I was hired and, on my first day, received the brief: "We need a campaign reporting tool, and here’s the research we’ve done so far." I was handed a report and assigned the task of designing the product. While the engineering team began setting up the pipelines and necessary infrastructure, I kicked off the project by digging deeper into the product’s goals, its users, and the problems it aimed to solve. I quickly began reaching out to users and stakeholders to better understand their motivations and expectations for this new tool.

During the first few weeks, I worked with my product counterpart to define the initial MVP and began planning several sprints ahead. In parallel, I continued interviewing users and validating ideas, sometimes even using handwritten sketches and rough concepts to gather early feedback.

With the first MVP released, we began receiving behavioural data. Some time later, a UX researcher joined the team, allowing us to run simultaneous discovery and delivery tracks to continue planning new flows and features. While I focused on designing new screens and supporting the engineering team as needed, I partnered with the researcher to stay engaged with users and stakeholders, helping to define priorities and validate new features and user flows.

After a few months of the product being live in production, my UX research partner and I ideate a strategy to gather enough insights to shape the following year’s roadmap for Vantage. This led to a tour across the Nordic countries, where we interviewed users, organised workshops to prioritise problem areas, tested proposals, and gathered new business requirements.

I particularly remember this phase as I decided not to present myself as the UX designer behind the tool, but rather as another researcher, allowing users to be more brutally honest with their feedback. Some of the feedback was difficult to hear 🥲, especially after investing so much energy into the designs, but it was incredibly enlightening. At the time, I lacked significant experience in UX research, but partnering with the researcher proved to be one of the best decisions I made. As a designer who was more focused on graphic design at the time, I grew tremendously through this research-driven experience!

Another highlight of this project was the opportunity to collaborate with other UX designers to establish a unified internal branding. Although Vantage was an internal product, we were developing four additional products and aimed to create a consistent branding and user experience across all of them. As mentioned in the UX Lead use case, team identity plays a vital role for many reasons, and we wanted to offer a more robust and engaging suite of internal tools for our users within the company.

We developed a style guide and design system, which was implemented across all internal tools for Schibsted’s media departments at the time. The branding not only ensured visual consistency across our products but also led to the creation of a cross-team guild, bringing together individuals from various backgrounds to define and deliver a set of UI kits. These kits enabled engineers to build consistent interfaces more quickly and efficiently.