Release Notes

Over the course of my time at Lilypad I have overseen dozens of successful mobile and web releases as both a product manager and a product marketer. I made it a focus to deliver release notes that spoke to our users in an authentic, down-to-earth way. Over time I developed the brand voice and honed in on an eye-catching design style that set us apart from the run-of-the-mill software common in our industry.

Through these release notes we inspired user confidence by showcasing consistent product progress and engaging our customers directly with shout-outs to clients that helped us catch bugs we fixed in the release. We consistently blew industry averages out of the water for opens and clicks. The email CTAs dramatically improved new app downloads and engagement with our customer success team. Nothing is quite as satisfying as getting an ecstatic thank you email from a user after a release. Click on the images to read them yourself.

Feature Release

Lilypad is a mobile-first CRM for beverage alcohol sales teams. Basic Lilypad users receive automated weekly email recaps of their performance and their managers receive emails summarizing their entire team’s performance. I was responsible for bringing a fresh design to these email recaps. Our goal was to provide easily digested, actionable insights to our users based on their role in order to drive adoption and retention.

I interviewed and surveyed our users from entry-level sales reps to executive leadership to figure out what was most important to them. I analyzed the results I determined the most impactful information I could send to both user groups, then got to work designing. You can see the reps ultimately cared most about hitting their target so gut check on their goals was best. Managers wanted to see their sales dollars first followed by anything unusual they might need to take action on.

Feature Release

Beverage alcohol suppliers often leverage incentive plans to encourage sales execution. These incentive plans can get complicated for large teams – plans are often unique to specific regions, factor in different types of sales activities, and track actual invoice values. For most suppliers, tracking and calculating payout is a manual process that eats up resources and leaves reps in the dark until it’s too late.

The Lilypad Incentives module drives rep behavior by tracking their activities and sales invoices automatically, then showing them in real-time exactly what action to take to get their cash payout. I started by creating user groups to understand our clients’ current processes and gather requirements. The clients had a lot of oddly specific requests and ultimately we created a set of incentive types that accommodated most use cases.

The feature involved creating a tool for managers to set up their incentive targets, a web and mobile view for reps to see their progress, as well as reports where managers can get a bird’s eye view of the team. I managed the entire development lifecycle of the feature from delivering scope and spec to day-to-day management of our designers and developers to beta testing with our user groups.