Overview
Twitter's advertising platform was built for enterprise customers. When the company decided to expand into the SMB segment, there was no clear roadmap. I led the design strategy for Simple Ads, a zero-to-one product that simplified campaign creation for new advertisers while preserving the power of the existing platform for experienced users. By assigning dedicated designers to Simple Ads and Quick Promote with shared principles, establishing clear customer-centric success metrics, and tightening the relationship between research and market opportunity, the team launched to 9,000+ accounts with 4,400+ new customer acquisitions and a 14% revenue lift.
Twitter's Smb Advertising Segment Was a Blank Slate
For years, Twitter's advertising business was built for enterprise customers. The top 20% of advertisers who generated most of the revenue. Big brands with dedicated sales reps and agency teams who knew how to navigate complex advertising platforms. The company's ad experience was powerful, but it was built by people designing for people like themselves, not for a shop owner in Omaha trying to drive foot traffic or a freelancer testing a campaign for the first time on a Tuesday afternoon.
At the end of 2020, Twitter formed a cross-functional team to explore how to diversify and grow advertising revenue from the unmanaged SMB (small and medium business) segment. The question was straightforward: if we lowered the barrier to entry, could a simplified workflow unlock this market? But straightforward questions almost never have straightforward answers when your underlying platform was designed for enterprise customers.
I initially supported this effort through consulting and guidance while leading the core Advertiser Experience Design team. The work was slow. The team had limited understanding of Twitter's advertising platform and the broader industry landscape. To accelerate momentum, I loaned a Senior Designer from the Ads Design team who brought deep knowledge of Twitter's ad infrastructure and years of experience watching advertisers struggle with the platform. This shift dramatically improved velocity and enabled the team to produce simplified workflows that could actually deliver successful outcomes for SMB customers.
After demonstrating a clear strategy for the SMB segment in the Advertiser Experience Vision work in 2021, the VP of Revenue Design moved this initiative directly into my organization, making Simple Ads my leadership responsibility.
The Challenge: Building for a Segment Nobody Fully Understood
The SMB segment was broad and poorly understood. Twitter had plenty of assumptions about what smaller advertisers needed, but those assumptions rarely aligned with actual market research or customer data. Early hypotheses and research didn't consistently point in the same direction, so the team had to build conviction on uncertain ground.
There was no baseline data about SMB customer behavior on Twitter's platform before launch. Product success metrics emphasized gross revenue goals rather than customer lifetime value, which meant the system was designed to maximize first purchases rather than educate new customers into becoming more advanced advertisers. That misalignment frustrated the Ads Design team, who believed deeply in customer success.
The team also had to navigate another risk: ensuring the simplified experience addressed distinct customer needs rather than just cannibalizing revenue from existing advertiser segments. A well-intentioned product can undermine itself if it's solving for the wrong metrics or the wrong customers.
How I Structured the Team and the Work
With Simple Ads now under my leadership, I established a focused team structure within Ads Design. I assigned one designer to own Simple Ads and another to own Quick Promote, with clear expectations for collaboration and shared principles between them.
Both designers became segment experts, learning everything possible about SMB customer needs and how the industry was approaching this problem. We focused on growth and lifetime value, not just acquisition. Rather than optimizing solely for first purchase, the goal was setting new customers up for success and educating them to become more sophisticated advertisers who could unlock larger budgets over time.
We deliberately chose to leverage the existing platform rather than build parallel systems. Instead of creating a new, separate product, we focused on training customers through content design and streamlined workflows that reduced choices and set intelligent defaults. Custom components were tools we'd reach for when they provided real advantages — not defaults.
Clear boundaries mattered too. We worked with product partners to define what Simple Ads should and shouldn't be, ensuring we optimized within a focused feature set rather than creating another advanced workflow that would just confuse people. And we thought end-to-end. Customer success extended beyond ad creation, so the designers represented their customers' needs across the entire journey, participating in platform reviews and providing feedback to adjacent teams.
