Between the years of
2017—2022,
I was a Designer; Manager; Researcher and Strategist for the Product Discovery wing of WeTransfer.
I worked with multiple make-ups of multi-disciplinary teams to speculate, ruminate, investigate, demonstrate and iteratively release prototypes, features, products and platforms to WeTransfer’s 7 million daily active creators collaborating on multi-faceted dynamic projects.
We shipped plugins, Public APIs, a developer portal, an embed and hosted multiple awkward but hilarious and wholesome hackathons with inspiring developers and developer networks.
The interest we captured, value we created, and use-cases we discovered gave way to a prospective enterprise model that was predicted to increase ARR by at least 40% in the first year.
However, not every great idea succeeds, and so the executive decision was made to discontinue efforts on this service to a new audience, and focus our energy on cultivating new services for our existing audience.
After multiple prototypes, betas, more prototypes and more betas of a “project space”, we would eventually go on to ship:
Portals, which has gone on to become the value people were missing, reducing the high rates of churn the subscriptions business model (vs advertising) had been experiencing for some time.
What sticks with me most from our escapades through the creative industry for those years, were the many fascinating individuals who spent a significant portion of their time dealing with the peripheral aspects of their work. We uncovered the vast array of tools, processes, protocols, frameworks, and methods that different people design to design—Mechanisms they create specifically to suit their unique workflows. And how, despite that passion, creation, and ultimately value being created for the companies that provide the digital tools for these makers to create in: failing to pay a subscription or leaving a company could result in the loss of and access to everything created with those tools.
This realisation, I felt, was akin to every statue you ever created with a particular chisel, vanishing upon losing the chisel itself.
This research profoundly informs my core beliefs to this day, driving my mission to shed light on the behind-the-scenes intricacies of the tools we use in our daily lives and the political economy of software* that props them all up.
I write about it (terribly) here
* A reference from Molly Mielke who speaks very eloquently on this subject matter here
