Case Study theSkimm

Case Study: theSkimm Loyalty Program

Team: Product Designer, Product Manager, Software Engineers (me)

Overview

TheSkimm Loyalty Program was designed to encourage deeper engagement across the theSkimm ecosystem. Members, known as Skimm'bassadors, earned points by completing everyday activities—from reading articles and opening the Daily Skimm newsletter to completing onboarding and watching videos. Those points could then be redeemed for rewards. The goal was to reward habits members already had while creating new opportunities for engagement.

My Role

As a Software Engineer on the Web Team, I helped build the first customer-facing experience of the loyalty platform.

Member Dashboard Experience

As part of the platform's first customer-facing experience, I helped build the member dashboard that surfaced loyalty status, recent activity, and rewards. The dashboard became the primary destination for members to monitor their progress and engage with the program.

I worked across the account creation and onboarding experience, integrated the frontend with our backend services, and developed several of the core interfaces that introduced members to the program. Some of my contributions included:

  • Account creation and registration flows

  • Loyalty account management

  • Password reset experience

  • Activities and Rewards dashboard

  • Integrate the customer loyalty and engagement platform, Oracle CrowdTwist

  • Styling and customization of CrowdTwist activity and rewards widgets

Technical Challenge

The most interesting challenge was integrating Oracle's CrowdTwist platform into our existing application.

While CrowdTwist provided pre-built widgets for displaying activities and rewards, they offered limited customization. We had little control over the generated markup and were constrained in how we could modify the DOM or extend the components through CSS.

Working closely with design and product, I explored ways to make the third-party components feel like a seamless part of theSkimm experience while working within those technical limitations. Rather than treating the widgets as isolated embeds, we focused on creating a consistent visual language across the rest of the application.

Reflection

This project reinforced something I enjoy most about product development: working at the intersection of product, design, and engineering.

Building the Loyalty Program wasn't just about implementing features—it required balancing product goals, technical constraints, and the overall member experience to create something that felt cohesive and intuitive.