Launching Lunar Landing

2011 foreshadowing of my product management career.

Challenge

Lyris's marketing team was running aggressive A/B testing and paid media campaigns that demanded hundreds of unique, tracked landing pages each week. NetSuite's native form handler couldn't support the tracking or customization the campaigns needed. A small team with no budget for enterprise tooling was competing on volume and speed against much larger organizations. Every manual step in the landing page process was a constraint on how fast the team could test, learn, and buy media.

Outcomes

Landing page creation time: Minutes

Campaign production scale: Hundreds of variants/week

Funnel data integrity: Visitor to win/loss

Marketing team positioning: Profit center

Overview

Long before I held formal product management titles, I was already obsessed with solving operational bottlenecks through scalable, user-focused solutions. At Lyris in 2011, our small but high-performing marketing and web teams were under pressure to deliver hundreds of unique, tracked landing pages weekly to support aggressive A/B testing and media buying. The answer became “Lunar Launch Pad” — a flexible, dynamic landing page application that automated repetitive work and empowered non-technical users to launch campaigns in minutes.

Even in 2011, this was an early forerunner of modern self-service marketing automation tools — and a formative moment in my passion for building products that drive efficiency, measurable impact, and stakeholder satisfaction.

“I have never seen anything like it before or since — it was an absolute game-changer for us.” — Cathy Sullivan, Director of Marketing, Lyris Inc.

Challenge

• NetSuite’s native form handler couldn’t meet marketing’s tracking and customization needs.
• Campaign velocity demanded hundreds of variants each week without breaking analytics or CRM integrations.
• A small, resource-constrained team was competing with larger, better-funded organizations.
• Maintaining data integrity through the full funnel — from visitor to acquisition to win/loss — was non-negotiable.

“We could easily enter a few pieces of key information and the web banners and landing pages were automatically generated — tracking included.” — Cathy Sullivan, Director of Marketing, Lyris Inc.

My Role

Senior Manager, Web Development / Project Manager

• Formed and led a cross-functional “Tiger Team” with development, design, and marketing ops.
• Gathered requirements from all marketing and operational stakeholders.
• Managed the build, test, and refinement process with developer Armando Ramos.
• Created governance and role-based permissions for secure, scalable use.

Process

• Stakeholder Discovery — Led interviews to deeply understand pain points, desired outputs, and workflow constraints.
• Rapid Prototyping — Built and tested the first Lunar Launch Pad iteration in weeks.
• Feature Development
• Modular templates separating form logic from design
• Batch upload via Excel for rapid deployment of hundreds of pages
• Language packs and multiple layout options

“It made us uber-efficient and a contributor to our ultimate ability to prove the Lyris Marketing Team was a profit center for the business.” — Cathy Sullivan, Director of Marketing, Lyris Inc.

Key Outcomes

• Reduced landing page creation from days to minutes.
• Enabled non-technical staff to independently produce campaign-ready, tracked pages.
• Maintained end-to-end funnel tracking in NetSuite CRM.
• Gave the marketing team the agility to make faster, data-driven media buying decisions.
• Positioned the marketing team as a profit center within the business.

Reflection

In 2011, we built an internal marketing automation app that would still stand out today for its speed, scale, and usability. Lunar Launch Pad was my earliest proof point that with the right listening, planning, and iteration, you can create tools that change the way teams work — and it planted the seed for the product management career I’ve built since.

Key Questions

How did you make a small marketing team competitive with larger, better-funded organizations?

By building a tool that removed the constraint. Lyris's marketing team needed hundreds of tracked landing pages weekly for A/B testing and paid media. Bex led the build of Lunar Launch Pad, a batch-upload tool that let non-technical staff deploy campaign-ready pages in minutes instead of days, giving a small team the production velocity of a much larger one.

What is an example of a self-service internal tool you have built?

Lunar Launch Pad at Lyris, built in 2011: a dynamic landing page application letting non-technical marketing staff input campaign parameters and auto-generate tracked pages with banners, copy, and CRM integration. Batch upload via Excel enabled hundreds of variants per week without engineering involvement.

How do you build tools that non-technical users will actually adopt?

By starting with stakeholder interviews to understand exactly what non-technical users need to do and what stops them. On Lunar Launch Pad, Bex gathered requirements from marketing and operational stakeholders before design began, then built in self-service features including Excel batch upload, language packs, and modular templates.