Built WorkSpan's new product site in under ten days, then moved their whole site with it.

About

WorkSpan is the platform large companies use to run their partner programs and sell alongside AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud. Playmaker is its new product for the smaller companies on the other side of those programs: resellers, managed service providers and software vendors who want their partners' funding and people working on their deals.

We already knew WorkSpan well. We were in the middle of moving workspan.com off Webflow and onto a custom stack they own.

The challenge

On October 10 we got on a call to check in on the migration and ask when they wanted to launch. That is when we found out Playmaker was being built somewhere else. Their other agency was putting it on the old Webflow site, because Playmaker had to go live and they wanted to get there the way they always had.

That made sense from where they sat. They had not seen how fast we work. So instead of arguing for it, we offered to show them: we would build the whole Playmaker section ourselves, ready in time for their launch.

The solution

We designed and built Playmaker from WorkSpan's brief. The first full build was in front of their team for review five days after the call: a homepage that explains the product by showing it, and a pricing page. Their feedback went in the next day, and the day after that.

The product is the hero. Instead of an illustration, the homepage opens on Playmaker itself, answering the question a partner manager actually asks: which plays should we run with our partners this quarter.

Each part of the product gets its own picture, built in code rather than pasted in as a screenshot, so it stays sharp at every size and comes alive as you scroll: the ranked plays, the partner funding that expires if nobody claims it, and the deals where a partner's team can tip the decision.

The agent in Slack

A site you have to file a ticket to change is a site that stops changing. So we set WorkSpan up with an agent in their Slack. Someone on their team writes what they want, the agent makes the change and sends back a preview, and nothing ships until they approve it.

They used it straight away. In the first three days WorkSpan asked for 26 changes that way, from rewriting the hero to cutting a three-stage section down to two, to hiding the annual billing toggle until yearly billing was ready.

Launch day

On the morning Playmaker was due to go live, we saw it belonged at workspan.com/playmaker rather than on a subdomain of its own. Under the main address, everything Playmaker earns in search adds to workspan.com instead of starting from nothing.

There was a catch. The main site was still on Webflow, so putting Playmaker under it meant moving the whole site at the same time. The migration had been under way for weeks, and it was not meant to launch that day. We launched it anyway: around four hundred pages, 264 blog posts, 64 events and 13 customer stories, with every old link still landing where it should.

The results

Playmaker went live at workspan.com/playmaker nine days after the call where we found out someone else was building it. The whole of workspan.com moved onto its own stack the same day. And the team that was going to go about it the way they always had now edits their site from Slack.