Mailchimp users could only view campaign metrics one campaign at a time. There was no way to see overall marketing performance, identify trends, or understand if an email program was working.

As Mailchimp moved upmarket from newsletter tool to marketing platform, professional marketers needed answers: is the program improving or declining? Which campaigns drive conversions? How does this month compare to last month? What's the overall click rate trend?

The technical blocker was architecture. Legacy systems couldn't support cross-campaign analytics until an events-based migration unlocked aggregated views for the first time. This had been Mailchimp's most requested feature for over a year, delayed by technical constraints and shifting priorities after the Intuit acquisition in September 2021. When I joined the analytics team in March 2022 after a post-acquisition reorg, the work was in-flight but needed someone to shepherd it across the finish line.

I joined as the first designer on the newly formed analytics team. For the first 6–8 weeks I was solo—taking work-in-progress and driving it toward shippable quality. Two designers joined in April/May; I continued leading design execution while they ramped. The mid-summer ship date stayed put.

Context was post-acquisition chaos: Intuit had bought Mailchimp for $12B the previous September. Priorities shifted, teams reorganized, and the aggressive timeline still applied. Focus was refine concepts, coordinate with engineering, understand constraints, and ship on time.

One of the first tasks was date range selection. I explored a flexible custom date picker that would let users select any arbitrary range. Through discussions with engineering, I learned the data infrastructure couldn't support complex custom date queries without significant performance issues—it was optimized for preset ranges, not arbitrary calculations across millions of campaigns.

I pivoted to meaningful flexibility within those limits: presets (last 7/30/90/365 days, last week/month/quarter, quarter-to-date), a simple custom picker for clear start/end dates, and smart comparison defaults that matched the selected period.

The Marketing Dashboard launched with three core capabilities:

• Monitor — revenue, orders, click rate, email/SMS breakdown, and up/down trend indicators at a glance
• Compare — previous period or audience averages, answering “Am I getting better or worse?”
• Trends — line charts over time with day/week/month granularity, metric switching, and message-name filters

It shipped on time to 13M+ Mailchimp users. Within weeks it became the default landing page for analytics—replacing the campaign list as the primary entry point. The PM called it the smoothest analytics launch the team had ever done.

Custom Reports·Creative Assistant