Accelerating enterprise outreach through a scalable, self-serve journey builder

Helping teams design and deploy treatment strategies used to reach 100M+ customers, by transforming a fragmented, technical workflow into a unified, visual platform that anyone could use with confidence.

The new Playbooks experience enabled Symend’s clients; banks, telcos, utilities, 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 build time for new strategies

  • Established the foundation for future automation, governed components, and scalable design

Impact

Research, conceptual models, UX flows, UI design, prototyping, usability testing, design system creation

Role

Team

A product manager, 3 engineers, data analysts, client-facing strategists, and the compliance/operations team to ensure the system met both business and user needs.

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.

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.