Design at the scale of customer feedback

Problem

In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, producing high-quality short-form video content at scale has become a critical business need. However, the creative production process remained fragmented, inefficient, and costly. At Shook Digital, we identified a fundamental challenge that was preventing marketing teams from unleashing their full creative potential: the disjointed ecosystem of tools and workflows in short-form video production.

Marketing teams were struggling with a complex production environment that hindered their creative output and efficiency. They were forced to use multiple disconnected tools for example:

• Google Sheets for planning
• Notion for scripts
• Dedicated platforms for video reviews
• Various publishing platforms

This process created significant inefficiencies and knowledge gaps between steps. As videos moved through the production pipeline, contextual information was frequently lost; notifications were abundant but rarely informative, chat interfaces were unintuitive, and teams struggled to maintain clarity about what needed to happen next to move productions forward. The traditional approach to video production compounded these issues by requiring creators to shoot entire videos multiple times for different variations, resulting in wasted effort, increased costs, and extended production timelines.

These interconnected challenges created a significant market opportunity. Marketing teams desperately needed a unified platform that could streamline the entire video production process while maintaining creative control and quality. They needed a solution that would transform disjointed workflows into a cohesive, efficient system that empowered rather than hindered creative teams.

Audience

Our solution targeted marketing communication teams who needed to produce high-quality, short-form video content at scale. These teams operated as complex ecosystems of collaborators, including in-house marketers responsible for campaign strategy and ROI measurement, content strategists developing scripts and creative direction, external creators handling filming and editing, and project managers overseeing the entire production pipeline. Each role brought unique perspectives and needs to the table, but all were united by the common challenge of producing effective video content efficiently.

These diverse stakeholders faced pressure to produce more content with increasingly limited resources while maintaining creative quality and campaign effectiveness. The challenge was particularly hard for teams working in hybrid environments across multiple locations, where distance further complicated already complex collaboration processes. Their workdays were dominated by excessive context-switching between tools, frustration with tracking production status, and difficulty maintaining clear accountability throughout projects. Creating variations for A/B testing was particularly inefficient under traditional production methods. When reviewing content, teams struggled to provide precise, actionable feedback on specific moments in videos, leading to misunderstandings and revision cycles. Perhaps most concerning was the absence of integrated performance metrics that could connect production decisions to campaign outcomes, leaving teams unable to systematically improve their approach based on past results.

Methodology

As the sole designer at Shook Digital, I led the design efforts in close collaboration with five developers, one product manager, and approximately ten stakeholders on the customer side. My approach was to balance the ambiguity that is inherent in an early-stage startup with the need to establish scalable design processes that could grow with our company.

Research

I established a barebone but effective research framework that prioritized customer interaction across our product team. Working closely with our product manager, I ensured that we participated in as many customer calls as possible, deliberately including developers who would ultimately build the solutions we were designing. This cross-functional exposure to user needs created a shared understanding that proved invaluable during implementation. After customers were using our product, we quickly scheduled follow-up calls to gather immediate feedback, allowing us to iterate rapidly and address emerging needs before they became entrenched problems.

For complex features that were difficult to articulate through conversation alone, I created visual prototypes that served as conversation starters. These tangible artifacts helped us probe deeper into customer challenges and refine our understanding of their underlying needs. One notable example of this approach was when a seemingly straightforward request for quality assurance evolved through prototype-driven conversations into a comprehensive tagging system with both manual and automatic capabilities.

Using AI as strategic interventions

A crucial aspect of my design philosophy was implementing "AI as interventions". What that meant was to strategically inject automation into specific parts of the workflow without replacing the meaningful creative work humans do best. This approach recognized that while AI could transform certain aspects of video production, the true value came from amplifying human creativity rather than attempting to replace it.

By mapping the customer journey, I identified specific friction points where automation could make the most impact. We designed an AI-powered system that could stitch together different video components into multiple variations, eliminating redundant filming sessions while preserving creative control over each element. Our notification system provided just enough information to keep productions moving forward without overwhelming users. The tagging system we created (based on that customer feedback on quality assurance mentioned above) combined manual human insight with automatic classification to support both quality assurance during production and valuable learning after campaign completion.

