Before getting into some of the products I've shipped over the past 12 years, I first want to describe the evolution of Backstage, which started out as a print magazine in 1960, serving primarily as a resource for actors in LA and New York to find work. When I joined in 2013, everything up to that point had been designed by an outside agency—there had never been an in-house design team.
2013 (when I started)
↑ In 2013 Backstage was mostly just an online magazine and job board (I didn't design this).
You can see in that image that much of the website was dedicated to the editorial product. At the time, the product team consisted of two engineers, so there wasn't much bandwidth to build anything too complex. I was the first design hire, and the new CEO had a vision to transform Backstage into a robust SaaS platform that would provide users in the casting space with digital tools they never had before.
To give a quick overview of the product back then: actors could apply to jobs by attaching headshots and reels, which they would then submit and hope to get a call or email for an audition. That was the extent of it. There were no user profiles, internal messaging tools, or application management system for employers. Employers with complex projects had to look elsewhere, and seasoned actors quickly graduated from the platform. There wasn't much to keep the advanced users engaged.
So that's where my journey, that of the product team in general, and the conception of Backstage 2.0, began.
Today
I've had a hand in nearly every product Backstage offers today. We're now a global product team of 30, including designers, product managers, and engineers, working in a Kanban-based agile environment.
While Backstage retains its rich history as a trade publication (the print magazine still exists today) that helped nearly every actor of a certain age break into the industry, it’s become a fully inclusive casting platform that talent (and not just actors anymore—models, voiceover artists, post-production crew, content creators, etc.) can use to not only find jobs, but actively grow their careers, and where casting directors, producers, and other employers can manage the entire lifecycle of their creative projects.
We have 450K subscribers today, compared to 100K in 2013, and we've seen a 500% increase in jobs posted. The business has grown from a $35M valuation to $1B when it was acquired in 2022. I think these numbers speaks largely to the quality of the products we've built.