Launching a community marketplace portal — web + mobile
Replacing repetitive forms, insecure access, manual matchmaking, and fragmented data with one personalized portal for talent — designed mobile-first and built to scale to 20,000 members.
An on-demand community of marketing experts
We Are Rosie is a community of independent marketing experts — "Rosies" — available on demand to augment, backfill, and accelerate the in-house teams of Fortune 500 brands and agencies. The product question: how do thousands of independent experts and the companies who need them find each other, apply, and get matched without the whole thing running on manual admin work?
Repetitive data entry, insecure access, and manual matchmaking
- Repetitive data entry. Rosies filled out a join form, then manually re-entered the same details every time they applied to an opportunity — slow and error-prone.
- Insecure community access. The talent hub sat behind a public URL, so people who'd never joined could reach sensitive community resources.
- No easy apply. There was no streamlined path to apply to opportunities, which discouraged candidates.
- Manual job posting. Opportunities were added by hand by an admin, delaying when they reached the community.
- Fragmented data underneath it all. The bigger, less visible problem: member data lived across disconnected platforms with no single source of truth — unusable for the internal team without heavy manual wrangling.
- Offline interview scheduling. Setting up interviews meant the admin coordinating times over email and phone with both sides.
What the product had to do
A personalized home
SSO and a centralized profile, a space to manage their data, browse and apply to open opportunities, and track application status.
Members only
Make the community hub an exclusive, authenticated experience — accessible only to people who'd actually joined.
Less manual work
Replace re-keyed data, manual posting, and offline scheduling with self-serve flows and system-driven coordination.
From user flows to a tested, responsive product
I ran the product from discovery through launch: mapping user flows for each role, building wireframes for mobile and desktop, then testing a low-fidelity prototype with real users across several sessions to catch gaps before visual design. From there: UI guidelines, a high-fidelity responsive prototype, and a scoped MVP spanning the Rosie portal, a back-office admin, and a companion mobile app with full parity — all built mobile-first.
Under the hood, the portal had to sit on top of the existing operational stack: I scoped integrations for single sign-on, the applicant-tracking system, CRM, calendar, time tracking, support, and notifications, plus migration of existing profile and opportunity data from the legacy systems.
One system, three experiences
Profile, apply, track
Social login; a rich profile (bio, roles, skills, industry, education, hourly rates, portfolio uploads); easy-apply with share & refer-a-friend; an availability calendar; and a dashboard with application tracking, profile-completion, and time tracking.
Manage & match
Tools to manage member accounts and coordinate interview scheduling across calendars — replacing the email-and-phone runaround.
Full parity, on the go
A dedicated mobile app mirroring the web portal — same credentials, same core flows — for Rosies who live on their phones.
It wasn't only a front-end project — it was a data one
Before the portal, this experience was spread across fragmented platforms, and the underlying member data lived everywhere — disconnected systems, spreadsheets, and forms that never talked to each other. The portal became the fix: a single, structured capture point for member data that feeds a clean, unified data warehouse, which in turn connects to our other internal platforms.
That turned a scattered, messy dataset into something the internal team could actually use — clean, queryable connections across roughly 20,000 member profiles, ready to be put to work instead of wrangled. The visible win was a better experience for Rosies; the quieter, larger win was making the data legible to the whole business.
A community marketplace that scaled
- Reached 5,000+ members in the first year, strengthening engagement across both freelancers and clients.
- Turned a manual, admin-driven process into self-serve flows for applying, posting, and scheduling.
- Made the community an authenticated, members-only experience.
- Unified roughly 20,000 member profiles into one clean data warehouse — turning scattered records into queryable data the whole business could use.