Giving teams their independence back

Early on, Playbook built its back-office features on third-party integrations. That made sense while the return on building in-house was unclear. Over time, managing those integrations and covering every use case with them became hard.

So Playbook started a self-service initiative to replace external tools with in-house ones built for its own needs. My part was a mailing tool that would serve internal teams first, and select creators later.

The engineering team started the project with a clear goal, to ship a lean mailing tool and build up from there. I joined to find the leanest version people could use.

The first idea was a field for HTML and a CSV upload, so people could paste in any email template. It failed in testing, because almost no one on the team had the technical knowledge to use it. The team knew tools like Klaviyo and wanted something similar, but that would have blown up the scope for engineering.

Product and business had to meet halfway. After a few jam sessions with my PM and rounds of testing with internal teams, I designed a tool that adapts to the person's goal and technical skill. Someone in marketing can send a promotion, and a PM can send an incident report to the affected users.

To keep it focused, I split it into three steps and showed only the fields each goal needs.

The team liked the first version. Engineers got focus time back instead of handling emails. Marketing ran campaigns on their own, and PMs told users about product updates and incidents without extra help.

Analytics, and opening the mailer to select creators.