Role: Product Designer (later expanding responsibilities as Staff Designer)

Team: 1 PM, 4 Engineers, myself as designer

Timeline: ~9 months, multi-phase rollout

Constraints: Instagram APIs limited interactive features (e.g., stickers, links)

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Overview

I led the design of Sprout Social’s Instagram Stories publishing experience, making Stories a first-class channel within our platform. This work unlocked a major customer need and drove immediate adoption, with over 68,000 Stories created daily at launch.

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The Challenge

Stories were becoming the most important format for brands on Instagram, yet Sprout didn’t support them. Social teams were forced into clunky workarounds — manually posting, splitting campaigns across tools, and losing analytics.

Problem statement:

How might we help customers create and manage Stories directly in Sprout, while navigating Instagram’s API limitations — including the largest blocker, no automatic publishing — and still ensuring cross-platform consistency?

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Role & Scope

• Role: Product Designer → expanded into Staff Designer responsibilities
• Team: 1 PM, 4 Engineers, myself as designer
• Timeline: ~9 months, multi-phase rollout
• Constraints: Instagram’s APIs restricted key functionality — most importantly, auto-publishing was prohibited, even though it was the most-requested feature from customers.

I was originally assigned to design the mobile experience only. As the project grew in complexity and cross-platform needs became clear, I stepped up to also take on the web publishing experience, ensuring workflows stayed consistent across platforms.

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Research & Discovery

• Analytics: 40%+ of brand Instagram posts were Stories, yet none were supported in Sprout.
• Competitive audit: Rivals offered partial or clunky workflows, often constrained by the same API.
• Interviews: Social managers called Stories “the highest-performing format,” but the lack of auto-publishing in any tool created major frustration.
• Constraints analysis: Identified publishing limits and designed fallback workflows (e.g., scheduled reminders + manual publishing notes).