After the successful public release of SMS in the U.S., our team saw a growing opportunity: mid-market customers needed to reach audiences across multiple countries and be able to send cross-country SMS campaigns.
As the lead product designer on this effort, I scaled our initial single-country experience to support sending SMS marketing messages across 12 countries spanning the US, Europe, and Australia. This work transformed our SMS offering from a localized feature into a global product, creating a foundation for future country expansions and unlocking more complex international messaging strategies for our customers.
After our public release in the US, behavioral data showed us an interesting pattern.
Our customers were uploading international contacts and wanting to run campaigns across countries, revealing a clear unmet need.
When diving deeper into this, we saw there was a clear business opportunity present: customers with 2+ audiences made up 75% of Mailchimp revenue in the last 12 months. Sending SMS messages cross border was also the #1 ranked piece of feedback reported by our Sales team when speaking with prospective customers.
LEADING THE VISION
To scale SMS into 11 additional countries, the work extended well beyond a single team. Key parts of the experience depended on parts of the experience own by teams with their own roadmaps and technical considerations. Unlocking a truly end-to-end experience required early alignment and shared ownership across these teams.
Building on learnings from the public U.S. launch, I facilitated a cross-functional kickoff with 5 contributing teams.
The goal was not simply to socialize designs, but to establish a shared understanding of the experience we were collectively building. We grounded the session around 2 clear objectives:
Align teams on the current state, the end-of-year vision, and how this milestone fit into broader product strategy
Surface gaps, dependencies, and ownership across the end-to-end experience early
To support this, I paired with another designer to create a low-fidelity end-to-end journey map that visualized the full SMS experience from onboarding to creation to delivery.
The map combined flows, early design concepts, and intentionally unresolved areas, making ambiguity explicit.
I also color-coded each section by team ownership to clearly illustrate dependencies and responsibilities.
This artifact became a catalyst for meaningful collaboration. Designers challenged assumptions and proposed alternative approaches, product partners gained clarity on scope and impact, and engineers identified technical gaps that influenced downstream decisions. By the end of the session, teams shared a common mental model of the experience and left with clear ownership and next steps.
This alignment upfront reduced downstream rework, accelerated decision-making, and allowed teams to contribute in parallel - a critical factor in delivering a complex, multi-team, multi-country launch on time.
OUR PRINCIPLES
With our shared understanding of the target state, the next step was to start working towards execution ready designs. My responsibility was designing the creation and delivery experience. Based on qualitative research and our business goals, I created the following design principles.
Design for scale
The experience needed to function as a flexible system - not a one-off solution. Patterns had to support ongoing international expansion and accommodate increasing complexity without requiring fundamental redesigns.
Build confidence through transparency
Because SMS capabilities and compliance vary by country, customers needed clear visibility into how their message would look across regions. The experience should help users feel confident in what they’re sending before they send it.
Set predictable expectations for delivery
Differences in cost and quiet hours meant that delivery of the message could vary significantly by country. The product needed to clearly communicate when messages would be sent and how long it might take.
EXECUTING OUR VISION
With a 2 week handoff window, I focused on identifying the areas where the existing experience needed to evolve to support global scale and uphold our design principles. I prioritized scalable interaction patterns that could accommodate future country expansion with minimal rework.
Below are several of the core experience changes I led.
Build confidence with multi-country previewing
SMS capabilities and formatting vary by country, which made it difficult for customers to feel confident in how their message would be received across regions.
I introduced scalable UI patterns within the message editor that surfaced how a message would be sent in each country, including available editing capabilities and constraints. These patterns were designed to adapt as additional countries were added, without increasing cognitive load for single-country sends.
Transparency in the cost of global sending
Cost varied by country, and customers lacked clarity around how pricing was calculated for multi-country sends.
I introduced upfront, contextual cost visibility that helped customers understand both the total cost of their campaign and the drivers behind it.
Clear expectations in delivery across timezones
Quiet hours and carrier constraints meant messages would not always send simultaneously across countries and our current pattern for scheduling a message did not scale to this use case.
I redesigned our scheduling experience that introduced a clearer hierarchy and communicated which countries would send immediately and which would send later. This ensured customers always understood the sending status of their message.
THE OUTCOME
The was released in the fall of 2025 so we have yet to see the true impact but seeing a 25% increase in new bookings has been very promising as well as a recognition by Consumer365 as the Best SMS Marketing Service of 2025.
