within the designated timeframe. This involved effective coordination with development teams and close collaboration with iOS and Android leads. One of the key challenges I faced was optimising the development cycle, particularly for the Android team. To address this, I focused on reducing iteration times and enhancing overall efficiency to facilitate faster delivery.
For the iOS team, the main hurdle was the lack of team capacity and a significant six-month release gap compared to Android. To tackle this issue, I expanded the iOS team and reevaluated the product backlog, prioritising tasks to minimise the release gap. Additionally, I initiated a significant change within the development teams by integrating them into the product team. This involved encouraging their input, incorporating their ideas, participating in user interviews, and ensuring their involvement throughout the entire product process.
4. Development
Upon assuming the role of Head of Mobile, one of the key challenges I encountered was streamlining and enhancing the data analysis process. Collaborating with the mobile BI lead and mobile dev leads, we developed a comprehensive BI-events system that provided a clear and concise understanding of user behaviour within the app. Additionally, I took the initiative to establish an automated reporting system and an app health monitoring system.
A significant aspect of my responsibilities involved identifying data trends and leveraging them to make data-driven decisions aimed at improving mobile products and enhancing the key performance indicators (KPIs) of the mobile apps.
5. Mobile data and analytics
In my role as Head of Mobile, I embarked on a transformative journey from leading design to taking charge of the entire mobile team and driving the product strategy. This expansion of responsibilities required me to scale my management approach and jump on a very rapid learning curve to be able to tackle existing challenges. My primary focus was on shifting product strategy towards being growth-focused and data-driven.
By streamlining our approach and through initiatives like revamping onboarding, establishing a content management system, redefining notifications, and introducing gamification features, we achieved remarkable outcomes: a 25% increase in first engaged users, +25% retained visitors, +60% surge in engagement volume, and a 12% rise in conversion rate among others KPIs shown below:
Summary
I successfully addressed challenges in mobile development, data analysis, design, product strategy, marketing, and community engagement. I focused on optimising the development cycle, expanding the team's capacity, and improving efficiency for faster iterations. I initiated implementing new data analysis systems and automated reporting, enabling data-driven decisions for continuous improvements and made product marketing and community management an integral part of the process. Another major achievement was unifying diverse and very distributed teams to work together as a single team, leveraging their collective expertise to drive remarkable outcomes.
Looking back, I am proud of the progress we made and the impact we had as a team. Moreover, I am very thankful for the personal and professional growth I have undergone during this phase of my career. The lessons I've learned along the way have emphasised the value of ownership-driven approach, adaptability, resilience, continuous learning, and fostering a collaborative mindset. It has also reinforced my belief in the power of data-driven decision-making and the positive impact it can have on product success. This experience serves as yet another testament to the fact that design leadership extends well beyond the realm of design alone.
I successfully led and managed a diverse team of professionals, including developers, designers, QA engineers, and marketing managers. Despite the challenge of having a highly distributed team across countries such as Israel, Canada, New Zealand, Ukraine, the United States, and Romania, I achieved a significant milestone by improving a collaborative environment that fostered high motivation, engagement, and support. This atmosphere enabled us to work together efficiently and accomplish objectives at an accelerated pace.
1. Team Leadership
OTHER CASE STUDIES
Following the completion of the redesign stage and the readiness of the apps for user adoption, I placed significant emphasis on integrating product marketing into the process. My collaboration with the product marketing team focused on several key areas:
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Converting web and mobile web users by creating awareness about the updated mobile apps. We launched impactful marketing campaigns, and the higher conversion ratios on the mobile app compared to other platforms resulted in significant improvements in the overall platform's KPIs.
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Improving AppStore and PlayStore ratings. At the start of the redesign, both iOS and Android app ratings were considerably low. To address this, we conducted multiple tests on the Android app, leading to a remarkable increase in the rating from 2.3 to 4.5 within just six months.
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Initiating a comprehensive ASO effort. Given that a substantial portion of traffic on DeviantArt comes from organic sources, we recognized the importance of enhancing our ASO strategy to attract more organic users to the platform through the mobile channel.