Categories

Problem

One of the biggest challenges for CMS users managing large content collections was keeping information organized in a way that stayed maintainable as websites grew.

Initially, collections only supported flat data. Once a site accumulated dozens or hundreds of items, editors had no reliable way to group related content, build navigation around topics, or perform actions on multiple items at once. This led to inconsistent content structures, repetitive manual work, and collections that became increasingly difficult to manage over time.

The problem became especially visible for websites such as blogs, knowledge bases, directories, e-commerce catalogs, and recipe collections, where a single item often belongs to multiple topics while still requiring one primary category for navigation and SEO purposes.

Users needed a flexible way to:

organize content into meaningful categories;
assign multiple categories to the same item;
define one primary category when needed;
manage large amounts of content without repetitive manual work;
keep the content model scalable as collections continued to grow.

User flow:

The user has a CMS collection with a list of books and wants to organize them into categories.

We introduced a new CMS collection type: Category Collection, designed specifically for managing categories.

Impact

I left the team shortly after the feature launched, so I only had access to the first week of adoption data.

Despite the short observation window and the fact that Categories was primarily an infrastructure feature with limited impact on core product KPIs, early adoption was encouraging:

26% of eligible users created a Category Collection within the first week.
9.3% of those users went a step further and created a dynamic Category Page, suggesting they understood and adopted the complete workflow.

While it’s too early to draw long-term conclusions, these numbers indicated that users quickly discovered the feature and were willing to incorporate it into their content management workflow.

Learnings

This project taught me that product design is rarely a linear process. Over the course of development, we pivoted several times due to platform limitations, changes in product vision, and new business priorities. It reinforced the importance of staying flexible, continuously validating assumptions, and balancing user needs with technical feasibility.