Choozle
Helping a Digital Advertising Platform Reduce Costs & Increase Speed to Production Through Design Enablement
Engagement Overview
Choozle is a digital advertising software platform that leverages detailed consumer data to power programmatic advertising campaigns across display, connected TV, video, mobile, and other mediums. Choozle was looking to improve its channel-model fit by expanding its current product functionality to encompass a suite of new integrations affording new capabilities.
In 2024, Choozle partnered with Crafted to accelerate the team’s progress towards introducing these new capabilities. Crafted partnered with Choozle’s team to help them better empathize with their customers, and leverage their already robust suite of analytics tools that they had available to observe their customers’ behavior.
Though the partnership was only eight weeks in duration, Crafted was able to bring immediate horsepower to Choozle's roadmap and scale their team's ability to deliver long-term.
Goals
“We [were] embarking on a new product roadmap initiative to elevate Choozle's second product line and bring it to the market,” said Mike Baldassare, Director of Product and Engineering Operations at Choozle. “I needed to kick-start the product design and discovery process with a fully embedded team member while also moving the organization forward with aspects of product-led and Balanced Team approaches.”
Mike identified three primary objectives for engaging Crafted:
First, to expedite the design process for updating their latest integration.
Second, to enhance design and discovery phases by incorporating direct feedback from users.
Third, to significantly improve their product design methods using standardized processes, complemented by direct mentorship and training for their in-house designers.
Approach
Design Operations as Enablement
Through a short-term engagement, we achieved lasting impact by piloting and testing new DesignOps strategies (to learn more about DesignOps, check out our white paper).
Choozle faced challenges with its design/engineering collaboration process, particularly the rising costs of tools to facilitate said collaboration. Additionally, the designers’ primary tool for iterations was also serving as the repository for final designs, complicating their workflow. After evaluating several alternatives, the team chose Zeplin because it was cost-effective, offered strong design library capabilities, and integrated well with Storybook, which the engineering team already used.
Choosing the right tools often involves deciding what not to use. We experimented with Omlet to assess the coverage of components in Choozle’s production application. Although the team intended to adopt a component-driven approach using MUI for their front-end components, they found that a tool for measuring reuse and engineering compliance did not align with the organization’s current objectives. We also considered ResearchOps tools like Dovetail. However, since the team had a well-established Confluence space for documenting design and product decisions, we opted to enhance the existing standardized processes across their product, design, and engineering teams instead of integrating a new system.
Novel Ways of Using Existing Tools as Enablement
The team had been using FullStory and Pendo for many years, and therefore had a wealth of robust customer information.
In parallel, the product team had been looking to refresh some outdated customer personas. Through collaborative workshops with designers, engineers, and the product team, we synthesized our collective knowledge about Choozle’s customers and users. However, what happens from there? One way we sought to scale the exploration was by hypothesizing, “what sort of tasks might this persona uniquely perform in Choozle?”
We took those hypotheses to FullStory. We created queries to identify sessions within their thousands of observed user sessions. We then compared the results: were there any customers that the team intimately knew? Taking what they knew about that customer, did the persona align with the person?
After analyzing some users, we created segments in FullStory for each behavioral persona. This enabled the personas not only to live in Confluence or a Miro board, but to be available for correlating them with the wealth of other data in their FullStory. For example, did one persona rage-click more than another?
By behaviorally mapping certain usage patterns through the personas to actual users, Choozle was able to strategically identify potential users to get on the phone with in future research sessions, as well as identify other behavioral patterns unique or specific to that persona.
Mentorship as Enablement
Crafted seamlessly integrated with Choozle’s in-house design team, which consisted of one designer and one hybrid front-end engineer/designer. Throughout our collaboration, Crafted participated in daily standups, weekly planning meetings, and daily design team interactions, including ad-hoc design reviews and sketching sessions. We also provided backup during the design review phase of the development process.
Initially, the hybrid front-end designer/engineer was temporarily filling a staffing gap. Over time, their growing interest and proficiency in design led the team to consider maintaining their dual role permanently. Crafted not only collaborated with them on daily design tasks but also mentored them in design techniques and principles.
Outcomes
What the Choozle Team Had to Say
“We were impressed with their seamless integration into our team and how they just seemed to ‘get it,’ which refers to how hard it is to work in an ever-changing landscape of technology. They delivered results despite how much things had changed, even in an 8-week engagement. It has me wanting more of it.”
“Working with [Crafted] helped to upgrade my design skills, and helped me to think about the problem at hand and how to go about solving it in a thoughtful, UX-forward approach. Not only was [their designer] kind and a great mentor, but he was patient and unbiased in his explanations. He is a great teacher and I’d relish the opportunity to work alongside him once more.”
Further, Crafted helped achieve a 30% reduction in costs through piloting, testing, and selecting alternative DesignOps toolings for the collaboration between design and engineering.
Mike mentioned some anecdotal benefits to the Crafted partnership. He perceived a “2x” increase in speed to design, from concept to production. He also cited “team morale increased based on regular check-ins.”
Conclusion
Enablement takes many forms. While we do have tools that we like and have seen to be effective with other clients, we leveraged existing tools Choozle was already familiar with to accelerate our work. While it can be nice to have a playbook, Crafted believes that sometimes the best way to enable a team is by helping them get the most out of what they already know.
Our partnership with Choozle was brief but fruitful; while we might not have partnered long enough to see their new features all the way from discovery to development, we…
Accelerated designs
Brought user insights into the design process
And made significant, meaningful progress elevating the team’s product design approach
Plan to work as partners again in the near future to continue our progress
Does your team need design enablement to improve cross-functional collaboration, reduce costs, and increase speed to market? Reach out to Crafted and we’ll be in touch ASAP to show you how we can help!
