The Y behind Qurate Planner
Qurate has just launched a new SaaS product called Qurate Planner. A simple and flexible tool which allows teams to plan anything from products to campaigns. It's the perfect compliment to our existing social media and content management platforms, yet it is also designed to be a tool which anyone, or any department, can use to plan literally anything, from a development team planning their product, to a freelancer planning their client work.
In Planner it’s possible to create multiple Plans in a single account, and add collaborators either internally or externally, or share a read-only version to give people insight into your plans. We're launching this after just three months since we had the initial idea.
How did we get here?
At the end of 2018 we finally wrapped-up major development of Qurate Content Hub. We’d been working on the platform non-stop for 2 years, and while some parts of the platform were functional much earlier, the platform didn’t reach a complete “version 1” until December 2018.
Developing Content Hub was extremely complex, dealing with integrations with multiple third party services in various different ways, such as collecting and serving massive amounts of analytical data, a robust scheduling service to publish content at specific times, continual social listening, on demand social discovery and much more in addition to the software development itself.
After reaching the v1 goal it was clear the team needed a break. They needed something fresh and simple to work on.
While our Content Hub platform allows users to draft, compose, approve, schedule, and post there was always a previous step which had to be undertaken before using Content Hub. Planning.
Initially we had planned to build a planner into the Content Hub, but as we started brainstorming the anatomy of the tool, it became clear that there were a few different types of planning marketing teams needed to perform. It appeared that we needed several planning tools.
To cut a long story, we realized that in order to be a comprehensive planning tool that content teams would love, it had to be able to plan much more than website content and social posts. It needed to consolidate all of their planning.
Qurate Planner as a standalone product
Late December 2018 as we were just preparing to go on our Christmas holidays we started work on the features and wireframes for Qurate Planner.
The goal was to make it so simple that anyone could learn how to use it in just a few minutes, and so flexible that it could be used to plan anything not just content.
We wanted to see if we could apply our design thinking practices of reducing planning down to it's essence, and create the ultimate level of elegance, simplicity and flexibility. I think we got it.
Qurate Planner is as simple to use as Trello, and like Trello there is just one feature. We call them Tag Groups.
Planner is a one-page application. The user interface has three sections: a calendar, your tag groups, and a sidebar which slides in when an event is selected.
We’ve included all of the essential features of project planning such as collaborators, dates and events. Preferring to let users create Tag Groups to make the Plan suit their specific needs. This means we don’t even have the ability to set a time for an event!
If time is required on events in the plan, users can create a Tag Group called “Time” and enter the required fields. Probably you would not enter “01:00, 02:00, 03:00 etc.”, you’d enter something that means something to your plan, such as “Morning, Noon, End of play”.
Now don’t misunderstand, we will enhance Qurate Planner, and we already have several feature enhancements planned (one of them is time related ;). However, the point is that we launched what we set out to create. The ultimately simple planning application. Possible for anyone to use for planning anything.
The really amazing thing was the energy the team brought to development. They developed Planner from start to finish as a brand new application in just 6 weeks. The design was almost entirely done using our Qurate Design System so virtually no new component designs were required.
Now, back to the “Y” behind Qurate Planner
Imagine a “T” shape where the horizontal represents different industries, and the vertical represents a single industry. Planner is T-shaped because it works for all people in all industries, but it goes deep (and will go deeper) for content workflows, such as our Qurate Content Hub platform including social media and content management.
Almost 95% of all businesses in the world have a content strategy. This means 95% of all users of Qurate Planner will also have a need for (or work for a company which has a need for) the other content tools we make. So rather than being T-shaped, we think of Planner as being Y-shaped because we can cross-sell users with the help of gravity into our content ecosystem.
Now you know the why and the Y behind Qurate Planner, please give it a go for yourself. Try to plan using only the Tag Groups and see how far you get. Hint, we also have a Notes field. Please please please also send us your comments and feedback.
