Manasa B R— Senior UX Designer
Real-time CDP — Phase 2 cover

Real-time CDP — Phase 2

Identity resolution and activation at scale

Role
Lead UX Designer
Year
2024
Timeline
5 months
Team
1 PM, 4 Eng, 1 Researcher

This is how it started

Phase 1 worked. Phase 2 had to scale.

After Phase 1, marketers could finally build segments without engineering. But the next bottleneck was right behind it: identity resolution rules were opaque, and activating a segment into a downstream channel still meant a handoff.

Phase 2 had to make the rest of the journey — identity, governance, activation — feel like the same product.

Research

The three frictions we kept hearing about

  • 01

    "I don't know what counts as the same person"

    Marketers needed a way to see identity rules without reading a data engineer's spec.

  • 02

    "Activation feels like leaving the product"

    Pushing a segment to an ad platform or ESP meant a different tool, a different vocabulary, and a different team.

  • 03

    "Governance only shows up when something breaks"

    Approvals, audit, and PII handling lived in policy docs, not in the product.

System diagram of the Phase 2 surfaces — identity, segments, activation, governance.
How the Phase 2 surfaces connect — identity feeds segments, segments feed activation, governance wraps the whole loop.

Design

Three workstreams, one shared spine

  • 01

    Identity visualizer

    A graph view that shows how profiles merge, with the rules behind each merge surfaced in plain language.

  • 02

    In-product activation

    A unified activation panel for every supported channel — same vocabulary, same approval flow, same audit trail.

  • 03

    Governance as a layer, not a screen

    Approval state, data sensitivity, and audit are inline on every segment — never a separate destination.

High-fidelity designs of the activation flow with channel cards and approval state.
The activation flow — one panel, every channel, approval visible end-to-end.

Impact

After the first two quarters

50%
Faster time from segment to live activation
3x
More channels used per segment
0
PII incidents in audit period
8
Enterprise upsells from Phase 1 customers
“[Placeholder quote] Phase 2 is the version we always promised customers Phase 1 was going to be.”
VP Product · Algonomy

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