I’m Alex, Lead Product Designer at QIC digital hub, where we’re building qic.online and QIC App — a new kind of insurance and digital ecosystem platform for the MENA and GCC regions.
My background spans agency work, immersive tech, and large-scale retail — but what drives me across all of it is the same mindset: solve problems systematically, think in systems, and design for impact.
That’s the approach I bring to every product, every team, and every decision.
This topic is especially relevant for three key roles in digital product development: managers, designers, and marketers.
In practice, the main challenges these teams face can be grouped into two categories:
These issues rarely exist in isolation. They overlap, reinforce one another, and are often made worse by misalignment between teams. Communication breaks down, ownership is unclear, and priorities clash.
Most of these pain points arise at the intersection of marketing and product — two departments that often operate in parallel, but not in sync.
These problems — both user-facing and business-driven — rarely come with easy solutions. And often, marketing teams feel responsible primarily for business metrics: traffic, leads, acquisition. It’s understandable. But when the focus stays only on performance and ignores deeper product or UX issues, the gap between marketing and product starts to widen.
That’s when things start breaking down.
Instead of collaboration, we get negotiation.
Instead of shared goals, we get blurred ownership.
And gradually, it turns into what many teams know too well: marketing vs. product.
Not because they’re misaligned in values — but because they’re trying to solve overlapping problems from very different angles.
And you can see it clearly in the workflow.
We used to follow a common setup: a marketing team responsible for campaigns, SEO, and experiments, and a product stream focused on feature development and platform stability.
When marketing needed product changes — like launching a landing page — they had to push requests into the product backlog. And often, those requests arrived like they were from another planet: different timelines, different KPIs, unclear ownership.
What happened next?
Take a basic landing page. The flow looked like this:
Ideation → Web Design → Content → Analytics → Handoff → Dev → QA → Release.
Multiply that by a few parallel product streams, and a simple update could easily balloon into a two-week operation.
It was slow. It was messy. It didn’t scale.
To fix this, we introduced a dedicated marketing product stream — a cross-functional team focused on marketing growth and user engagement.
This stream acts as a bridge between marketing and product — not a bottleneck. It includes a product manager, designer, analyst, developer, and QA — all aligned around rapid delivery and clear priorities.
Now, both product and marketing can add to the backlog. The marketing PM owns prioritization, so nothing gets lost or delayed.
That’s a huge improvement. But even in this model, the full development cycle still applies for most tasks.
So the next question was: how do we make delivery faster — without involving full-scale development every time?
That’s where our design system came in.
We built our system around two key tools:
This setup enables marketing and design to move fast — while keeping everything consistent across design, code, and content.
To make the system scalable, we split our process into two tracks:
🔧 Preparation — for large, structured updates
⚡ Delivery — for fast, low-risk iterations
Prep once — deliver endlessly. That’s the loop.
We applied this model to one of our key verticals — travel insurance.
An SEO audit revealed that while we had a generic travel insurance page, users were searching for destination-specific options — like “USA travel insurance” or “Schengen travel insurance.”
We were missing out.
Our design team created modular templates with variable blocks — from promos and forms to CTAs and headers. These templates were deployed via CMS, localized, and continuously optimized based on analytics and user behavior.
As a result:
The same approach worked for car insurance — with redesigned pages leading to a 50% increase in monthly purchase volume.
Once the system was fully integrated, the impact became clear — and measurable. Conversion rates rose, especially on high-intent product pages where the combination of targeted content and optimized UX made a direct difference. Engagement also improved across the board, particularly on pages built with our modular templates. These blocks weren’t just easier to assemble — they were more effective at holding user attention and guiding action.
Our blog became another strong growth channel. We applied the same component-based approach to blog infrastructure, allowing us to quickly create SEO-optimized articles, enhance internal linking, and improve content discoverability. What started as a supporting section evolved into a strategic lever for organic traffic — one we now treat as a core acquisition tool.
But the benefits weren’t just in what we shipped — they were in how we shipped it. Workflows became leaner. Fewer handoffs meant less friction. Designers and marketers were able to move quickly, publishing updates and testing hypotheses without waiting on development resources. Experiments that used to take weeks could now happen in a day.
And perhaps the biggest shift? We created something rare — a culture of experimentation inside a traditionally conservative and highly regulated industry. Speed was a benefit. But clarity, autonomy, and the freedom to iterate — those were the real wins.
Today, we have a fully operational, modular design system powering everything from landing pages to blog content.
And we’re already looking ahead.
With generative layout tools evolving in Figma and beyond, the next logical step is clear: training AI on our templates to help assemble new pages even faster.
Soon, we’ll be able to go from idea to published page in hours — not days — with AI acting as an assistant that understands our system, uses our logic, and follows our structure.
Designers won’t be replaced — they’ll be orchestrating systems, directing layout intelligence, and focusing on strategic impact instead of routine assembly.
The tools are ready.
The foundation is in place.
The future is already loading.
Build, Ship, Repeat: How We Turned Marketing into a Machine was originally published in QIC digital hub blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
