LINE Corporation

LINE Corporation is a communication firm dedicated to developing, operating, and advertising various mobile messaging and communication services. The company’s core innovation is LINE App, a mobile messaging platform that is used by companies around the world.

LINE also provides the LAP (LINE Ads Platform), a performance-based ads platform for the LINE messaging app. Advertisers make bids and define details such as budget, time period, user attributes, and creative needs, and the LINE Ads Platform system chooses an ad to show to users. This performance-based ad system allows many more businesses to post ads, and since advertisers can monitor their ads, they can run promotions with limited budgets and distribute ads to fit sales prospects, goal achievement rates, and more.

Today, over 6,000 businesses take advantage of the LAP. In order to continually enhance the marketing and advertising activities of these users, the product managers and developers for this solution innovate constantly. They work to increase sales of the platform while ensuring it helps advertisers and agencies lower their daily operating costs and improve their strategies.

During this innovation process, the team has found that they prefer to work visually. And they prefer to work visually using Lucidchart.

Increasing understanding

During specification writing, the team relies on Lucidchart to express crucial information more clearly. Byeongok Ha, a member of the Business Platform Planning Office BP3 Team at LINE, explains:

“We use Lucidchart for content that is better explained, expressed, or clarified in a diagram. We use wireframes, user flows, system flow diagrams, and other visuals.”

The visual format allows everyone involved to come to an understanding more quickly and clarifies complex or confusing concepts. Byeongok says,

“Lucidchart helps us to eliminate the gap between communication and understanding with our teams across the globe.”

And making those diagrams is a smooth and simple process. “I recommend Lucidchart simply because it’s easy to operate regardless of your role. There is no learning cost involved," Byeongok says.

Creating a central repository

As they develop new ideas, the Business Platform team works with people across several different countries. Because specifications and requirements are managed across multiple files or services, it becomes confusing for the team to find all of the project information they need. The LINE team needed a central repository to house all project information during the development period and beyond.  

That’s why LINE Corp’s favorite Lucidchart feature is its integration with Confluence. Using this integration, team members can quickly create, edit, and embed diagrams within the Confluence wiki environment and share them with other project members. They can manage specifications within the same environment.

Product managers create specifications in Confluence, create supporting diagrams in Lucidchart, and then embed those diagrams in Confluence. All employees can access any diagram at any time to better understand specifications. Developers reference them as they work, and marketing references them to create sales promotion materials.

Byeongok describes the game changer this integration has been for his team:

“Lucidchart allows us to display content in real time in Confluence. With other software programs, you have to export a diagram and then add and manage it on another file server. With Lucidchart, there is none of that. Utilizing Lucidchart’s integration with Confluence enables us to work very efficiently.”

Collaborating in real time

Before using Lucidchart, employees tried to build visuals using PowerPoint, OmniGraffle, and Sketch. However, when content was constantly being updated by multiple people, they ran into problems trying to keep track of the most up-to-date version.

Now using Lucidchart, multiple project managers can work together in real time on a single diagram. Rather than emailing versions back and forth, they can all edit the most up-to-date diagram together.  

And anytime diagrams are updated in Lucidchart, they are updated in Confluence as well, making it easy to ensure that employees are always referencing the most current diagram.

Armed with Lucidchart, LINE employees have streamlined and enhanced their innovation process, bringing more power to the thousands of users trusting them for their advertising needs.