From Requesting Features to Taking Requests

Gabrielė Verbickaitė came to Candu with a simple request: her marketing team needed a way to create banners in Smartproxy's dashboard without going through developers.

"Like probably any bigger organization, there are always bottlenecks when it comes to communications," explains Gabrielė Verbickaite, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Smartproxy. "Anything that had to do with our dashboard would have to go through the dashboard team."

Today, her role has completely transformed. What started as a quest for a banner management system has evolved into marketing taking ownership of entire product experiences, from new feature announcements to full product pages—all without engineering time.

The most surprising part? Now product managers come to the marketing team with requests.

"Never in my life would I have expected that we're going to be getting requests from product to put up banners," Gabrielė laughs. "But we had quite a handful of those to be fair."

The Results: 40% increase in product adoption

When marketing took over, the results spoke for themselves:

• 40% increase in weekly active users for their statistics feature
• 17% increase in overall product usage following feature announcements
• Mobile Proxies captured 52% of all trials with targeted in-app promotion and a 15.8% CTR on promotional banners overall
• 61.2% of users actively engaging with new product pages
• 86% reduction in time needed to ship new projects - (According to Smartproxy's internal analysis, projects that previously took multiple eng sprints could be done in 4 hours by the marketing team.)

Perhaps most dramatic was the impact of their in-app promotion experiment. "We launched free trials for all products in February. In the beginning, we only had communications in our usual marketing channels—website, emails and so on. The adoption wasn't that good," Gabrielė explains.

"We wanted to test if in-app promotion would make a difference, so we created a banner specifically for our Mobile Proxies product. After implementing it, we saw adoption just skyrocketing. Mobile Proxies went from our least-adopted free trial to over 52% of all trials taken, far outperforming our other products. That was what led us to believe that this in-app banner was the key factor driving conversions." This in-product announcement is one of the most effective ways to launch new features - meeting users where they already are.

The Challenge: Marketing's Implementation Bottleneck

For Smartproxy's marketing team, the process was clear: every dashboard communication had to go through development.

"Anything that had to do with our dashboard and communications there would have to go through the dashboard team," Gabrielė shares. "For marketing, we didn't have any option to just put up some new feature announcements or banners or point users in a specific direction."

This meant even small changes could take a long time. "We would have to plan it around the development schedule, which might mean waiting several sprints due to other priorities," explains Gabrielė.

The limitation was particularly significant because, as Gabrielė learned from customer interviews, "One of the questions we asked was 'Where can we reach you? Do you hear the latest news about Smartproxy?' And the answer we heard most was 'We just go to your dashboard.'"

With their most engaged audience primarily getting information through the dashboard, the team began exploring alternatives to building an internal banner management system—a project that would itself require significant developer resources.

The Journey: From Banners to Product Experiences

When Smartproxy adopted Candu, they intended to start with banners. But once they saw the possibilities, their ambitions grew.

"Initially, like I mentioned, we were looking into banners, but the fun part is that we didn't even start with banners when we started using Candu," Gabrielė explains. "One of the first few things that we launched was the hotspots."

The marketing team created spotlight-style guides to highlight their new statistics feature, allowing users to monitor their spend and usage. They designed the experience to grab attention initially but remain unobtrusive after users had seen it.

"We set it up in a way where there's two different versions. First time a user sees this experience, it's opened by default so it catches the eye. Then if they close it, it's only the little blue toggle left, so it's not annoying, but you can still go ahead and open it." This strategic use of hotspots allowed Smartproxy to highlight new features without disrupting the user experience.

The statistics feature hotspot was just the beginning. The team went on to create:

1. A full "New Features" feed showing platform evolution over time. (This approach aligns with best practices for creating effective release notes that drive engagement and adoption.)
2. Product information pages for different offerings
3. Promotional banners for free trials and announcements
4. Welcome experiences for new users

All built and maintained without developer resources.

The Transformation: Now "We Never Get Any Objections"

Perhaps the most significant change has been cultural. Marketing's relationship with product and engineering teams has fundamentally shifted. This mirrors what other companies like Moz experienced when their marketing team took ownership of product onboarding.

"It just boils down to the fact that there's no development effort needed," Gabrielė explains. "Whenever we want to test something with Candu, we never get any objections. Everyone's just like, 'Yeah, sure. Go ahead, try it. Let's see how it works.' Whereas previously, we would get a reply that said, 'We'll do it in three sprints or something like that.'"

This freedom has unleashed creativity and experimentation. Instead of carefully selecting a few ideas to pitch for development resources, the team can now test many concepts quickly.

"At a certain point, everyone just realized that we don't have to wait three months to get things done. We can get it done a lot faster, a lot quicker, and it's not going to be as complicated, so all of the ideas just came back."

The impact on time-to-market has been dramatic:

• Product updates page: 2 weeks → 4 hours
• Product information page: 2 days → 1 day
• Promotional banners: 1 day → 1 hour

According to Smartproxy's internal analysis, implementation with Candu is approximately 10 times faster than through traditional development.

The Role Reversal: When Product Teams Come to Marketing

As Smartproxy's marketing team demonstrated success with their Candu implementations, something unexpected happened: the product teams started coming to them for help.

"At this point we also get requests from product teams as well," Gabrielė says. "For example, we're doing some maintenance and they want me to put up a banner informing users that there's going to be some potential downtime."

This role reversal represents a significant shift in organizational dynamics. What began as marketing seeking approval from product has evolved into product seeking implementation from marketing.

"The roles have shifted very much," notes Gabrielė. The demand has grown so much that they're now "onboarding our product managers to Candu so they can do things themselves and don't have to go through me every time."

Looking Forward: Scaling Marketing-Led Product Growth

With their initial successes behind them, Smartproxy continues to expand their use of Candu. They're now planning comprehensive onboarding experiences as they consolidate four scraping APIs into one unified product, and they're exploring A/B testing different approaches to optimize user experiences further.

The team is also expanding Candu access across the organization: "We're onboarding our product managers to Candu," Gabrielė explains, ensuring more stakeholders can contribute directly to the product experience.

For organizations considering a similar transition, Gabrielė offers this advice:

"Be prepared for the unexpected and make sure that you're ready for it, because it can start off as one small banner, but eventually it's going to grow into so many more things."

She also emphasizes the value of support during the journey: "Your side was very, very helpful. Whenever we needed something—and we still do need some things occasionally—I know that Flora [Sr. Customer Success Manager at Candu] is there to help me."

As marketing teams increasingly take ownership of product experiences, Smartproxy's journey offers a compelling roadmap for what's possible when you remove the barriers between marketing ideas and implementation.

"At a certain point, everyone just realized that we don't have to wait three months to get things done. We can get it done a lot faster, a lot quicker, and it's not going to be as complicated, so all of the ideas just came back."

About Smartproxy

Smartproxy is a premium proxy and web scraping solution provider, offering a range of residential proxies, datacenter proxies, and specialized scraping APIs for businesses of all sizes.

About Candu

Candu is a no-code editor that enables marketing and product teams to create and modify in-app experiences without engineering support. With Candu, teams can build product tours, onboarding guides, feature announcements, and in-app messaging that drive user activation and adoption while reducing time-to-market for new initiatives.