Artful.ly is a web-based software platform that helps artists and arts organizations run their businesses. As Director of Product Management, I organized and led a team to research, design, develop, launch, and manage this product.
While building Artful.ly I wore many hats and gained a lot of hands-on product development experience.
USER RESEARCH
I sat at the elbows of dozens of arts administrators and watched them manage a hundred tasks. We talked about their work, tools, and dreams for better business practices. I led focus groups and community design sessions to better understand these users’ common needs and priorities. I created personas, use cases, user stories, and journey maps. After we launched, I engaged users through a public feature request forum and onboarding demonstrations.
PRODUCT DESIGN
Artful.ly’s earliest designs were marker sketches on chart paper! I worked with front-end engineers to plan the platform’s user flows and information architecture. I used tools such as OmniGraffle, Balsamiq, Illustrator, and inVision to create wireframes. In later iterations, I worked with UX designers to refine the look of the app and define a cohesive experience for users working across Artful.ly and other Fractured Atlas tools.
FEATURE DEVELOPMENT
I worked with numerous staff and contract engineers. I became familiar with their tools including HTML, CSS, Javascript, Ruby on Rails, GitHub, Heroku, APIs, Drupal, WordPress, etc. We built features for event ticketing, discount codes, membership management, festival passes, box office sales, embeddable sales widgets, checking in tickets via iPhone, scanning ticket QR codes, customer relationship management, Boolean searches, syncing with MailChimp, importing past sales and contact records, creating list segments, defining relationships between records, detecting and merging duplicate records, donation pages, suggested giving levels, creating and managing fundraising campaigns, tracking pledges, and many many more. I defined requirements for all these features, managed QA and acceptance testing, and shepherded their launch.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Prioritizing new features, bug fixes, and maintenance takes time and a good system. Early on, I used Pivotal Tracker, Basecamp, and Gantt Charts. Eventually, we moved to Trello and I developed templates that allowed all staff to submit requests and log bugs. I triaged all these requests, and worked with senior engineers to plan work sprints. I led team status meetings, maintained roadmaps, defined KPIs, and kept various stakeholders up-to-date.
CUSTOMER SERVICE & EDUCATION
When Artful.ly was brand new, I was the customer service team! As adoption grew, we brought on team members to support our customers full time. I trained and supervised this staff, managed the creation of knowledge base articles and how-to videos, conducted demos for high-value customers, and continued to help troubleshoot difficult customer issues. I also oversaw our migration from a home-grown helpdesk platform to Zendesk and worked with team members to improve customer service KPIs.
PRODUCT MARKETING
From launch, through growth, I led the product vision for Artful.ly and its marketplace positioning. I worked with graphic designers to create Artful.ly’s logo, style guidelines, and brand collateral. I wrote and managed the production of the product video. I conducted public demos of Artful.ly, planned the launch event, and worked with our PR firm to get articles about Artful.ly placed in national news outlets.