Creative
Studio

An ad building application that makes building ads easy
The challenge
After acquiring three companies, GumGum's global Ad Building Design Team faced significant workflow obstacles:
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Tedious manual asset exporting from Photoshop
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Conflicting design approaches (some designers coded, others didn't)
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Inefficient approval processes for external users
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Inconsistent project development relying on "copy-pasting" old templates


A previous designer workflow that consisted of an animation timeline with no coding involved

A previous designer workflow that consisted of purely just front-end development, as if hand-coding a traditional website
The Process
As a Product Manager/Product Design hybrid, I:
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Conducted 30+ hours of user research to identify pain points
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Held collaborative workshops with engineers to build cross-team empathy
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Prototyped two different approaches:
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A timeline editor similar to After Effects
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A Photoshop file parser that automatically positioned and animated assets
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Led user testing sessions to identify the most resonant solution
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Designed key interfaces in Figma
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Created and validated critical feature workflows
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Implemented analytics tracking
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Advocated for the product, winning over resistant designers

The Solution
We created a unified platform that:
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Automatically exports assets from Photoshop
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Bridges the coding divide with a flexible component system
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Streamlines authentication through domain whitelisting and magic links
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Reduces creative development time by 50%

Key Innovations
Intelligent authentication flow (Miro)
Intelligent authentication flow that detects user domains depending on whether they are internal, external (whitelisted) or external (not whitelisted).

Creative Browser
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This home page interface added even more value to the tool, helping strengthen our business case. It solved a few problems:
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It helped designers search for previous creatives
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It closed the loop, allowing them to see the actual metrics from the creatives they designed
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It allowed sales to search for and create collections of previous mock ups that they could show clients, reducing design requests


Results
Designers now build ads in half the time, with a platform that unifies workflows while maintaining flexibility for different working styles. The solution transformed a fragmented process into a streamlined, efficient creative ecosystem.