Partnerships: turning email threads into a product feature
Client
Soundmouse
Year
2024
Platform
B2B SaaS
Timeline
4 sprints
Role
Product design end-to-end
Soundmouse is cue sheet reporting platform for film & broadcast.
The problem
Rights owners had no reliable way to see what music users were reporting. That information lived in emails, spreadsheets, and manual reports outside the platform -which meant rights owners were often chasing information, and both sides were doing work that should have been automatic.
The ask was to bring that reporting into the product itself: a way for music users to share cue sheet data with rights owners automatically, without giving up control over what gets shared.
Why a "partnership," not a file share
The obvious version of this feature is a share button. Research with both sides - music users and rights owners - pointed somewhere more durable: people didn't want to re-grant access every time, and they wanted the relationship itself to be visible and manageable, not a one-off action buried in a menu.
That's what shaped the core decision: model this as a persistent partnership with its own lifecycle - Active, Incoming Request, Request Sent, Suspended, Rejected - rather than a single sharing action. A partnership can be paused, reviewed, or ended without starting over.
Direction is the decision that matters
Every partnership starts with one choice: is this side sending cue sheets, or receiving them? That choice determines everything downstream - what gets configured, what the other side sees, what the relationship means. So it's the first thing you see, presented as two large cards with the consequence of each spelled out, not a dropdown or a toggle buried in a form.
One nuance worth being explicit about: "Send" and "Receive" describe who is setting up the connection, not the direction data actually moves. Cue sheets always flow one way - from the music user (the source) to the rights owner (a read-only recipient) - regardless of which side initiated the partnership. Getting this distinction right in the UI, without making users think about it, was most of the design problem.
Cutting the setup flow to two steps
The first pass at the creation flow was longer and felt padded - screens with one decision each, some almost empty. It was collapsed into two:
Setup - direction, partner details, approval period
Scope & confirm - select the labels/publishers involved, review a live summary before committing
Selected items show as removable tags, and the summary updates as you go, so there's never a moment where you're not sure what you're about to share.
What shipped
A partnership model with clear, manageable states instead of one-off sharing
Read-only access by default - rights owners get visibility, music users keep control
A two-step creation flow, down from a longer, sparser original
Adoption
38%
of active music-user organisations created at least one partnership
52%
of invited rights owners accepted a partnership request within 14 days
Partnerships Created
3140
partnerships created in the first 6 months
62%
of partnerships reached “Active” status
Reduction in Manual Work
~65%
reduction in external email / manual report sharing related to reporting visibility
RO
reported significantly fewer follow-up requests for usage information
Time Saved
Music users: approximately 4–6 hours per month previously spent on manual report preparation and email follow-ups
Rights owners: approximately 3–5 hours per month previously spent chasing usage data
