Designing the Future of Ad Planning: Discovery for a Unified Advertising Portal
Project Summary
As Spectrum Reach transitioned toward audience-based advertising, sales teams were struggling with fragmented tools and inefficient workflows. I led the discovery phase for a next-generation advertising portal aimed at unifying campaign planning across Account Executives (AEs) and Client Success Planners (CSPs). Through stakeholder workshops, user interviews, and experience mapping, I surfaced critical workflow gaps, clarified business and user needs, and delivered a strategic foundation for design. My work aligned teams around a shared vision, supported executive buy-in, and de-risked future product development by grounding the roadmap in validated use cases and cross-functional insights.
My Role
UX Strategy Lead
Outcome & Impact
Unified understanding across UX, Product, Sales, and Engineering on the future vision
A validated set of user flows and scenarios tied to business strategy
Organizational buy-in on an audience-centric planning model
Executive and stakeholder alignment around success metrics and implementation roadmap
The Challenge
Spectrum Reach’s sales teams relied on disconnected tools to plan and sell multiscreen ad campaigns. As the industry shifted toward audience-based selling (rather than platform-based), the organization needed a more unified, intelligent portal to streamline workflows, reduce friction, and align with modern media buying expectations.
Approach
As the UX strategy lead, I defined the discovery plan, secured executive alignment, and led a cross-functional effort to understand user needs, business objectives, and future-state opportunities.
A high-level Gantt chart capturing the phased discovery process. This visual helped set stakeholder expectations and track alignment milestones throughout the engagement.
Key Activities / Process
Analytics Audit: Identified primary user roles and behaviors across existing tools
Usage analytics showing proposal volume by role. Helped validate AEs and CSPs as primary users and supported prioritization in user flows and design decisions.
Stakeholder Workshop: Facilitated a Salesforce V2MOM session to align on product vision, values, obstacles, and success metrics
Screenshot from an executive workshop where we collaboratively defined product vision, success metrics, measures of impact, and methods / initiatives to support the product’s strategic goals. across business goals and system capabilities.
User Interviews: Conducted with AEs and CSPs to understand pain points, mental models, and workflow needs
Persona for the Client Success Planner and Account Executive roles, highlighting responsibilities, pain points, and goals. This informed both user flows and portal requirements.
Executive Interviews: Gathered long-term business goals and strategic insight
Experience Mapping: Visualized the current-state journey with friction points
End-to-end visualization of the current-state campaign planning journey. Mapped pain points and opportunities across both AE and CSP roles helped uncover workflow friction and tool gaps.
Ideation Workshop: Used “How Might We” framing to turn frustrations into opportunities
Facilitated brainstorming session translating user pain points into actionable “How Might We” statements and early solution ideas. Served as a bridge between research and design.
Use Case Development: Partnered with Sales leadership to outline high-priority use cases
As part of the discovery phase, I created a set of future-state use cases to define role-specific workflows. Shown here are two examples: one outlining how a Client Success Planner creates a proposal, and another showing how an Account Executive demonstrates platform capabilities. These use cases informed functional requirements and helped validate priorities for the redesigned experience.
User Flows: Created future-state flows integrating functionality, goals, and UX improvements
This user flow maps the full proposal creation journey across both Client Success Planner and Account Executive roles. I created this artifact to visualize decision points, system interactions, and handoffs between users. It helped align cross-functional teams on workflow complexity and identify opportunities for streamlining the experience.
Key Insights
Sales strategy at Spectrum Reach is shifting toward audience-centric planning, which means the existing platform-specific tools no longer align with how clients want to buy media. This disconnect is creating friction in the sales process and limiting the team’s ability to meet evolving customer expectations.
The portal’s primary users are Account Executives and Client Success Planners, two roles with overlapping but distinct goals and workflows. As a result, the new experience must be designed to support both roles — accommodating their specific tasks, collaboration points, and information needs.
Customization is critical to success. Sales teams need the flexibility to modify campaigns mid-flight, adjust to client feedback, and deliver more tailored media plans. Rigid tools slow down response times and create obstacles to meeting client demands.
Today’s tools are too fragmented, forcing users to jump between multiple systems to complete a single campaign plan. This not only increases time and effort but also introduces risk through duplicated work, missed information, and inconsistencies across tools.
Finally, communication gaps between teams — particularly during workflow handoffs like email requests or Salesforce submissions — cause confusion and delay. There’s no clear, consistent process for moving work between roles, which results in inefficiencies and a lack of visibility.
Solution & Design
Though the design phase began after my departure, I delivered a foundation that set the next phase up for success:
Personas grounded in real workflow needs
Experience map visualizing the full current journey, key frustrations, and points of opportunity
“How Might We” reframing for ideation
Use cases and user flows that reflected both short-term MVP needs and long-term vision
Design opportunities grounded in user goals and strategic business shifts