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).

Export screens (Figma)
Customised export interfaces for internal and external teams​

Sprite Sheet Component (Figma)
Sprite sheet animation tool enabling non-technical designers to create highly animated ads

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.
