Overview
In 2021, Twitter's advertising platform had a reputation problem, and it had fully earned it. Despite powering a significant chunk of company revenue, Twitter Ads was widely seen as fragmented, dated, and falling further behind Meta and Google with every product cycle. The numbers backed it up: 78% of new SMB advertisers churned within their first 30 days. Powerful targeting, weak experience.
I led a four-month initiative to fix that. Not by patching individual features, but by building a real north star. Working with 16 designers organized across five focused workstreams, we mapped all nine stages of the advertiser journey and developed 65+ concepts that connected priorities across three product and engineering verticals, exposed gaps in the current roadmap, and gave teams a shared direction to orient around for the next 18–24 months.
Background
Twitter's advertising business had grown organically over years, resulting in a collection of disconnected experiences. Advertisers juggled multiple surfaces: Twitter Ads for campaign management, Twitter Analytics for organic performance, Twitter Business for educational content, and Quick Promote for simple promotions. No cohesive thread connected them. For small and medium-sized businesses especially, this complexity created friction that contributed to an alarming statistic: 78% of new advertisers churned within 30 days.
Research consistently showed that advertisers felt they were working too hard to use our tools. The most recent customer satisfaction data indicated that while Twitter offered powerful targeting and reach, the platform itself made it difficult to realize that value. Competitors were moving faster, introducing sophisticated creative tools, automated optimization, and seamless onboarding that made Twitter's offering feel dated.
At the same time, Twitter was investing heavily in performance advertising capabilities. New ad formats, improved measurement, better audience targeting. But these enhancements risked becoming isolated improvements unless we could articulate how they fit into a cohesive future vision for the entire advertiser experience.
Challenge
The advertising platform faced interconnected problems that couldn't be solved through isolated feature work:
Fragmented customer journey. Different advertiser segments encountered completely different experiences with no clear path for growth or graduation between them. From individual creators to enterprise brands, each group faced its own isolated tools. A creator using Quick Promote had no natural pathway to become a sophisticated campaign manager user.
Poor onboarding and retention. With nearly 4 out of 5 new advertisers leaving within a month, we were hemorrhaging potential customers who never got to experience Twitter's advertising value. Our onboarding provided little guidance, and advertisers struggled to set up campaigns, understand targeting options, and measure success.
Campaign management gaps. Compared to competitors, Twitter's campaign management capabilities felt rudimentary. Advertisers lacked sophisticated forecasting, struggled with audience definition, couldn't easily test and optimize, and found the interface clunky and time-consuming.
Limited creative tools. While competitors offered template libraries, creative assistance, and intuitive ad builders, Twitter provided only basic tools for creating ads. This put the burden entirely on advertisers to produce compelling creative without support.
Brand perception. Years of accumulated technical debt and incremental updates had cemented Twitter's reputation as difficult to use. Even as we improved individual features, the overall perception remained negative. Tactical fixes alone couldn't solve this problem.
Approach
Rather than attempting to solve everything at once, we established a structured approach that would allow us to move quickly while maintaining quality and team alignment. The project would run as five distinct but interconnected workstreams, each building toward a unified vision.
I assembled a cross-functional core team including 16 designers across product, systems, visual, and content disciplines. We brought in 2 design strategists to facilitate workshops and synthesize insights, plus a program manager to maintain organization. Researchers, product managers, engineers, and sales representatives participated in ideation and provided feedback throughout.
Each workstream followed the same three-week sprint structure. We began with workshops and prioritization exercises, producing design briefs that would guide the work. I worked directly with designers to align on strategy, brainstorm approaches, and workshop concepts. Designers then iterated through the remaining two weeks with regular critique sessions.
Workstream 1: Project One focused on creating a single, unified front door for all advertiser types. Rather than maintaining separate experiences for creators, small businesses, and enterprise clients, we would design a dynamic interface that could adapt to different customer needs while maintaining cohesion.
Workstream 2: First 30 addressed onboarding and retention by mapping the complete journey from a new advertiser's first 15 minutes through their first month. We designed guidance systems, smart defaults, educational content, and proactive support that would help advertisers succeed.
