Building Ambo
- Feb 25
- 6 min read
Overview
Ambo is an early-stage employee advocacy platform that empowers employees to become brand advocates, enabling companies to share and amplify content through their employees’ personal networks.
When I joined the team, the product was transitioning from a simple post-sharing tool into a more flexible content distribution system. The challenge wasn’t just improving UI, it was redefining how content workflows should scale as teams, accounts, and distribution complexity grew.
This wasn’t a redesign. It was a structural rethink.
Where the Experience Broke Down
As Ambo grew, the product expanded beyond simple post sharing to support content creation, automated distribution, and performance insights. Over time, new capabilities were added across different parts of the product, from AI-assisted writing to scheduling and analytics.
While these features made the platform more powerful, they also introduced new complexity.
Workflows began to feel fragmented, with content creation, distribution configuration, and performance insights spread across different surfaces. Automation behavior was not always easy to understand, and key actions often competed for attention within the interface.
As a result, the product experience began to feel dense and harder to navigate, especially for admins managing multiple posts and advocates.
To address this, I approached the redesign by looking at the product as a complete system rather than a collection of individual screens. The goal was to clarify how content moves through the platform from creation, to distribution, to performance insights.
The redesign focused on improving three key areas:
Content creation workflow – making it easier for admins to create and prepare posts for distribution
Content dashboard – helping teams manage and track content more efficiently
Analytics – connecting performance insights more clearly to participation and reach
Inspiration hub – enabling admins to discover and curate content ideas
Below are some highlights from the redesigned interface.
Restructuring Content Creation
Admin content creation workflow
The admin workflow in Ambo focuses on preparing content for distribution. Admins create posts, configure how they should be shared, and select the advocates who will distribute them across their networks. The platform then helps coordinate how that content is published over time.
Where Complexity Started to Appear
As the product evolved, new capabilities were introduced to support more flexible content distribution.
A single post could now:
Support multiple variations tailored for different contexts
Allow each variation to be shared by multiple advocates
Include variation-level settings such as scheduling time and advocate selection, in addition to general post settings
While these features increased flexibility, they also introduced new complexity to the creation workflow.
The Challenge
Integrating these capabilities into the existing interface proved difficult.
The content creation screen already contained several functional areas:
Post Settings
Post editing
Variations management
Distribution settings
Post preview
Bringing all of these together within a single surface risked making the interface visually dense and cognitively overwhelming.
The challenge was to design a workflow that could support this increased flexibility while still feeling clear, structured, and easy to navigate for users.
Exploration different workflows
I explored several possible directions and narrowed them down to three strong options.
Each concept was prototyped in Figma and stress-tested against typical user flows to evaluate clarity, scalability, and usability.
Workflow A
Variations as a First-Class Sidebar followed by edit post and separate preview.
✅ Strengths
Fast switching between variations
Faster work flow
Scales well as more metadata/features are added
⚠️ Weakness
Hierarchy between global settings and variations is less obvious
Does not scale well when settings increase
3-column layout can feel intimidating
Source URL sits close to variation editor
Workflow B
Variations Inside Post Settings and preview and edit post as switchable units.
✅ Strengths
Very clear hierarchy (settings → variations)
Easier for new users to understand
⚠️ Weakness
Does not scale well when settings/variations variations increase
Hard to scan
Workflow C
Variations Inside Post Settings and preview and edit post as switchable units.
✅ Strengths
Clean separation between global and variaiton settings
Familiar interaction pattern
⚠️ Weakness
Users must remember context
No simultaneous visibility
Solution
Compared the 3 models with Scalability, speed and confidence
While the earlier approaches solved parts of the problem, Workflow C provided the strongest foundation for the product long term, balancing efficiency with a structure that could scale with future features. This became the basis for the redesigned creation workflow.
As we tested different workflow directions, we noticed that admins relied heavily on AI to write and refine posts. However, creating new versions of a post still required manual steps after generating variations.
To address this, we experimented with a workflow where AI rewrite results could be directly converted into new variations. Instead of copying and editing content manually, admins could select AI-generated options and instantly turn them into ready-to-use variations.
This significantly reduced the effort required to prepare multiple versions of a post and made the content creation process much faster. Over time, this workflow has become one of the most frequently used features in the product.
From Status Dashboard to Performance Workspace
As Ambo matured, the dashboard needed to do more than show system status. It needed to help teams understand how their content was performing and where to focus next.
The original dashboard surfaced metrics like shares, impressions, and clicks, but these numbers lived separately from the content itself. Users could see activity, but it wasn’t easy to connect performance back to the posts that generated it.
This created a gap between insight and action.
Reframing the role of the dashboard
Instead of treating the dashboard as a static overview, we reframed it as a performance workspace, a place where teams could quickly understand what’s happening and decide what to do next.
Three changes shaped the redesign.
Surface insights first: We introduced a Weekly Insights layer at the top of the dashboard, highlighting key engagement metrics with trend indicators. This gives teams an immediate sense of momentum without requiring them to open analytics.
Bring performance closer to content: Engagement signals like shares, clicks, and impressions now appear directly on each content card. This makes it easy to see which posts are driving impact while browsing the content feed.
Improve scanning and control: Clearer content states and filtering options make it easier to navigate large content libraries and quickly focus on what matters.
A clearer performance story
The redesigned dashboard shifts Ambo from a content management interface to a decision-making surface.
Redesigning Ambo Analytics
What wasn’t working
The original analytics dashboard surfaced a large set of metrics but lacked a clear hierarchy. Important signals such as ROI, top advocates, and post performance were buried in dense tables, making it difficult for teams to quickly understand how their advocacy program was performing.
Shifting the focus
Rather than simply displaying data, the redesign focused on helping teams quickly interpret performance. The experience was reorganized around the questions users naturally ask:
Is our advocacy program performing well?
Which posts are driving engagement?
Who are our most impactful advocates?
A clearer performance story
The new dashboard introduces a stronger visual hierarchy with three key sections:
Program performance highlighting ROI and overall reach
Post analysis to surface high-performing content
Advocate insights to identify the employees driving impact
Trend indicators, comparison graphs, and highlighted performers make performance easier to scan and interpret.
The result
The redesign transforms analytics from a collection of metrics into a clear performance narrative, helping teams quickly understand what’s working and where to focus next.
Introducing Inspiration Hub
Through customer interviews and product feedback, a recurring pattern emerged. Admins didn’t struggle with publishing, they struggled with finding the next thing worth sharing.
Teams often had plenty of valuable content scattered across blogs, company updates, and industry articles. But discovering these pieces and turning them into employee-ready posts required manual searching, copying, and rewriting. The friction meant good content frequently went unused.
This insight led us to introduce Inspiration Hub, a dedicated space designed to help admins discover ideas and quickly turn them into posts.
The hub aggregates multiple sources of inspiration in one place: RSS feeds, company posts, and trending LinkedIn content. Instead of jumping between platforms, admins can browse relevant content and convert it into a post with a single action.
Each item acts as a starting point for creation. With options like Create Post or Share Post, admins can instantly transform inspiration into structured content within the publishing workflow.
By turning inspiration into a designed step in the workflow, the hub reduces the gap between discovering an idea and publishing a post making content creation faster and far more consistent for advocacy teams.
Looking Back
This project started as a redesign of a few complex interfaces. But as the work progressed, it became clear that the real challenge wasn’t the screens, it was the system behind them.
By restructuring how content is created, distributed, and measured, Ambo now presents a clearer product experience for admins and a stronger foundation for future features.
What emerged wasn’t just a new interface, but a more coherent product model for employee advocacy.
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