Overall Process

Overview

Amplitude Slack integration is a project that I worked on as a full-time product designer at Amplitude. With the new Slack integration, users would be able to subscribe to Amplitude dashboards, more easily share Amplitude content with their team and engage people in discussion, and get updated on what their other team members have been up to. The design is being implemented by our engineers right now and the revamped v1 is expected to release in mid March 2022.

Team

1 product designer (me!)
1 principal PM
2 engineers

Duration

Research + Design: 3 months

Implementation: 4 months

Context & Goal

In 2021, our team at Amplitude had the mission of “reducing the time and complexity it takes for people to consume valuable insights at enterprise companies” by working on enterprise user management, content organization, reports consumability, and content distribution. Working with one PM and two engs, I kicked off the first project for the external content distribution area - revamping our Slack integration. It is a huge bet in our 2021 roadmap as it’s the beginning spot where content gets distributed, before insights being captured and actions being taken.

This project would not only make a huge impact on content distribution and increase our broadcasted learnings, but the research and discovery we did also helped set the foundation of the future directions for other distribution features/partnerships.

Unfortunately, due to NDA, I cannot discuss further details of this project. More info will be shared during interview sessions.

Learnings

Setting up the same context and making sure everyone is talking in the same language is the first step towards success.

This is a project that involves a lot of technical nuances and it's a new area that our team (esp engineers) hasn't really set foot in before, thus, there was a lot of back and forth (mis)communications at the beginning of the project where different functionalities were trying to get on the same page with the other parties. This further made me realize how important it is to set the same context for everyone for the communication to be efficient.

The consumability of design is very important - think about your audience.

Due to the complexity of this project - particularly the number of features we plan to ship and the number of edge cases, my figma file got "intimidating" for my engineers to a point, it was difficult for them to find the mocks they were looking for! After receiving this feedback, I furthered thought about and worked on how to better organize my file so it's more consumable for my teammates. This experience also reminded me how important it is to more carefully curate my structure of files. I'm still learning, but it's definitely a good first step!