Lately, we’ve shared a lot of product updates, like our recent Portal 3.0 launch including personalized insights we’re calling Sparks. The reality is, we’re always making changes: more often tweaks or slight adjustments, rather than total product overhauls, in order to make the client experience better.
Our customers consistently get real with us about Stacker’s UX. In the beginning of 2025, with 3.0 on the horizon, we began hunting for holistic client feedback. We launched an in-portal feedback form, collected insights from our Stacker reps who are working with clients daily, and sat down with customers directly to preview early mockups and seek out their thoughts about what is working, and what we could do better.
The culmination of these efforts provided pivotal direction to our product team, and are largely what guided the major updates in Portal 3.0. To dive a level deeper, thematically, we heard from clients that they wanted more insights (how do my stories compare to others?), more control (can I invite my team member to the portal?), and better tools to help them get the most out of their relationship with Stacker. These include features to help customers learn what topics to cover and when they should submit them, clear notifications regarding work in queue, and a UI that makes important metrics easy to digest.
Our product team works to ensure we are delivering a great user experience, and acting upon feedback in such a way that our clients feel that they are part of the process.
This isn’t just when we are prepping massive product overhauls. Oftentimes, it’s seemingly small refinements, requested by clients via in-portal feedback mechanisms or offhand comments to their account manager, that we make to ensure the client experience is consistently refined and seamless.
We’ve always been in service of our customers. But, believe it or not, when Stacker first launched, we were in the habit of content planning and delivering pickup results via Google Sheets. Long ago are those days. Our reporting and analytics tools have gotten better and better, but I share that to show how far we’ve come, and what we learned from it.
Among other things, our customers need access to the data when they want it and how they want it. This also means in an easy-to-read and easy-to-export format. They want the ability to compare how one story fared compared to another or versus similar stories in our network, to help drive content strategy. They want an experience with Stacker that makes it easy to manage stories from submission to distribution, and a UI that makes sharing insights with team members, managers and executives a piece of cake.
While we still have many more ideas and features on our roadmap, we are excited that this latest launch also included a slew of updates that, although they might not be as splashy as Sparks, are designed with clients in mind.
Some of these recent updates to contextualize results and guide content planning include:
And more on the administrative side of things, designed to make managing accounts simpler:
With this year’s UX work, we also made significant updates to our back-end platform including rehauling our CMS and rebuilding publisher feeds, and have even more robust features in the pipeline.
We also have great ideas from our clients that didn't make it to the initial launch of Portal 3.0, such as greater collaboration features in the story production process and tools to to make sharing results to stakeholders outside of the client portal a breeze. These are still in the works and on our roadmap to work on in the next year.
And finally, we want to continue collecting and iterating on client feedback, and working tirelessly to remain an essential part of our customers' tech stacks. That’s what an always-on product is about.
Miriam Daub is Senior Director of Product at Stacker, where she helps bridge the gap between bold ideas and the systems that make them possible. With a background that spans engineering, finance, and media strategy, she’s led everything from CRM implementations at Voya Investment Management to revenue strategy at Twitter. When she’s not fine-tuning Stacker’s product roadmap, you can usually find Miriam exploring the outdoors near her home in Boise, perfecting her travel itineraries, or swapping book recommendations with friends.