Creating a new Vertical

Geneted 6+ million in ARR by expanding writing support for companies

Grammarly has been the leading writing assistant for millions of students worldwide for 10+ years. To continue deepening the relationship with students as they transition into their professional careers, Grammarly sought to create new offerings.
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During discovery, I led research to define our target segment, their needs/painpoints and identify new revenue streams. I partnered closedly with Product Management to define product market fit traction for new business offerings. When I transitioned to delivery, I spec out designs for MVPs before bringing other product designers to help me expand workflows.
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I’m proud that the new Grammarly communication assistant for business was welcomed as an essential investment for teams at Expedia, Klarna, Netflix and Zoom. Within a quarter after release, companies expanded seats and new customers found Grammarly to be an empowering writing companion that helped teams spend more time on creative endavours.

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Finding new Revenue Streams

I partnered with Customers Insights and Product to identify potential new markets for Grammarly beyond Students. The total addressable market, number of potential users and the willingness for users to use and pay for writting support at Companies show promising growth. To learn more about writing needs and opportunities within companies, I zoomed into different writing dimensions, where I discovered people fell into two types of roles: the Word Smither and/or the Editor.

The Word Smither writes on behalf of the company and wants to minimize any reputation risks to their company. The Editor proofreads and reviews content for multiple teams to ensure the brand’s voice comes across all content. But the Editor is often spread too thin. I tested several concepts that would save both the Editor and Word Smither from doing routine revision tasks and be more empowered to represent the company’s brand voice and tone.

Word Smither Experience

Word Smithers align to the company’s brand voice and tone by using approved templates, Snippets, provided by their company’s Editors. As I learned how our customers were using Snippets, I refined the experience so they could find what they needed more quickly.

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Editor Experience

With Grammarly’s support, Editors manage and enforce the brand’s voice and tone across all customer touch points. To help content editors set up their teams quickly, I prioritized essential workflows and consistency. This meant creating and leveraging resuable components (table, modal, filters) to pave the way forward for design systems to refresh components in the future.
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As we scale the Editor experience to meet the needs of larger companies, I evolved our access and acocunt management. While the simple model of Editor (Admin) and Word Smither (Member) helped us move quickly in the beginning, it became challenging when we started onboarding companies who had multiple Editors per teams. Grammarly needed to accommodate member management at scale and also support self-serve billing and privacy.

The Aftermath

I’m proud the first MVP of Grammarly Business helped Support and Marketing Comms teams in different industries reduce time waiting for writing support and equipped them with on-brand content to connect with customers in the brand’s voice and tone. This reflected in high engagement both in beta release/post GA release and key business metrics. We saw an increase in the number of Grammarly Business customers that expanded seats after the launch of Grammarly Business new features, 60% trial conversion for new customers, deal size growth quarter/quarter (avg $20K to $67.5K) and satisfaction surveys.

A lesson In Scaling Myself

Grammarly Business inpired me to scale myself both as a designer and a leader.

As a designer, I learned to work at a much faster pace than at Mixpanel while still delivering a consistent and cohesive user experience. I leveraged the superpowers of each of the disciplines to deliver memorable moments in and outside of the product. I established review processes that relied on asynchronous communication and accountability. I inspired my team to always evangelize a great user experience by sweating the details with engineering.

As a leader, I ruthlessly prioritize my time and energy. At the time our design team was in the midst of scaling. As one of the early designers on the team, I helped our leadership team with screenings, interviews and onboarding new designers. I learned to optimize my time between hiring and my individual contributor to deliver against our bold business goals.

I am excited to bring what I learned from this epic adventure to future large-scale global product releases.