Seven years turning an email company into a marketing platform.

Journey Builder started on a marketer’s corkboard.

Across the engagement we interviewed more than fifty marketers. One of them, at a national apparel retailer, showed us the corkboard she used to plan her campaigns: color-coded index cards branching into different paths at customer milestones. She was building journeys by hand because no software offered them. Looking at her board, we saw what had already convinced Scott McCorkle, the executive driving ExactTarget’s platform: marketers did not need more channels in one interface, they needed one surface above the channels, coordinating a single customer journey. That concept became Journey Builder.

ExactTarget did not ship vaporware.

Product visions did their work inside the company. We built them at high fidelity, concrete enough that executives and product teams could see their customers in them, and over the years they aligned the organization around where the platform was going. What reached the stage at Connections was held to a different standard: built, or nearly built. When thousands of marketers saw the platform’s next chapter at the keynote, they were looking at product, not promises. That discipline came from ExactTarget’s leadership, and it is why the reactions in that room meant something.

The platform shipped in pieces, each one building on the last.

ExactTarget could not ship everything at once, and chose not to try. Releases were sequenced strategically, each one extending the system the last had put in place. Playbooks came early: pre-made journey templates built on the existing platform, real functionality that put the journey concept in marketers’ hands years before Journey Builder was complete. What marketers did with each release informed the next. A living design system held the pieces together as they accumulated into one coherent platform.