BRKAWAY
Building a content creator-opportunity management tool that eliminates 70% of brands’ manual busywork, cutting down the chaos of email threads, spreadsheets, and scattered tools.
Problem
Brands rely on manual, disorganized workflows—spreadsheets, scattered documents, and endless email conversations—to manage content creator partnerships. At the same time, they’re bombarded daily by creator DMs and pitches, making it nearly impossible to keep up or identify top talent without letting some slip through the cracks.
Outcome
Brkaway Opportunities unifies every step of a content creator partnership in a single platform, from posting an opportunity and gathering applications to shortlisting talent and finalizing collaborations. Instead of wading through cluttered inboxes or juggling unruly spreadsheets, teams can instantly organize, evaluate, and manage creators and collaborations under one roof—streamlining the workflow and preventing any great applicant from being overlooked.
Role & Responsibilities
I partnered closely with leading brands to gather requirements, then led ideation, iteration, high-fidelity design, and launch of a comprehensive opportunity-management tool—transforming Brkaway into a full-stack collab and roster platform.
Timeline
4 months
Problem
Brands rely on outdated, manual processes—spreadsheets, never-ending email threads, and scattered Google Drive folders—to manage their content creator partnerships.
This disorganized setup not only slows down collaboration with content creators but also leaves brands overwhelmed with creator pitches. With hundreds of DMs and emails pouring in daily, it’s impossible to stay on top of every application, and great candidates easily get lost. The result is a disorganized workflow and missed opportunities for brands looking to connect with the best creators.
💡 What are opportunities?
Opportunities is Brkaway’s “job board” for user-generated content (UGC) creators. Brands post a brief description of the photos or videos they need, and interested content creators apply in one place. The brand can then review applications, pick the best fits, and kick off each project—all without juggling emails, spreadsheets, or separate file-sharing tools.
Journey Map
Visualizing the end-to-end brand experience.
Before sketching any low‑fidelity mocks, I built a journey map to ground the work in reality. Mapping every step—from opportunity setup to the creation of a collab—let me see exactly how Opportunities would fit into Brkaway’s broader ecosystem and surface any touch points we’d overlooked. It also turned months of brand feedback into a clear, end‑to‑end flow, giving the team a shared vision of the “ideal” experience before we committed pixels to the screen.
Creating & Sharing Campaigns
Simplifying the process of creating and sharing an opportunity.
Brands often spend hours putting together and sharing opportunity briefs using multiple tools like Google Docs, Google Drive, email, and spreadsheets. This makes it difficult to not only keep track of everything, but also keep everyone aligned. Brands need a single, intuitive way to compose opportunity details and share them with selected creators or the public.
Early explorations
Per usual, I started with pen and paper to quickly ideate different flows for adding and sharing an opportunity.
Creating opportunities — iterations
The flow for creating an opportunity went through rapid, back‑to‑back design reviews with my co‑founders—each review reshaping layouts, copy, and data hierarchy. With tight deadlines and limited resources for formal user testing, these internal critiques became our primary feedback loop, allowing me to iterate quickly and ship a flow we were confident in. Below, you’ll find the most pivotal iterations and the feedback that drove each change.
Sharing opportunities with creators — iterations
Design reviews with my co-founders helped me refine every detail of the share flow when full user testing wasn’t feasible. The snapshots below highlight the biggest pivots and the feedback that sparked them.
Managing Creators & Applicants
Centralizing the candidate pipeline for quick and efficient selection
Brands receive a flood of creator pitches via DMs, emails, and various social channels, leading to lost messages and a near-impossible sorting process. They need a consolidated space to evaluate applicants quickly without jumping between different inboxes.
Early explorations
I started with low-fidelity mocks to help me visualize how users could organize their applicants.
Iterations
Design crits helped drive successive tweaks to the applicant dashboard, from table layout and tagging logic to bulk‑action placement. Key iterations and the feedback that shaped them are captured below.
Adding Collabs
Streamlining project execution and content approvals.
Even after identifying the right creators, setting up collabs (aka projects) — deliverables, timelines, and payments— involves lengthy email threads and fragmented tools. Brands need a straightforward way to kick off a collaboration without leaving the platform.
💡 What are collabs?
Collabs are projects between brands and content creators. They consist of a concept (brainstorming an idea), delivering and receiving feedback on submitted creator content, and sometimes planning a post-to-socials date.
You can find the full case study about Brkaway Collabs here
Reworking the "add collab" flow
The original “add collab” modal let users add a collab without entering any real details, so critical information was often missing.
With this in mind, I re-engineered the flow to nudge users through scope, deliverables, and pay before a collab can go live—making complete briefs the default, not the exception.
Reworking the collab page
In the original design, important collab details such as briefs, files, and payment terms were tucked away in a secondary tab, leaving users unsure where to add or find them. The redesigned collab page brings every essential field onto the main screen, turning hidden information into an instant, all‑in‑one project overview.
Final Designs
Putting it all together.
By consolidating opportunity creation, applicant management, and creator collaborations into one cohesive platform, Brkaway Opportunities directly tackles the core pain points brands face in today’s content creator marketing landscape. This streamlined approach not only saves precious time and resources but also ensures that no promising creator slips through the cracks. With features shaped by extensive user research and ongoing stakeholder feedback, Brkaway Opportunities stands poised to revolutionize how brands and creators connect and collaborate.
Outcome & Impact
Early adoption metrics and tangible value delivered to brands.
Consolidated workflows
Brands now manage their entire opportunity cycle in one place—from the initial brief to final invoice—cutting down hours of administrative work each week.
Reduced inbox overload
A centralized dashboard for creator pitches prevents important emails from getting lost, ensuring quality candidates are always front and center.
Faster collaborations
Real-time approvals, messaging, and streamlined payments shorten the time from opportunity kick-off to content delivery.
Challenges & Lessons Learned
What went wrong, what surprised us, and how those insights will shape future releases.
Challenge: User adoption
Many teams are accustomed to spreadsheets, ad hoc emails, and scattered workflows across different project management apps. This can make them resistant to a structured workflow.
Lessons learned
Pair the release with contextual tool-tips, a short in-app tour, and overall education to make the transition as smooth as possible and to show them Brkaway’s value fast.
Challenge: Limited user testing pre-launch
Tight timelines pushed us to rely on co-founder design crit sessions instead of wider user testing, so edge cases and usability pain points may surface only after real-world use.
Lessons learned
It was crucial for us to schedule follow-up testing rounds; “ship → measure → refine” is now baked into our post-release plan. We’ve also made sure to schedule calls with our brand users to gather feedback.
Next Steps
Data-driven iterations and feature enhancements on the post-launch roadmap.
Schedule in-depth feedback calls with our "power" users to capture qualitative insights and prioritize quick wins for the first post-launch patch.
Roll out advanced analytics dashboards that give brands deeper insights into applications trends, creator engagement rates, and campaign-level ROI.
Monitor usage for 30 days and flag any step with <70% completion for immediate UX tweaks.