At Carousell, the marketing team needed engineers for almost every campaign. I designed internal tools that let them do it on their own, from interviews with the team to prototypes and handoff.
Every campaign ran through the same loop. Marketing sent a request, an engineer set it up in the backend, and any change started the loop again. Campaign pages were squeezed onto listing pages, and surveys ran on third-party tools that were costly and hard to change. The team could plan campaigns faster than they could launch them.
I designed three tools that work as one system:
Collections and forms drop into a landing page as blocks, so marketing can launch a full campaign without engineers. All three share the same patterns, so learning one makes the others feel familiar.
To promote a category, marketing had to ask engineers to set up a listing collection in the backend. Every change meant another round of back and forth. I interviewed the team to learn what they needed to see first, then designed a tool to create and manage collections themselves.
Campaign pages were often squeezed onto listing pages. They were rigid and easy to miss. I reviewed past campaigns and talked to the team about how they built them, then designed a builder around what I found.
The team’s feedback after release was positive. Next on the list were scheduling, so campaigns go live on time without someone watching the clock, and preview, so mistakes get caught before publishing.
As the business grew, we needed a way to run surveys and collect leads at scale, and third-party tools were costly and hard to change. I designed an in-house form builder for surveys and lead forms.
Setting up a campaign takes less time, since marketers no longer wait on engineers for each step. They also have more tools to work with: collections, campaign pages and surveys they can mix for each campaign. Engineers, in turn, got their time back for product work. And with our own tools in place, we dropped a paid third-party service, cutting costs by 17%.
Designing for business users is still user-centered design. Interviews and workflow reviews showed that marketers needed two things: less manual work, and confidence that a campaign was set up right. Simple, consistent patterns made complex tasks feel easy, and feedback after each release guided the next round. That is why scheduling and preview came next: both answer the same need for confidence before a campaign goes live.
