Designing Revenue Generating Ideas & the Design Team
My time at Shippo can be divided into designing 0-1 revenue generating products and contributing to forming the Design Team at Shippo. I was the first designer that the Head of Design hired, and I contributed to the hiring of 2 staff-level designers, and a senior designer.
Team formation responsibilities
Candidate interviews
Career ladder rubric
Broader team responsibilities
Design system redefinition
Merchant workflows definition
Workshop feedback system
What is Shippo?
Shippo is the shipping layer of the internet. What that means is a merchant is able to purchase shipping labels in bulk based on the orders they receive in their stores (i.e. Shopify, Wix, Magento…etc) from Shippo at a discounted price. We operate on 2 layers — Web Application and API.
I was one of 4 designers working on the web application. The web application is the merchant facing interface, that powers the purchasing of labels, but we had bigger ambition to expand to other touch points within the fulfillment process.
Responsibility — New products that extend beyond purchasing labels
I was the designer responsible for new products within the web application team. During the discovery journey, I wasn’t paired with a product peer (the Product team was short handed and in the midst of staffing their team). I was updating the Director of Product and Head of Product Design of my progress and they were thought partners for me.
As part of the New Products Vertical, I was responsible for the following products:
Intelligence
Loyalty + Billing Experience
Tracking
Journey beyond shipping labels
When I was hired back in 2021, Shippo was in their Series D round, with a very solid core product — purchasing shipping labels at a discounted price. As Laura and the executive team looked forward, what they were most concern with was how to expand Shippo’s reach with merchants, and particularly, how else can we impact the fulfillment journey other than labels?
Business Intelligence — Showing value through bespoke data
A lot of the merchants are seeing benefits to understanding their shipping spend, where they can cut costs and where they should focus on. At the same time, Customer Support Managers (CSMs) are spending 50% of their time pulling, cleaning data, and creating a presentation for the clients.
How might we productize our offering to create even more loyalty and value for our merchants with intelligence?
We took a look across our product and see how we can integrate smart recommendations.
Northstar
It takes significant effort to build in recommendations across our product.
Is there a way we can demonstrate value more immediately?
Half way through the project, we had an internal re-organization which consisted of leadership changes, and needed to ship this project out quickly. We paired it back and focused strictly on Spend, Surcharges and a breakdown of Label Purchases by carriers.
