Dyspatch (Techdrop Labs Inc.)

My Role: As the Senior Product Designer, I owned end-to-end UX and UI across Dyspatch’s platform, shaping complex workflows and scalable systems in close partnership with Product and Engineering. Over the course of nearly 6 years, I helped evolve the product from a simple email builder into a robust production system that supports automation, compliance, and team autonomy.

Key Outcomes:

  • Increased Monthly Active User rate by 87.5%, from 32% (2023) to 60% (2025)

  • Maintained 100% Enterprise Retention by supporting demos, customer check-ins, and prioritizing customer-driven improvements

  • Average Time to Market (north star KPI) was reduced from ~1 week (2020) to ~15 minutes (2025)

Note: Dyspatch offers a free trial (https://app.dyspatch.io/signup) which can be used to see the platform in action. While a few advanced features are restricted from trial accounts, the core functionality, information architecture, and user experience can be evaluated.

No-Code Email Builder

Transforming an editor into an email production platform

When I began working on Dyspatch’s Email Builder, it included important core functionality, but it lacked the granularity, controls, and workflows required by enterprise teams operating at scale. Through early customer check-in calls, the pain points we consistently heard revealed bottle-necks at each point in the critical path of the builder:

  • Rigid, hard-coded components (blocks) that limited design flexibility for marketers who built the emails (in turn requiring engineers to assist)

  • Costly localizations workflow: emails were translated before copy was finalized requiring multiple rounds of professional translation revisions, inflating a customer’s expenses for every campaign

  • Manual, disconnected template approval process across brand, marketing, and legal (typically done in excel spreadsheets!)

Given the variety of our customer base, every organization had their own unique requirements. This gave us focused constraints that had to be accounted for in every decision we made:

  • There was no “default” path – every customer had a different process, level of legal and compliance, and technical capability

  • We had to balance flexibility with guardrails – some customers had strict brand guidelines and governance, while others demanded more creative freedom and decision making

Due to customer expectations to ship improvements without disrupting active campaigns, we focused on incremental releases each quarter. The primary KPI we measured was time-to-market (TTM), defined as when the email is initially created to when it is published. Our goal was to dramatically reduce TTM while preserving quality, brand governance, and customer autonomy.

The largest impact to average TTM came from improving the core stages of email production: design, translation, and approvals.

Key Outcome: Average TTM was reduced from ~1 week to ~15 minutes

EMAIL BUILDER STATE IN 2020. CLICK PREVIEW TO VIEW FULLSCREEN

EMAIL BUILDER STATE IN 2026. CLICK PREVIEW TO VIEW FULLSCREEN

Multi-Step Approval Workflows

While reviewing in-app NPS feedback, I noticed a strong negative response from a key stakeholder in one of our flagship enterprise accounts. Given their influence over renewals, this raised red flags for churn risk. I initiated follow-up interviews with the primary stakeholders to better understand their pain points, current workflow, and identify opportunities for improvement.

Key Pain Points

They had strict brand and legal compliance requirements; with 1,000+ users on the account, our original single-step approval flow didn’t scale. Emails were frequently published without the correct approvals, stakeholders were looped in last minute, and most users didn’t even know who needed to sign off.

MULTI-STEP APPROVAL WORKFLOW: Demonstrating the approval workflow from start to finish. (Example is using admin-only actions to approve on behalf of assigned stakeholders to keep recording short). CLICK GIF TO VIEW FULLSCREEN

APPROVAL GROUPS: Stakeholders assigned to a workspace will be automatically assigned to review and approve an email at the appropriate approval stage(s).

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STAGE 1 DESIGN REVIEW: Email is submitted for design & copywriting approval.

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STAGE 2 FINAL APPROVAL: Once localizations are complete, the email is submitted for publishing. It is then ready to export to their email sending platform.

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Discovery

Through multiple stakeholder interviews, we determined that a multi-step approval flow paired with automation would best solve their need for compliance, efficiency, and user autonomy.

I conceptualized and designed the new workflow, sharing interactive prototypes, iterating based on their feedback, and educating them on how best to structure approval groups once live.

Solution

Given their upcoming renewal and potential churn, I advocated for scheduling the project as an immediate priority. I partnered with Senior Engineers to plan and deliver the solution, which included:

  • account toggle for admins to enable multi-step workflow for their organization (opt-in feature to support other customers)

  • ability to create approval groups, and assign those groups to each or both of the approval stages

  • splitting the email builder so the localizations panel would only become available once the content/design were approved

  • API upgrades to allow programatic approvals based on QA testing pass/fail states, and automatic publishing to production once all stakeholders have signed off

The feature launched as a beta behind a feature flag for this customer. I conducted live training sessions, and provided a pre-recorded walkthrough video they could share internally. With a one-month beta period, we validated stability and refined edge cases before releasing to the full customer base.

Results

The customer called the feature a game-changer, enabling automation across nearly the entire workflow while preserving required stakeholder sign-offs. What used to take them 3-4 days now took ~1 hour end-to-end, drastically improving their average TTM.

They expressed their appreciation that we truly listened to them and took actionable steps to make sure they were set up for success. In a follow-up interview, the original negative NPS respondent reversed their sentiment entirely, re-gained their confidence and trust.

Key Outcomes:

  • Average TTM for customer reduced from ~3-4 days to ~1 hour

  • Secured $300K+ multi-year renewal, preventing churn

  • Feature adoption across most enterprise accounts

LOCALIZATIONS: Walkthrough demo I recorded showcasing how the direct integration works with our first localization partner, Smartling.

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Localizations

To eliminate a major bottleneck in the email production process, we built direct integrations with leading localization platforms to automate the localization workflow, including Smartling, Phrase, and XTM.

Previously, customers completed the translation work manually in either Dyspatch or in spreadsheets, often taking multiple days (sometimes weeks!) to complete and preventing smaller teams from localizing at all. By shipping key direct integrations, we dramatically reduced localization effort and contributed to a faster average TTM.

Key Outcomes:

  • Secured 3 net-new customers + 4 existing account expansions

  • Cultivated a formal co-marketing partnership with Smartling

EDITABLE STYLES IN THE EMAIL BUILDER: With variants, a single button component can support switching between every button style defined in the theme. Further design choices are made available based on theme settings.

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THEME EDITOR: Admins can globally style all available components to match their brand guidelines. Style control toggles provide granularity over design guardrails, allowing admins to restrict which specific styles are available in the email builder.

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Editable Styles

The email builder originally relied on hard-coded blocks with no design customization, requiring users to create hundreds of blocks to cover all design variations set by the brand guidelines. This made block discovery difficult for new users and forced marketers to rely on developers for even small design changes, resulting in slow workflows and frequent back-and-forth.

Through extensive UX work across themes, blocks, and the email builder, we introduced a robust system of editable styles. Because customers enforce varying levels of brand guardrails, we designed layered style precedence and admin controls that allow teams to fine-tune exactly how much design customization is available in the builder.

By implementing more advanced controls in the theme editor, users can now rely on a small set of flexible, reusable blocks shared across all themes. Admins control which styles are editable for each element, including focused colour palettes and defining style variants.

With these changes, emails are easier to build, faster to customize, and consistently on-brand while still supporting creative flexibility.

Key Outcomes:

  • Blocks reduced from an average 150-200 per theme, to 20-40 global blocks shared across all themes

  • Blocks are easier to find and customize, reducing the average time to create an email, supporting positive impact to TTM

  • 2 net new customers won specifically due to style variants

  • Generated revenue through professional services to overhaul customers’ block libraries to leverage all of the new advanced theme editor capabilities