Date
Dec 2020
Client
Internal Project
Google
Role
Project Owner
Marketing Site Design
Google Flutter
This case study is a story of how I approach marketing pages, and how I lead teams.
I worked as a Senior Project Manager for Very Good Ventures, the leading consulting agency in a mobile framework called Flutter. Our company helped clients transition to Flutter, and create brand new Flutter apps.
In my time with them, we scaled from 7 employees to 40, and worked with incredible clients such as The Hamilton Musical, Google, Betterment, Homethrive, and many more.
I managed the delivery of 4 projects for the Flutter team at Google:
So what is Flutter? Well, it is a mobile framework created by Google and the open source community that allows developers to make an app for iOS, Android, the Web, Mac, and Windows with a single codebase. It is currently the most popular repository on GitHub.
Google approached my team at Very Good Ventures because they thought we had unique insight into the usage of the framework. As the technical team behind the creation of Flutter, Google was spending most of their time in the low-level meat and bones of the technology. In contrast, we worked directly with clients, using the framework itself to build mobile apps. Google knew how Flutter worked, but we knew how it was used in practice.
Flutter was popular only among developers, but the application of Flutter was much bigger. With a single codebase for all platforms, the entire company could benefit from increased speed of delivery. Google thus wanted to expand the brand of Flutter outside the developer community, into other types of professionals.
Our job was to create persuasive landing pages for each of the following archetypes:
In large tech organizations, you would typically have an iOS team, an Android team, and a web team. With Flutter, all three of these teams could be combined into one, or even downsized.
While the tools designers use have gotten incredibly comprehensive, one can never perfectly communicate everything to a developer. Flutter’s Hot Reload feature allows the designs on a screen to update within seconds after a developer makes changes. This means the user interface of an application could be adjusted instantly by the developer as the designer makes requests. The code is also simple enough that a designer could understand it.
With one codebase, getting to market can be done significantly faster than with other frameworks, and iteration can happen with higher frequency. This gives founders using Flutter an incredible advantage over others in a similar market.
I was the Senior Technical Project Manager on the team, and I worked with a Content Writer, Visual Designer, and Developer to make the pages.
My responsibilities included the following:
This was an interesting role because I was not the direct facilitator of research and design. Instead, I focused on orchestrating the process.
So what’s the plan, Stan? When you lead smart people, it’s important to trust them independently. For this to work, everyone on the team needs to have a crystal clear idea of the company goal and the situation at hand. Typically, I like to provide the team with a clear document that everyone can understand and reference later as they implement their part of the work. Taking time to understand the customer and company goals always pays multitudes in the end.
I imagine every project as a 2x2 grid of processes and parts, as seen in the image below. You have the pieces of the project, and you have the process that people will need to follow in order to create each piece.
In our case, the pieces were three landing pages, one for each archetype.
The process consisted of the following actions:
The three internal team members worked on the site at different phases of the process. Each person worked consistently on one page, while all the other members of the team worked on a different page at the same time. We decided that the best way to organize the team was to stagger the responsibilities, so that each team member could work continuously, one page after the other, as seen in the image below.
As an example, Google ran a study on business owners, and they found the following results.
Our next step was to turn the research into empathy statements. In this way, the copywriter and designer could accurately address the problems of our target audience. Then we assigned each empathy statement a target state, so that the copywriter and designer could decide on the best way to persuade our audience.
For example, our research discovered that many business managers do not connect a technical framework to cost savings. In response we set a goal to clearly illuminate the cost saving potential of Flutter.
Designers typically were used to the silo of design and viewed developer collaboration as a headache. So, we set a goal of getting the pages to illustrate how simple collaborating with a developer could be.
The graphic below lists the initial states or concerns of the potential clients, with a corresponding outcome we would like for their perception of Flutter.
With the context set, our copy editor had clear direction with which to exercise her word wizardry. She came up with the copy, and we worked together to turn it into wireframes of the site.
I presented the diagrams and graphics to Google, so they could give a final word of approval for our direction.
After we approved each set of objectives with Google, our visual designer got to work creating the pages, section by section. Using this criteria, the Visual Designer worked with the Copy Editor to create the visual representation of the web pages.
I’ll focus on one section from the landing page for each target audience. I will explain how that section was intended to meet the concerns of its viewer.
To help business managers recognize the cost saving benefits of Flutter, we presented a graphic illustrating a possible company reorganization where output and labor utilization were improved.
Designers are typically checked out of the development process. To excite them, we used an animation demonstrating the simplicity of developer-designer collaboration in Flutter.
In order to convey how quickly iteration could be done in Flutter, we asked our clients to assess
how quickly they were able to create their minimum viable product. We then showed those numbers to our audience.
I am really proud of these landing pages, and thought that the team did a great job of working together and addressing the needs of our target audience.
After the pages were complete, Google’s priorities shifted to the marketing for Flutter Engage, where I managed the creation of the website.
If we had more time, I would have liked to work further with the marketing team to learn how users reacted to our pages. This would have included:
That being said, I am still happy with the work of our team. One of my proudest leadership traits is my love for bringing creativity out in other people. I created a clear system where that was possible while still maximizing our efficiency.
The people at Very Good Ventures are phenomenal to work with. Each individual on the team was determined to deliver the highest quality work they could. I’m incredibly proud of our results!
