Over four years, I helped transform Cross Screen Media's outdated media planning tools and disconnected experience into a streamlined and unified platform for political advertising analytics, connecting audience discovery, media planning, and campaign measurement reporting.
Quick context before the deep dive
Unify outdated, disconnected political advertising tools into one platform and make dense analytics feel intuitive.
Lead Product Designer across core workflows, research, and cross-team alignment over 4 years.
Confidential work, legacy UX, high data density, and many stakeholder needs (sales, CS, data science, engineering).
Helped evolve the platform into a unified experience; during this period the company reported 300% revenue growth.
"Political agencies need to understand their audiences at a granular level, but most tools either drown them in raw data or oversimplify the insights."
We needed to make complex data feel intuitive.
When I joined Cross Screen Media as Lead Product Designer in 2021, the platform was showing its age. The existing web application was functional but clunky, built years earlier by team members no longer at the company, and mostly by the engineering team who were at a more experimental time of the company's early life. The previous designer had created a design system, but there was a lot of work left to do to connect the disconnected services offered by Cross Screen Media. The company was ready to evolve its business model.
What made this role unique was the culture. Cross Screen Media is a hands-on company that actively encourages reaching across departments to solve problems. I wasn't siloed in a design corner but rather explicitly told to reach out to different departments like engineering, marketing, sales, data science, and customer success to figure out how to visualize the complex web of issues the entire industry faces on a daily basis. I got to reach out to members internally and talk with dozens of external users to understand their pain points, an ongoing effort that shaped everything I designed.
This wasn't a single project - it was four years of continuous improvement, major feature launches, and deep cross-team collaboration. As Lead Product Designer, I had a seat at the table with product, engineering, data science, and marketing. Here's what I owned:
Led the complete redesign of the audience discovery experience, creating an intuitive drag-and-drop system for building complex audiences with voter segments using real-time sizing estimates thanks to the talented engineering team.
Collaborated with the engineering team to support the integration of Metabase, designing a visually consistent library of charts, tables, and interactive graphics and color palettes across the Figma design system.
Rebuilt the Figma design system using modern best practices, creating reusable components through MUI6 that accelerated both design and development velocity for the front-end team.
Designed the reporting interface for cross-platform campaign measurement, helping clients understand performance across TV, Digital, and CTV.
Using Metabase charting, I collaborated with product and engineering to design the interface and UX flow for TV-specific analytics inside the platform.
Worked directly with the VP of Marketing to unify visual language across the platform, website, and social media, contributing to a cohesive brand refresh.
The Audience Builder is the heart of the platform. It's where political agencies find and define who they want to reach. I redesigned this experience from scratch over two years, including a year of focused user research: internal stakeholder workshops, contextual interviews with campaign managers, moderated usability testing, unmoderated prototype testing, card sorting and task analysis exercises, remote diary studies, and A/B prototype experiments. We iterated through low and high-fidelity prototypes, measured success via task-completion rates and funnel drop-offs through HEAP Analytics usage tracking, and validated improvements with session recordings and qualitative feedback to turn a confusing multi-step wizard into an intuitive, industry-leading real-time builder.
Turning raw political data into actionable insights. Through almost-daily discussions with engineering, data science, customer success, and product, I gathered constant feedback while iterating dozens of design variations to find the clearest way to represent relationships that had not previously been visualized together in a cohesive experience.
Multi-dimensional data tables with heat-mapped cells for instant pattern recognition, powered by MUIX. Users can compare audience segments across geography, demographics, and media markets, to name a few.
Every table is fully interactive with metric filtering, column re-ordering and hiding, sorting, and the ability to export filtered views. The data updates in real time as users adjust their audience definitions.
Color-coded density indicators help users spot concentrations at a glance. The visual weight of each cell communicates relative importance without requiring manual comparison.
When I joined, the Figma files were a mess — inconsistent components, sparse documentation, random colors and font variations, scattered hex codes, and concepts that didn't reflect production. I updated the design system to MUI6 in collaboration with engineering and the front-end team, creating reusable components with variants, proper auto-layout, and detailed specifications for the engineering team.
The result was dramatic: what used to take days to build could now be assembled in hours. More importantly, it aligned design and development — we were finally speaking the same language with the same building blocks, removing remnants left by past team members that could vaguely be described as hieroglyphics.
My role extended well beyond features designed, often involving collaborations with various teams in different capacities.
Conducted customer interviews, usability tests, and feedback sessions. These insights directly shaped feature priorities and caught usability issues before they reached production.
Created an internal communication format for product updates, now adopted company-wide, including the CEO. Clear, visual summaries that keep everyone aligned on what's happening, what's shipping, and why.
Worked directly with the VP of Marketing to create case study formats and social media content, including produced videos. I managed subcontractors such as motion-graphics artists and supervised deliverables to ensure visual consistency across channels.
Built strong relationships with the front-end team, creating documentation and prototypes that accelerated development. We iterated together, not in silos.
Contributed to a new brand guide in collaboration with an external designer that aligned the product platform with external marketing, unifying colors, typography, and visual language across all touchpoints.
Introduced modern prototyping practices to the team through interactive Figma flows that let internal and external stakeholders experience features before a line of code was written.
Four years is a long time. Long enough to see features I started designing in 2021 become core workflows that Cross Screen Media users depend on daily. Long enough to watch the company triple its revenue and reach its most successful point since inception. I'm very proud of what we built together.
The biggest lesson? Complex data doesn't have to feel complex. Every chart, table, and interaction is an opportunity to make something that could feel intimidating approachable, familiar, and natural. Political advertising is a high-stakes world with serious money on the line. The people using these tools don't have time to figure out confusing interfaces. They need clarity, speed, and confidence that they're making the right decisions.
This role also taught me the value of being embedded across teams. The best insights came from unexpected places — a comment from a sales rep about how clients actually use the tool, a constraint from engineering that led to a better solution, or a question from data science that revealed a gap in my understanding. Cross Screen Media's culture of open collaboration made me a significantly better designer.
Great product design isn't just about the pixels but the relationships. The features that shipped successfully were the ones where design, engineering, data science, customer success, and external users were genuinely aligned. My job wasn't just to make things look good; it was to make everyone's job easier.
"I had the privilege of working closely with Andrei for four years, and I can say without hesitation that he is a rock star teammate.
Andrei is incredibly creative and brings a true multi-disciplinary approach to every challenge. He connects product, design, engineering, and business strategy in a way that drives real outcomes, not just ideas.
As a CEO, it can be difficult to get honest, thoughtful feedback from the front lines. I was always grateful for the time Andrei took to share candid input and well-formed ideas in private. He didn't just identify issues, he brought solutions.
He was also a proactive communicator to the company as a whole. His regular, clear updates kept teams informed and focused. He created an internal product update 'blast' that became a model for how multiple teams now communicate major initiatives across the company.
Andrei was with us for both good times and bad, but always carried the same high-energy can do spirit no matter the circumstance.
I was genuinely sad to see him go, but any organization would be lucky to have him."
"I had the pleasure of working with Andrei for four years, including a year as his direct report, and I can say without hesitation that he's one of the best teammates I've ever had. Andrei brings a consistently positive attitude that lifts the energy of everyone around him.
Beyond being a talented Lead Product Designer, Andrei is never afraid of a challenge. He built our user research function from the ground up, designing all of the processes and frameworks we still use today. He has a genuine gift for drawing out honest, actionable feedback from customers. The kind of insight that actually moves the needle on product decisions.
Any team would be lucky to have him."