Campaign scope, approvals and packages come to the Portal

October 2025: a campaign in the Portal became a list of scope items built from packages, a change to it became an approval the partner signs off on, and Workbench got its data model, tasks and time tracking while three side experiments were tried and set aside.

October 2025 was the month the Portal learned what a campaign is made of. In the same month Workbench went from an empty shell to a designed system, and three other experiments were started and stopped.

For our partners

1. A campaign became a list of items. From October 13 every campaign in the Portal is built from sellable items grouped into packages, with campaign rules, guidelines and access details alongside, and that structure is what made everything else this month possible.
2. Approvals arrived on October 15. When our team proposes a change to a campaign’s scope, or needs a partner’s sign-off on anything else, the partner gets an email and an approval in the Portal to accept or decline.
3. Smaller things a partner would notice: notes on a campaign for reporting and publishing preferences, a reporting note on the partner record, files attached to a campaign from October 17, and a new onboarding form on October 29 for starting a campaign.
4. The first billing code was merged on October 28 with the billing link kept out of the partner menu; billing shipped in December.

2. Approvals

The conversation about an approval stays attached to it. On October 30 scope changes were rebuilt so a partner sees exactly which items change, for one period or several, before agreeing to anything.

Behind the scenes

1. The package and catalog work was for the operations team as much as for partners: a service catalog, sellable items, packages and campaign profiles gave the team one vocabulary for what a campaign contains. By October 27 the campaign tables were pre-filtered with cancelled campaigns moved to their own page so a campaign manager’s day-to-day view stayed short.
2. Workbench got its skeleton. On October 18 we wrote down the design decisions, and the underlying structure and the first task view followed over the next three days.
3. October also had experiments that did not continue. Between October 11 and October 30 three separate experiments were started: an agent framework with a chat interface and a prompt tester, and two further starts on the internal tool.

2. Workbench gets its skeleton

On October 20 the underlying structure landed: tasks, task templates, task types, assignments, deliverables, approvals, artifacts, content assets and time tracking. On October 21 the task view was built out with notes, attachments and deliverables, and time entries, time off, timesheets and a schedule view arrived with it. Time tracking on day one was deliberate. Our specialists already logged time, and a work tool that ignored that would have been a second place to look.

3. Experiments

All three stopped before November. Workbench is the one that continued, and the agent ideas from the first experiment came back inside Workbench in December, with a better home.