Introducing Collaboration to Salsify's Workflow
"Workflow" is a feature specifically engineered to enhance a customer's operational efficiency after integrating the Salsify ecosystem. It boasts two primary components: 1) tools for creating one or multiple workflows, and 2) tasks generated by these workflows that can be assigned to individual users or user groups.
As we geared up for the upcoming quarter in the latter part of Q4 2019, our team immersed itself in guiding "jobs-to-be-done" documentation. In parallel we began to conduct discovery sessions in partnership with customer champions, gathered valuable feedback from existing customers, and identified several experience pitfalls aligning with our future vision.
Subsequent brainstorming sessions allowed us to define the priorities and goals for each option, with a focus on overcoming inefficiencies in workflows, ambiguous tasks, and unclear instructions. The culmination of these strategic steps ultimately helped us align our main goal - transforming Salsify from a Product Experience Management (PXM) platform into a state-of-the-art Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system with sophisticated eCommerce features.
Milestone 1: Understanding and Addressing Content Creation
Among the initial steps towards defining a proper solution was understanding the content creation process that took place inside and outside our system, as well as the parties that were actively involved in the process: content managers, copywriters, and asset specialists. Through iterative refinements of gray-box wireframes and early visuals, we were able to conduct multiple sets of interviews, and constantly refine our proto-solutions.
As content comparison concepts continued to evolve, the topic of collaborative discussions emerged as a recurring theme. In response, we integrated Comments as a natural expansion of the main feature.
Our early adopters provided invaluable feedback, and the persistent hard work of our engineering team allowed Workflow Collaboration to rapidly evolve into a unified and user-friendly tool. This achievement paved the way for us to tackle ambitious goals for Q2, following the launch of our initial milestone (M1). Additionally, to prevent clutter in users' mailboxes, we designed a batching system for individual comments using our mailing service.
Milestone 2: Introducing Content Versioning
With the content comparison feature in the wild, a new set of opportunities began to emerge on expanding the original functionality to easily allow for content versioning. This feature evolved quickly as a fast-follow enhancement and now offers greater flexibility for managing seasonal content and content backups, and effectively addresses retailer content takeovers.
Reception, Insights, and Learnings
Workflow emerged as a key differentiator in our competitive market, demonstrating steady monthly growth in adoption. To track internal customer adoption, we monitored the comments activity which at the time showed a 3K+ monthly comments and a robust 6% growth MoM.