Design a creator sponsorship marketplace for cross-functional squads that improves search success

Problem Statement Description

You are designing a creator sponsorship marketplace used by cross-functional brand teams to discover, evaluate, and shortlist creators for paid campaigns. These squads may include marketers, creative strategists, legal reviewers, finance partners, and agency collaborators, each bringing different criteria such as audience fit, brand safety, pricing, past performance, content style, availability, and campaign goals.

The current search experience is assumed to be a major source of friction: teams may struggle to translate campaign intent into searchable criteria, compare creators consistently, trust marketplace data, coordinate feedback, and move from broad discovery to a confident shortlist. “Search success” should be interpreted beyond simply returning results; it includes whether the squad can find relevant creators, align internally, and progress toward sponsorship decisions efficiently.

Your task is to define the product experience for this marketplace, focusing on the end-to-end workflow of squad-based creator discovery. Consider the needs of both buyers searching for creators and the marketplace’s need to maintain trust, liquidity, quality, and scalable operations.

The experience should consider:

- Who the primary users are within the squad and how their roles, permissions, and decision criteria differ

- How campaign goals, audience requirements, budget, region, platform, content format, and brand-safety constraints shape search behavior

- Where users experience friction in query formulation, filtering, ranking, comparison, collaboration, and shortlist creation

- What information is needed to build confidence in a creator’s fit without overwhelming the search experience

- How the marketplace should handle sparse data, creator availability, pricing ambiguity, fraudulent signals, and changing performance metrics

- How collaboration should work across marketing, creative, legal, finance, and external agency stakeholders

- How to define and improve “search success” while balancing relevance, diversity, fairness, trust, and marketplace health

- How the experience should scale across different campaign sizes, creator tiers, geographies, and sponsorship categories

The goal is to design a clear, high-trust discovery and decision-making experience that helps cross-functional squads move from campaign intent to qualified creator options with less ambiguity, fewer coordination delays, and stronger confidence in the eventual sponsorship match.