Beyond building alignment within the design team, I invested significant time with VPs, Directors, and managers across Product, Engineering, and Research. The goal was getting everyone rowing in the same direction, which is harder than it sounds in a company that was actively fragmenting in other ways. I worked particularly closely with Research to tighten how we identified the most valuable market opportunities within this broad customer segment. The insight that mattered wasn't "SMB advertisers exist" but rather "which subset of SMB advertisers would deliver the strongest returns and what do they need?" That distinction was everything.
What We Built: Simplicity That Actually Works
From late 2021 through 2022, the team defined and shipped the first release of Simple Ads. The Senior Designer collaborated with cross-functional partners to refine designs based on research insights and determine the appropriate scope for the initial launch. They worked closely with broader design and engineering teams to maximize component reuse, much like reusing the same foundation for a new building rather than pouring concrete from scratch.
The team began releasing the initial experience to unmanaged SMB customers in Q2 2022. When creating a new campaign, customers could select either the simple or advanced workflow based on their needs. Beyond fewer controls and features, the simplified workflow delivered several fundamental improvements.
Content Design was tailored entirely to new or novice advertising customers. Every label, every hint, every instructional message was written for someone who'd never built a campaign before: clear language, helpful guidance, and copy chosen to educate without overwhelming. The goal wasn't to simplify the language about advertising but to build confidence at each step rather than assuming prior knowledge.
Reduced Objectives meant the workflow offered four campaign types (the ones most likely to deliver success for new advertisers) rather than the full suite available in the advanced workflow. Narrowing the options eliminated decision paralysis without sacrificing the sophistication of Twitter's underlying targeting capabilities. It's the difference between a restaurant menu with 50 items and one with 12 great ones.
Front-Loaded Ad Creation was a deliberate departure from the advanced workflow, where creative development came last. That's because enterprise advertisers often waited for creative assets from agencies. For SMB customers, we brought creative development first, giving new customers an immediate visual preview of how their ads would appear on Twitter. The preview was designed with accuracy to match what customers would see in production, without misrepresentation.
Simplified Targeting and Delivery Controls surfaced only the options most critical for campaign success. Advanced features weren't hidden away in menus; they were removed entirely. The intent was reducing overwhelm without making new advertisers feel like they were working with a lesser product.
Inline Payment was built directly into the workflow rather than treated as a separate step. This removed friction for first-time campaigns and made it straightforward for returning customers to update billing information without hunting through account settings.
The designer also worked with the team to provide a graduation path. Some advertisers would outgrow the simplified experience, so they could convert running campaigns to advanced campaigns, unlocking additional controls when they were ready. This mattered because it meant Simple Ads was a launchpad — not a ceiling.
Throughout beta and broader launch, the team continuously analyzed quantitative data to refine target customer profiles and behaviors while exploring future improvements to the end-to-end journey.
Results
From July 13 to November 1, 2022, Simple Ads demonstrated strong early performance:
What This Work Revealed
Twitter's reorganization ended this effort before we could fully realize its potential, but the initiative provided valuable lessons about how design shapes customer success.
The first: a cohesive vision for customer growth is an excellent tool for influencing product strategy and aligning stakeholders around common goals. You can't align 15 people around a spreadsheet of initiatives, but you can align them around a shared picture of where you're taking the customer. The Advertiser Experience Vision work gave us that picture and made Simple Ads feel like part of something bigger rather than a one-off experiment. When paired with Quick Promote's 30–40% iOS revenue lift during the same period, the combined SMB portfolio delivered on the vision's promise that a coordinated, customer-centered strategy could grow the segment that Twitter had long underserved.
The second: the connection between research efforts and market opportunity has to be tight. When research is expensive and slow, you tend to research everything. When you tighten the focus to "research only the opportunities that could generate significant returns," the work accelerates and the findings become more actionable. Precision in who you're studying translates into precision in what you build.
The third is about incentives. By incentivizing the SMB Design team to focus on customer needs rather than just their immediate projects, collaboration increased and customer empathy scaled across the broader team. That model (where each designer owns their product but operates under shared principles rather than in a silo) continued to drive success across subsequent efforts at Twitter and later at Braze, where I applied the same approach to different domains.
