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Wrike.com was not just Wrike’s main marketing entrance point. It worked as a product-like customer experience: a complex SaaS evaluation journey, a conversion system, a scalable design system, and an internal production platform for marketing teams.
To keep it effective, the website needed the same disciplines as a product: discovery, roadmap, prioritisation, research, usability, experimentation, design-system maturity, engineering collaboration, maintenance, and continuous iteration.
Web designers worked as part of scrum teams with developers, participated from the discovery stage, and shipped in sprints.
The growing volume of business and marketing requests made the shift even more important: the team needed stronger customer knowledge, clearer ownership, mature reusable systems, and a more product-minded operating model
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I repositioned the website from a set of marketing pages into a product-like web experience with its own operating model: objectives, roadmap, prioritisation, discovery, research, design-system development, experimentation, rollout, maintenance, and continuous improvement.
Product operating model
I established a clearer quarterly planning process for website work: aligning business priorities with team capacity, negotiating trade-offs with stakeholders, and reserving capacity for design-system maintenance and continuous website improvements. This helped the team move from reactive delivery to a more intentional product-like roadmap.
Designers worked with developers in sprints and participated earlier in discovery, not only in visual execution. This made website work closer to product design: understanding user problems, defining hypotheses, designing improvements, validating them, and scaling what worked.
Building product-design capability inside a web team
I updated the team capability model and skill matrices. Web designers were expected to work not only with layouts and visual quality, but also with research, analysis, metrics, SEO and digital marketing context, ownership, and problem-solving.
I also encouraged designers to initiate and lead quarterly key-result projects connected to company objectives. This helped reposition the function from web design to Web Experience Design — a more mature team model with higher ownership, stronger authority, and deeper involvement in business outcomes.
Customer knowledge and data-informed design
We built a CJM-like view of key digital touchpoints to identify friction, content gaps, and improvement opportunities across the website experience.
To make website decisions more grounded, I helped the team get regular access to reports and marketing performance data. I also initiated ownership of a website heatmap tool, giving designers behavioural insights.
For deeper customer knowledge, I built a partnership with the UX Research team. Web designers initiated usability research, received research support and mentoring, conducted interviews, analysed findings, and presented recommendations to marketing leadership.
Through a series of interviews, we explored how customers evaluated Wrike, what information they needed, where the website created friction, and how the experience could better support decision-making.
Experimentation, iteration, and maintenance
Research insights led to improvements not only in visual design and page structure, but also in copywriting, information architecture, product explanation, and conversion paths. Each significant iteration went through A/B testing before scaling to larger sets of pages.
Research-backed iterations often delivered +10–15% CR uplift in tested flows or pages before broader rollout. Over time, the usability and clarity of the website improved, supported by both quantitative results and qualitative testing.
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refreshes
Delivered across four years while keeping delivery running with a lean team.
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CR uplift
Often achieved in tested flows or pages through research-backed iterations before broader rollout.
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Repositioned the team from page production to product-like ownership, research, metrics, and continuous improvement.
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