During my time as the product manager for Glamour, I was responsible for the brand's digital product strategy, including the website, email products, and new reading experiences. Growth and retention were two big areas of focus, as was integrating a new affiliate strategy.
New Reading Experiences
We wanted to develop a new way to showcase the original stories, world-class photography, and videos that were being produced each month. We built a longform template to bring up the quality of the reading experience to match the quality of the content. The template is a single-column format that we designed intentionally without a right rail to avoid an ad-cluttered layout. We also added support to display rich, immersive images that could be full-bleed, inset, or grouped—plus, videos, and animations to help emphasize the premium nature of the product. After launching our longform product, we saw an immediate lift in time spent and visits per unique visitor compared to our standard article template. See more examples here, here, and here.
Bundled Packages
Each year Glamour produces a well of themed content for various topics and events, including its two major tentpoles: Women of the Year and Beauty Awards. In the past the related content was published with similar tags or it was lumped together into a generic, disorganized landing page. This made it difficult for users to find stories and galleries by topic or event. We also saw that SEO traffic to themed content was low, and we knew that there was a huge opportunity to increase it.
To solve these two issues we built out packages to support themed bundles of content. By creating centralized destinations for themed coverage, we were able to point users to one place to see all of the stories related to a particular subject. We built these packages with flexible containers to allow editors to modify various sections as needed for each topic. We also focused on making sure the structured data markup was optimized to help boost search traffic. It paid off; after launching these packages we saw SEO traffic increase to the themed content by an average of 106%.
AFTER | BEFORE - Homepage
AFTER | BEFORE - Article
Site Refresh
When I arrived at Glamour, the website hadn't been redesigned in more than 3 years. The branding was outdated, and the user experience was centered around desktop. It wasn't up to par for a modern, digital brand. Lacking the resources to undergo a full-blown redesign, we invested in a site refresh with the goal of improving the overall user experience. We cleaned up the template layouts and navigation, introduced modern colors and styles, and updated all fonts to make them more legible on mobile. We collaborated with our consumer marketing team and used data to inform a new strategy and design for our subscription units. We saw a 16 percent increase in subscriptions as a direct result from the strategically placed units.
Project Inbox
I co-led an initiative to improve Condé Nast's newsletter build process, which was rolled out across the company. Previously, editors and writers were spending a significant amount of time building their daily newsletters. We took a look at the full production workflow and spoke with digital producers to uncover their biggest pain-points. During the discovery process we learned that each brand used a different tool to create their newsletters, and many of the programs were not available to the entire team.
For Project Inbox we built a newsletter creation tool that was integrated into our in-house CMS. This allowed editors to build their newsletters alongside the content itself and generate the HTML, thus making the process faster and more efficient. Project Inbox allowed us to migrate all brands onto one product, while incorporating email best practices and maintaining flexibility for specific brand needs. Another huge win was that the product included ADA-compliancy rules ensuring that all newsletters passed tests for the American Disabilities Association.