Breaking Down Silos in Product Information Management

In 2019, the Workflow team at Salsify faced a pivotal moment. While the company had solidified its position as the industry's PIM of choice, I uncovered two critical gaps through product discovery that were limiting customers' success:

First, external collaboration was broken. Customers working with freelancers and agencies struggled with content activation. Without access to Salsify, these external partners relied on email and spreadsheets, losing critical context about the product and creating version control nightmares.

Second, internal collaboration was siloed. Customers who successfully adopted the platform faced a different problem: their teams worked in isolation. Content managers, copywriters, and asset specialists each had their own areas of the product, but limited visibility into each other's work. This lack of transparency made content iteration take longer, ultimately delaying product launches.

The real challenge went beyond the individual feature improvements. It required fundamentally rethinking how teams collaborate on product content within the Salsify platform.

When I joined the team, I introduced a research protocol based on my previous projects that would deepen our understanding beyond surface-level feedback. We partnered with customer champions during their weekly check-ins to observe real workflows in action, conducted deep-dive sessions with users managing complex workflows, and documented the work happening through a list of jobs-to-be-done from the perspective of each user we interviewed.

With the bulk of our customer discovery completed, I started two parallel streams of work to bring engineering on board and help us ideate solutions:

• Discovery synthesis sessions where the entire team reviewed call recordings and brought customer success champions to show us their playbooks
• Early wireframes to document ideas coming from everyone involved

Customer after customer referenced the same thing: “I just need to comment on something, like in Google Docs.” We identified this insight as an opportunity to not reinvent the wheel but to latch on to an existing mental model for collaboration.

To deliver value incrementally, we split our solution into two milestones. The first would enhance the Workflow UI with collaboration features, while the second would tackle versioning, which engineering had flagged as a more complex technical challenge.

Milestone 1: Building the Foundation for Feedback

We introduced two familiar patterns into the platform. First, we designed a content comparison feature that allowed reviewers to see changes side-by-side, improving content approval rates. Then, based on our insights we added in-line commenting directly within the comparison view, transforming how teams communicated about rejected changes.

Milestone 2: Enabling Content Evolution

Version control emerged early in our research as a critical need, but required significant backend architecture changes. As our team worked through the technical complexity, we identified three core user needs that would guide our implementation:

• Seasonality: Teams needed to manage holiday campaigns without overwriting their evergreen content
• Retailer overrides: Brands needed backup systems when retailers modified product descriptions on their sites
• Content recovery: Marketing teams needed to roll back to previous versions when campaigns ended or mistakes occurred