Workstream 3: Campaign Management tackled the end-to-end workflow for creating, monitoring, and optimizing campaigns. We examined audience definition, targeting, forecasting, bidding, testing, measurement, and brand safety. Each touchpoint needed to be more intuitive and powerful.
Workstream 4: Superior Ad Creation envisioned a creative workflow that would empower advertisers to build world-class ads directly within Twitter. This included template libraries, creative optimization recommendations, contextual previews, and support for emerging formats like Fleets and commerce ads.
Workstream 5: New Brand recognized that functionality improvements alone wouldn't change perception. We needed to signal a fundamental reset through updated visual design, brand identity, and a cohesive voice that made advertising on Twitter feel modern, approachable, and trustworthy.
Throughout the process, I worked to ensure our vision connected with existing initiatives rather than competing with them. We weren't designing in isolation. We needed to show how current roadmap items fit into this larger narrative while identifying gaps that needed attention.
Delivery
Over approximately four months, the team produced more than 65 concepts spanning 9 stages of the advertiser journey. Each concept was developed as detailed design work that could be understood and evaluated by stakeholders across the organization.
We organized these concepts into presentations tailored for different audiences. Product leadership needed to see strategic rationale and business impact, while engineering teams needed to understand technical feasibility and implementation approaches.
To make the vision tangible and memorable, we produced a highlight video that brought the concepts to life. Rather than static mockups, the video demonstrated how an advertiser's experience could flow across the platform, emphasizing the narrative of customer advancement from first-time user to sophisticated marketer. This video became a valuable tool for socializing the work and building excitement across the organization.
A unifying experience that prioritizes simplicity and self-service, unlocking the power of Twitter and ever-growing success from day 1 for everyone.
The vision articulated a unifying principle that helped stakeholders understand that we weren't just making incremental improvements. We were fundamentally reimagining how Twitter could serve advertisers at every stage of their journey.
Key deliverables included detailed designs for a unified Twitter Ads front door that dynamically adapted to different advertiser types, comprehensive onboarding flows with contextual guidance and educational content, enhanced campaign management workflows with better targeting and forecasting, an advanced ad composer with template libraries and creative tools, and a refreshed brand identity system.
Results
The vision project achieved its primary goal of aligning the organization around a shared direction for the advertiser experience. The work received enthusiastic support from senior leadership and generated tangible changes to how Twitter approached advertising product development:
Roadmap impact
More than half of the concepts developed through this process made it onto product roadmaps for 2022 planning, with additional concepts scheduled for 2023. The vision helped prioritize which initiatives would deliver the most value and how they should connect to create cohesive experiences.
Organizational changes
The clear articulation of our strategy for small and medium-sized business advertisers led leadership to consolidate all SMB-focused initiatives under my team. The VP of Revenue Design also expanded my role to build out a management layer overseeing the entire Ads Design team, recognizing the need for more coordinated leadership.
Design system evolution
Our partnership with the Design Systems team informed critical decisions for Twitter's new Visual Design Language rollout across the platform. The vision work established patterns and principles that would scale beyond Twitter Ads.
Cultural shift
Perhaps most importantly, the project demonstrated the value of design-led vision work. By investing time upfront to align on direction, we created a foundation that made subsequent execution more efficient and effective. Teams had a north star to reference when making tactical decisions.
Takeaways
Leading this vision work reinforced several lessons about design leadership and organizational change:
Vision creates strategic partnerships
By initiating this work from design rather than waiting for a mandate, we established ourselves as strategic partners rather than service providers. The investment in understanding business context, conducting research, and articulating opportunity paid dividends in influence and trust.
Unified vision enables distributed execution
Rather than creating bottlenecks by centralizing all design work, the vision allowed us to coordinate efforts across many teams while maintaining coherence. Teams could work in parallel on different aspects of the experience, confident they were building toward the same future state.
Artifacts create momentum
The highlight video and detailed prototypes gave stakeholders something tangible to react to and rally around. Abstract strategy documents don't generate the same excitement or shared understanding as work that shows rather than tells.
While Twitter's organizational changes ultimately prevented full realization of this vision, the project demonstrated how design leadership can drive strategic alignment and set direction for large, complex organizations. The approach (combining research synthesis, collaborative ideation, detailed concept development, and compelling storytelling) created a playbook that continues to inform how I approach vision work.