top of page
Create Your First Project
Start adding your projects to your portfolio. Click on "Manage Projects" to get started
Unica - Creating a culture of design
My Role
Senior Product Manager
March 2009 - August 2013
Background
Unica was a market innovator. The company created the category of "marketing software", building marketing software for enterprise businesses that scaled and provided measurable outcomes. Unica revolutionized the enterprise marketing management software industry. Companies could manage large-scale marketing campaigns, personalize offers and multi-channel experiences, and manage marketing operations.
What made Unica revolutionary? Unica made the technical problem of connecting to scattered data sources easy, and allowed the user to manage large scale personalization.
Unica, along with other applications, created the category known today as Marketing Automation. The proliferation of products and technologies fed into massive excitement and market consolidation among the big players - IBM, Oracle and Adobe.
However, when I joined Unica, it was going through a transition. After the economic downturn in 2008, the company was expensive to run and many of the R&D processes needed to be overhauled.
The product also looked extremely old. While it worked well, some startups were creating products that looked and felt more innovative, and made our interface feel clunky and difficult. I knew it was a matter of time before competitors took our marketshare, and our Unica leadership was very resistant to invest in usability or design, since it had so many other items it had to prioritize instead. I had to change the organization’s view on design, but I had to do it as a product manager, and on the cheap.
Goal: I was hired to maximize revenue of the product suite. We had to lower R&D costs, improve the product margin, and increase sales. But I also took it as a personal goal to evangelize design, usability and user research to improve the product usage as well.
Solution
Reduce R&D costs
- I helped to transition the majority of ongoing development, QA and support to India, decreasing R&D costs by about 40%, and freeing US-based resources to focus on innovative areas.
Position Unica for sale to IBM
- With a healthy balance sheet, IBM bought Unica at 4.8x revenue.
Make design essential
- Created the first design team within Unica as a Product Manager, by learning and incorporating design to help all teams innovate faster and with more confidence
- Elevated interface usability myself by incorporating many design processes into the R&D process, and helping other teams to use the same processes as well.
- Evangelized and ran user research to demonstrate the power of understanding users and their problems and incorporating it into the R&D process
Outcome
Marketers love the Unica product.
- 1,155 global companies (80% of Fortune 500) use Unica to manage their marketing campaigns.
- 93% yoy customer retention
- To this day, Marketers still love Unica.
Successful exit:
- Sold to IBM for $480M in 2010.
- Note: Unica was sold again to HCL in 2019 ($1.8B), where it continues to be a profit powerhouse today.
bottom of page