The Business Problem
Mobile was quietly bleeding money
Brandwatch had four separate mobile apps — each built for different acquisition paths over five years of mergers. By 2022, mobile churn was a top-3 cancellation reason, but nobody had quantified what that actually cost.
I led the discovery work to put a number on it: $60K+ ARR directly attributable to mobile experience failures, surfaced through exit interviews, support tickets, and NPS analysis.
Four apps. Zero shared experience.
My Role
Building the case for a path forward
As design manager, I owned the full discovery arc: from stakeholder alignment to research execution to validated vision. This wasn't a solo project — I coordinated across product, engineering, and leadership to build consensus around a direction the company had been avoiding for years.
My deliverables: a churn diagnosis with dollar figures, a consolidated persona framework, a validated nav architecture, and a publishing flow prototype ready for handoff.
The Insight
Fragmentation & reliability issues
Users weren't complaining about missing features — they were complaining about having to context-switch between four apps to complete one workflow. The core problem was identity fragmentation: each app had its own login, its own notification model, its own interaction patterns.
Reliability was the second knife: publishing failures on mobile with no feedback loop meant users stopped trusting the app for anything time-sensitive.
The Research
Three personas, three use cases
Rather than designing for an abstract "mobile user," we collapsed the research into three distinct Jobs-to-be-Done personas — each representing a different mobile context and failure mode.
The Manager
Senior social media manager overseeing global brand accounts. Approves content across time zones on the go.
Key Need
Approve posts in under 10 seconds
The Creator
Content creator publishing real-time social content. Needs to react fast to trends and moments.
Key Need
Publish Instagram stories in real-time
The Responder
Community manager handling mentions and DMs across platforms. Must catch crises before they escalate.
Key Need
Never miss a critical mention
The Process
From diagnosis to validated vision
Phase 1
Diagnosis
Mapped all four apps, documented feature overlap, and quantified the duplication cost in ARR churn through exit interviews and support data.
Phase 2
Research & Synthesis
9 user interviews, 4 stakeholder sessions, competitive analysis of 9 products. Synthesised into persona frameworks and a validated Jobs-to-be-Done map.
Phase 3
Vision & Validation
Prototyped a unified nav architecture and two core flows (publishing and monitoring). Validated with users before handing off to engineering.
Unified nav architecture concept
Publishing flow prototype
The Outcome
Groundwork laid, now being built upon
The vision was validated with users and presented to leadership. The consolidation roadmap was approved — then Cision acquired Brandwatch, pausing the initiative.
The research didn't disappear. The persona framework and competitive analysis were reused when Brandwatch's current team restarted mobile renewal in 2024. The work outlived the original project.
