Web3 Social Network
Ultra Social
Reimagining the social experience, Ultra Social is a blockchain-powered platform designed with metaverse smart contract, cryptocurrency, and NFT capabilities. Prioritizing positive engagement and empowering influencers to monetize their brands via tokenization.
About the project
This case study captures detail from discovery to launch. The journey of reimagining and developing a new way to connect showcases innovation in practice. Dive deeper into the various phases we went through, from understanding requirements to launching the app. Discover the artifacts and insights that shaped this project and made it a reality.
My Role
Lead Product Delivery Manager, Product Manager, Product Owner - Led a team of 27 members and collaborating with developers, architects, designers, data analysts, QA analysts, and marketing - I was responsible for:
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Discovery and client engagement: Coordinated and led client meetings, user interviews, design thinking workshops, presented demos, and provided weekly status updates.
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Project management: Implemented an agile culture, fostered a collaborative environment, documented functional and nonfunctional requirements, managed resources, led ceremonies, wrote user stories and acceptance criteria, prioritized and refined backlog, UAT.
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Product Strategy: prioritized features, influenced tech stack, drove Go-to-Market and monetization.
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Product Design: Implemented design system and led user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) on NFT marketplace.
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Stakeholder management: Point of contact for leadership, led weekly meetings, provided weekly status reports, and developed processes to promote transparency into the project.
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Sales and Marketing: Designed and executed go-to-market strategies, including targeted sales campaigns, marketing initiatives, and customer onboarding processes.
🏁 How it started
Discovery
With $2 billion in year-over-year revenue, the client had a global presence across industries such as lifestyle, health & wellness, and e-commerce. As part of their shift toward a more innovation-driven culture, the client engaged our team to help expand their product portfolio into technology solutions.
Given only 10 business days for the initial discovery phase, I was responsible for coordinating resources, collaborating with stakeholders, defining the project scope, and delivering a formal proposal. This involved working closely with both internal and external stakeholders to conduct risk and code assessments, align on business objectives, document functional and non-functional requirements, and define success criteria.
Initially, my team and I understood that we would be developing the mobile application from scratch. However, during our assessment, we discovered that the client had started development four years earlier—a detail lost due to high turnover within their organization.
After securing leadership buy-in, we accepted a knowledge transfer and I worked with my team to assess the legacy code, compile our findings, and align with the client on a strategic path forward. Several challenges were uncovered that dramatically increased the project risk and complexity.
Biggest challenges:
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Technical debt - an exuberant number of risks threaten to increase development effort - dilapidated code that lacked proper documentation, poorly structure and designed code.
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NFT marketplace - new technology inherently increases risks via unknowns related to stability, longevity, and knowledge gaps.
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The Client - aggressive timeline requests coupled with key employee turnover increases risks related to knowledge loss, decision bottlenecks, commitment to vision, and scope creep.
Next, leveraging various tools such as Jira, I collaborated with internal and external stakeholders to estimate stories and build a roadmap.
Project Phases
Phase 1
Discovery/Design - Gain insights into the User Experience design, Customer Journeys and requirements to develop MVP Roadmap and Plan
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Understand brand vision
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Business goals and objectives
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Marketing and product strategies
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Roadmap features/requirements
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Version 1 and phases refined
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Usability testing strategy
Phase 2
Development - User Experience Functional architecture, infrastructure and feature development
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Technical Architecture Design
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Development of UX screens and flows
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Infrastructure/hosting
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3rd Party Tools integration
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User Experience development
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Content publishing and delivery
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System testing and Quality Assurance
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Continual Roadmap Alignment
Phase 3
Production - User Experience and Business Operations readiness phase
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User Acceptance Testing and Validation
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Marketing Strategy Alignment
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Business Operations and Process readiness
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App Stores release content and schedule
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Support and Maintenance Plan in place
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Launch to stores
Reimagining how we connect
The Problem
Social media rewards "rage bate" engagement. Studies have shown that repetitive exposure to negative content on social media can significantly influence viewers' mental health and perception, emphasizing the need for awareness and interventions to mitigate its harmful effects on mental health and public perception.
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Increased likelihood of sharing negative news: Social media users are 1.91 times more likely to share negative news articles compared to positive ones, with Facebook users posting 98% more about negative articles than positive ones.
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Impact on mental health: Individuals with poorer mental health are more prone to engage with negative content online, which in turn exacerbates their symptoms, creating a vicious cycle.
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Depression risk: A strong association between social media use and depression has been observed, with those in the highest quartile of social media site visits per week having significantly increased odds of depression.
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Mood deterioration: Participants exposed to negative web pages reported being in a worse mood compared to those who viewed neutral pages.
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Viral spread of negative news: Analysis of nearly 30 million posts revealed that emotional, negative content fuels the viral spread of news on social media platforms.
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Cumulative effect: The collective impact of multiple exposures to negative content contributes to shifting public perceptions over time, potentially leading to acute stress, PTSD, and depression, especially among people of color.
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Algorithmic reinforcement: Social media algorithms may amplify this effect by prioritizing negative content in users' feeds, creating a feedback loop of negativity.
The Solution
We imagined a new way of connecting - our mission was to create a community that prioritized positive engagement. I initially approached the problem from viewer's experience and the content creator's intention.
Viewer:
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Experience - understand the viewers emotional experience.
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Intervention - haptic feedback to intervene and to bring awareness to a viewer's emotional experience.
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Analytics - capture various data points, aggregated and delayed, to profile the viewers emotional experience.
Content creator:
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Intention - understand the intention of the content creator's post.
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Analytics - understand if and to whom the the intention of content creator's post were met.
The two features that evolved from discovery were Moods and Ultra Ranking Model. Features from Moods were captured and fed to the ranking model the purpose of injecting personalized content rewarded by positive engagements. The below artifacts represent snapshots along the process.
Notable Features
Moods
Documenting, solutioning, and developing a POC and prototype for moods:
Ranking Model
NFT marketplace
With new technologies, it is important to build spikes for epics to validate they can meet functional and nonfunctional requirements. It was important to iteratively diagram the NFT journey as we developed to visualize a transparent source of truth to align, collaborate, and solution.
Thank you for reading!
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Tu feedback es bienvenido 👍🏻
Cristopher Galarce Arcila
Product Designer