In order to ensure transparency we had to make sure that:

• Users always understood when AI was being used
• What AI was doing specifically
• How the users could review and modify its output
• The limitations of the technology

This transparency built trust in the system while maintaining human oversight of critical creative decisions, ensuring our platform enhanced rather than diminished the human element in video production.

Designing

My design process began where all good design should: with pen and paper. I sketched initial concepts and discussed them with the team before committing to digital designs, allowing us to explore possibilities broadly before narrowing our focus. This approach helped secure team alignment on key concepts before investing significant time in high-fidelity designs, enabling us to "kill" ideas that wouldn't work early in the process and focus our limited resources on the most promising solutions.

For complex features like the notification system and chat experience, I created multiple iterations based on continuous customer feedback, refining each version to better address the needs of different user roles. Working closely with developers throughout the process ensured that designs were technically feasible while pushing the boundaries of what our platform could achieve.

Through this collaborative process, we developed solutions that were able to help teams collaborate better on video content. For example:

1. Time-specific video comments allowed precise feedback on exact moments in videos, eliminating the confusion of traditional text feedback.
2. Role-based comment visibility created appropriate communication channels for different stakeholders, respecting organizational boundaries while maintaining transparency where it mattered.
3. Our comprehensive production management system integrated calendar views, deadline tracking, and performance metrics into a cohesive whole that supported the entire video production lifecycle.

Results

Customer impact

The modular production approach changed how teams created video content, reducing filming time by up to 60% by allowing creators to shoot different modules once rather than entire videos multiple times. What had previously been a weeks-long process was compressed into days, giving marketing teams agility in responding to market opportunities on platforms like TikTok. This efficiency gain alone represented significant cost savings and a competitive advantage for customers.

Communication clarity improved dramatically. Time-specific commenting allowed precise feedback on exact moments in videos, while mentioning functionality ensured the right people saw important messages. Role-based visibility created appropriate communication channels for different stakeholders, respecting organizational boundaries while maintaining transparency. The result was fewer revision cycles and faster time-to-approval, accelerating the entire production pipeline.

By bringing planning, creation, review, and performance analysis into one cohesive platform, we eliminated the need for 4-5 separate tools that teams had previously cobbled together. This consolidation reduced context switching and information loss, creating a seamless experience that preserved creative momentum throughout the production process. Perhaps most importantly, the integrated metrics and tagging system we developed allowed teams to learn systematically from past productions, continuously improving their video content strategy based on real performance data rather than intuition alone.

Business impact

The business impact of my design work extended beyond improved user experience. Early validation with customers and exploring their pain point together proved crucial in our product-market fit journey, confirming that we were addressing genuine market needs in ways that customers valued.

By addressing end-to-end workflows, we evolved from being perceived as just a video tool or agency to a comprehensive creative platform. This repositioning increased our potential market size, opening new growth opportunities for the business. Our tightly aligned design and development process enabled a rapid efficiency, allowing us to ship in two weeks major features that actually worked.

By addressing core workflow pain points that had long frustrated marketing teams, we created a solution that became integral to our customers' operations.

Technical achievements

From a technical perspective, we established a modular design system with patterns that could scale as the product grew, ensuring visual and interaction consistency while enabling rapid iteration. The close collaboration between design and development resulted in higher quality implementation with fewer revisions, accelerating our development cycle while maintaining product excellence. I even personally contributed code improvements using AI-assisted development tools like Cursor, enhancing product quality while maintaining my primary focus on design.

Key Learnings

1. Embrace ambiguity as a design process: What initially seemed like ambiguous customer requests often contained hidden needs that led to our most innovative solutions.

2. Challenge assumptions continuously: One of our fundamental assumptions was that productions should always contain complete project information. In practice, we discovered that customers resisted filling in detailed information, leading us to make many fields optional rather than mandatory.

3. Balance artificial and human intelligence: Our most successful features maintained the perfect balance between automation and human control.

4. Provide multiple communication layers: Different stakeholders needed different views of the same project.

5. Start simple, scale thoughtfully: In a startup environment, it's tempting to build comprehensive solutions immediately.

6. Design for the ecosystem, not just the tool: By understanding the entire production ecosystem (from ideation to performance analysis) we created a platform that addressed end-to-end workflows rather than optimizing isolated tasks.