Gannett

Senior Director, Product Design

Scaling product design to meet the growing marketing needs of small business owners.

WordStream, a Gannett-owned SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform, helps small and midsize businesses succeed with digital advertising across Google, Facebook, and Bing. As the Head of Design, I joined to evolve the platform’s customer experience, modernize the design practice, and improve business performance in a highly competitive adtech landscape.

After improving the core Wordstream platform, I took on the opportunity to lead the organizational redesign and guide the B2B product design work for Gannett–partnering with executives across all digital ad management platforms. In this role, I shaped our long-term strategy to cross-sell and gain efficiencies in a largely commoditized marketplace.

Approach

I focused on addressing short- and long-term objectives simultaneously. Actively engaging partners and direct reports on four key mandates.

Improve the core product experience

  • Led the redesign of flagship Google Ads and Facebook Ads optimization workflows—simplifying core flows and surfacing insights earlier in the journey.

  • Integrated real-time campaign diagnostics and success benchmarks to increase confidence for less technical customers.

  • Introduced self-service onboarding improvements that lifted trial conversion and reduced customer support burdens (reduced call-time and account troubleshooting)

Build a culture around our customers

By creating greater shared understanding of our customers expectations and challenges, I was able to lead the transformational work–improving the overall product experience and culture–while achieving business objectives of greater retention and engagement.

  • Created a customer insights dashboard used by product, marketing, sales, support, and executives to deepen insights, build empathy, and drive decision-making. Implemented new customer feedback loops

  • Established new innovation and testing practices including insight-tagging, usability testing, and alpha/beta customer testing.

  • Partnered with Marketing to launch NPS and customer effort score tracking by feature area.

Establishing a scalable design practice

I believe that Design is a strategic business driver that often gets challenged by the demand to execute. Whether using AI or more traditional production methods, Design need to work efficiently and move earlier in the process–focusing on high value problem-solving and planning.

  • Launched WordStream’s first design system, aligned with React component libraries and CMS needs

  • Created standard design-engineering practices, including ceremonies, documentation, version control, and QA alignment

  • Introduced new tools like Figma and FullStory to speed up production and insight collection

Contribute to Gannett’s broader strategy

  • Partnered with Gannett’s broader B2B and SaaS leads to define brand consistency, shared component architecture, and platform integration strategy.

  • Developed internal narratives and demos that helped position WordStream within Gannett’s enterprise offering to local business advertisers.

Impact

97%

Retention Rate. Highest ever achieved.

5%

Lift in average customer spend

33%

Improvement in product usability

Takeaways

WordStream is not fully integrated into Gannett’s LocalIQ platform.

My time at Gannett taught me a great deal of how to lead a design practice and how to navigate large organizations from an internal (vs. consultant) role.