ShopTalks | Zufiya Edwards & Bobbie Perez talk about working across teams, client care, & our new Ratings Explorer functionality

This month, our new Ratings Explorer tool, featuring our quick and convenient “cascade” demo functionality, went live on the MX Platform™. These latest enhancements allow local workflow users to quickly and easily replicate or “cascade” ratings across multiple demos and forecast with unparalleled ease. We’ve sat with Zufiya Edwards and Bobbie Perez, Product Solutions Team Lead and Product Manager, respectively, to dive into this exciting new functionality and what this enables for MX Platform™ users.

How did the Ratings Explorer and cascading functionality features make their way into our MX Platform™ 2022 roadmap?

Zufiya: This suite of new features directly resulted from our clients' invaluable input.  During sessions with a particular client leadership team, we uncovered ways they were interested in taking advantage of our technology infrastructure to make the Local TV buying and forecasting workflow more efficient. Specifically, the task was to have a tool that would make it possible to negotiate across multiple buying demographics simultaneously—while retaining complete visibility of key data points as they progress in the workflow. 

Bobbie: From a product design and user experience standpoint, we saw this as an opportunity to meet a need and build in that value-add for our clients—as well as optimize the user experience across our rating tool. 

This feature also lays the foundations to continue to innovate this and other workflows, as the meaning of “TV” and “video” continue to converge in meaningful ways for our users. For a while now, Local TV buyers have been eying opportunities to employ new, more advanced targeting demographics. Our optimizations make integrating and buying against these new, more advanced measurements easier.

So what can Hudson MX users leveraging Local workflows expect from the new Ratings Explorer and cascade functionality? 

Bobbie: For one, our entire platform is powered by a sophisticated rules engine, so we were able to leverage this to allow our teams to create custom rules that are automatically applied across all demographics. Users can now change primary demo projection books fields to automatically populate, or “cascade,” that information across all available demos. 

Beyond the new cascade functionality, we’ve reconfigured Ratings Explorer screens from a vertical to a horizontal view, enabling users to work within larger, more detailed screens and view more historical data at a time.

Zufiya: I’m very excited that this enhancement has made this process much quicker and easier as negotiators are going through their estimating journey.

How do you measure success when taking our client’s vision to the next level—ultimately translating it into full functionality deployed across our platform?

Bobbie: The mark of a genuinely successful product enhancement goes beyond what it can enable. It is often measured by how intuitive it is and how quickly users can ramp up and adopt that functionality in their everyday work. Making this or any feature release truly successful requires taking advantage of the full breadth of what virtually every one of our teams can offer.

So does that mean that several teams were involved with this development and release?

Definitely. At Hudson MX, we’ve learned from experience to develop and employ a genuinely cross-functional team effort—involving everyone, from developers and product designers to our excellent QA, client service, training, and even marketing & communications teams.

How has this cross-functional team effort impacted the rollout of this feature to our clients?

Zufiya: We’re fortunate to have created ways to work across teams to seamlessly deliver what I like to call “white glove” client service as we deploy genuinely top-notch, innovative, and user-friendly features. 

In this instance, we made it our mission to ensure that all of our Local client teams that work in the MX Platform™ each day were well-versed in the new feature and prepared for the update. As clients see further opportunities to optimize this and other elements within the platform—and this will always be necessary as users continually evolve the way they work—we have a holistic strategy and team to get their vision mapped, tested, released, and optimally utilized. 

Based on what we’ve heard from our clients so far, it feels great knowing that our collective efforts have made all the difference! 

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Want to learn more about this upgrade and how to get started in the new Ratings Explorer? Check it out in our release note library here.