Accelerating enterprise outreach through a scalable, self-serve Playbook platform

Helping banks, telcos, and utilities support customers in debt by transforming a fragmented, technical workflow into a unified, visual journey builder that non-technical teams can use with confidence.

The new Playbooks experience enabled Symend’s clients to design, validate, and launch treatment strategies without relying on engineering or data science teams. This shift:

  • Increased user autonomy and reduced dependency on technical specialists

  • Unified what used to be 3+ separate apps into a single, predictable interface

  • Reduced configuration errors and shortened build time for new strategies

  • Established the design system and component foundations for future automation and governed, scalable UI

  • Has been used to treat 100M+ customers from debt

Impact

I was the product designer owning the Playbook designer experience and the 0→1 design system that underpinned it, across a multi-year migration from a code-based system.

Role

Team

I worked in a triad with product and engineering leaders, alongside 2 product designers, 2 PMs, multiple engineers, and 1 QA. We designed within the constraints of existing back-end services and a React flow-editor library, ensuring the vision was both feasible and scalable.

High-Stakes Problem

Symend helps banks, telcos, and utilities support customers in debt through tailored, multi-channel engagement strategies. Those strategies were being designed in a cluster of legacy, code-driven tools that were:

  • Hard to learn, easy to misconfigure, and impossible to see end-to-end

  • Fragmented across separate apps for campaigns, treatments, segmentation, experiments, and content

  • Accessible mainly to technical power users in engineering and data science

For clients and internal teams, this meant slow onboarding, high operational overhead, and real risk: the wrong outreach at the wrong time can damage customer trust and create regulatory exposure, especially at the scale of 100M+ customers.

The business needed a self-serve Playbook designer that would let non-technical teams design, validate, and iterate on treatment strategies safely in a single, unified, visual platform.

Research and analysis → key insights

Existing product audit

  • UI + component library review

  • Task-flow + navigation mapping across legacy apps

  • Contextual observation + interviews

    • Observed 8 Symend employees (Client Ops, Solutions Architects, Behavioural Scientists)

    • Captured 30+ data points across 5 core functional areas

    • Affinity mapping to synthesize themes

  • Persona creation

    • “Patty” – central design persona, responsible for treatment strategies and performance

External / competitive research

  • Feature + pattern benchmarking against tools like HubSpot, Adobe Campaign, Persado, Mailchimp

  • Industry best practices for journey builders, validation UIs, node-based editors

  • Feasibility exploration

    • Early pairing with engineering on a React node-based editor to understand technical constraints and opportunities

From this work, three direction-setting insights emerged:

Why this mattered

Symend’s clients rely on treatment strategies to guide how they reach millions of customers during sensitive financial moments. But the legacy approach was scattered across multiple tools, required deep technical knowledge, and left users unsure if their strategies were configured correctly.

The redesigned Playbooks experience:

  • consolidated multiple apps into one

  • reduced reliance on technical teams

  • improved clarity, accuracy, and confidence

  • empowered users to build and validate strategies independently

Impact: Playbooks became the unified way Symend clients reach and support 100M+ customers across telco, banking, and utilities.

Understanding why strategy creation was so much harder than it needed to be

Symend’s original workflow for designing treatment paths was scattered across multiple legacy tools:

  • one app for content

  • one for segmentation logic

  • one for sending events

  • and another for visualizing paths

This created:

  • Fragmentation - users constantly switched tools

  • Cognitive load - no single view of “what’s happening, where, and why”

  • High reliance on technical experts - only a few internal SMEs understood the system end-to-end

  • No visual validation - errors surfaced late, often during engineering handoff

  • Slow feedback loops - small changes required multi-team coordination

From interviewing strategists, data specialists, client service teams, and leads, one theme emerged clearly:

“I just want to see what’s happening and know it’s right before activating it.”

This became the opportunity: create a unified, visual, self-service Playbook builder.

Legacy authoring tools were fragmented, inconsistent, and required technical support.

Designing for clarity, predictability, and confidence

(Placeholder visual: early flow sketches or conceptual boxes)

From the research, three design pillars emerged:

1. Put important things within reach

Users needed a way to inspect content, rules, timing, and segmentation without leaving the canvas.

2. Reduce friction through guidance

The system should proactively surface issues and guide decision-making.

3. Empower users through exploration

Playbooks needed to feel safe to experiment with—without risking broken logic or mis-configured outreach.

These principles guided the design of:

  • A consolidated visual canvas

  • Contextual side panels for editing

  • Familiar drag-and-drop interactions

  • Clear, consistent patterns for flow controls

  • Inline validation and error grouping

The outcome:
A single, predictable place where users could design, test, and validate a strategy from end to end.

Making complexity feel simple (and familiar)

(Placeholder visual: side-by-side comparison of old vs. new card design)

To reduce the learning curve, I drew from familiar mental models:

  • flowchart logic (draw.io, Miro)

  • message builders (HubSpot)

  • personalization patterns (Mailchimp)

  • side panel editing (modern web apps like Notion / Figma)

This allowed users to:

  • Click any step to view details instantly

  • Edit messages, rules, controls, and timing from a single pattern

  • Move or duplicate steps intuitively

  • Understand the entire journey at a glance

The interface emphasized clarity:

  • consistent card hierarchy

  • intuitive iconography

  • semantic colors

  • minimized chrome

  • predictable placement of actions

This made even complex strategies feel manageable and easy to reason about.

The fragmented, multi-tool ecosystem we were tasked with untangling

Through interviews, shadowing sessions, and platform audits, it became clear that strategy creation was far more difficult than it needed to be. Workflows were fragmented across four different internal tools, requiring strategists to bounce between message builders, segmentation rules, and experimentation controls just to complete a single journey. Nothing existed in one place, and no one had visibility into end-to-end logic.

Strategists described the experience as:

  • “disconnected and fragile,”

  • “difficult to trust,”

  • and “impossible to visualize.”

This reality revealed a compelling opportunity: build a single, unified system that gives users clarity, confidence, and control from start to finish.