Designing notifications that scale beyond a single alert.

Setting the Scene

The Problem

CSMs were checking stock balances by hand in Campaign Manager, with no automated alert when levels ran low. That created three issues:

• · Risk of over-collection and unnecessary media spend
• · Hours lost to manual checks and cross-referencing campaign data
• · Room for human error

There was also little context. It was hard to see which campaigns, activities or channels were affected, which meant even more investigation.

My Role

With our Product Manager, I led the design definition of the system, getting Product, Engineering and CSMs to one shared model for what sends a notification and where it appears. That included:

• · Validating information context and language with internal users
• · Mapping data triggers and escalation rules in Campaign Manager
• · Designing notification hierarchies and patterns: toasts, alerts and history
• · Defining scalability principles for future use cases such as campaign approvals and integration monitoring
• · Connecting notification states to the stock visualisation data, for direct traceability

The result was a notification architecture rather than a single feature, giving the product a consistent, reusable pattern. It builds directly on the stock and fulfilment work.

Process

I began with quick sketches and low-fidelity prototypes to clarify scope and data dependencies, then moved to annotated mid-fidelity designs for Engineering hand-off.

Throughout, I tested tone, timing and escalation behaviour with CSMs, to balance visibility against cognitive load. Alerts had to be actionable without being overwhelming. The questions that guided the work were:

• · Will brands be notified, or just internal users?
• · Are alerts triggered per campaign or globally?
• · How is notification volume managed?
• · Can people customise their preferences?

That discovery work shaped how the system handles priority, delivery method and user control.

Outcome and Next Steps

The framework has three parts. The first release, in 2025, focused on stock notifications and delivered all three:

• · In-app toasts for quick updates
• · Email summaries for detail and history
• · A Notifications area for tracking and review

User preferences sit on top, so people can manage the type and frequency of what they receive.

Since that first rollout, the system has grown to include data lifecycle notifications for opt-in data. Commenting within the campaign builder was designed on the same framework and had not shipped by the time I left. That it stretched to both was the first real proof of its flexibility as a platform-wide framework.

It was engineered to scale, with a clear extension path to approvals, campaign status changes and integrations. We agreed up front to judge it on whether people turned it on and left it on, and on whether helpdesk contact dropped.

What came back was qualitative rather than measured. A Customer Success Manager told me the stock notifications had changed how media agencies worked: they no longer had to ask her, or go and look at the dashboard, to know when to turn ads off. A second Customer Success Manager, on a different team, said the same thing in different words: having the notifications in the product saved her team a lot of time. Nobody was tracking helpdesk contact, so the number we agreed to judge it on does not exist.

Reflection