Partnerships: Turning Email Threads Into a Product Feature

Soundmouse is a cue sheet reporting platform for film and broadcast. Rights owners had no reliable way to see what music users were reporting - that data lived in emails, spreadsheets, and manual reports outside the platform, so both sides spent time chasing information that should have been automatic.
The obvious solution was a share button. Research with both sides pointed somewhere more durable: people didn’t want to re-grant access every time, and they wanted the relationship itself to be visible and manageable, not a one-off action buried in a menu. That shaped the core decision - model this as a persistent partnership with its own lifecycle (Active, Incoming Request, Request Sent, Suspended, Rejected), not a single sharing action.
The trickiest design problem was direction: “Send” and “Receive” describe who sets up the connection, not which way the data actually flows - cue sheets always move from the music user to the rights owner, regardless of who initiated it. Getting that distinction right in the UI, without making users think about it, was most of the work. I also cut the original setup flow from several sparse screens down to two: Setup, then Scope & Confirm.
Results in the first 6 months: 38% of active music-user organizations created at least one partnership, 3,140 partnerships were created, and 62% reached Active status. Manual email and report-sharing dropped by roughly 65%, saving music users an estimated 4–6 hours a month and rights owners 3–5 hours a month previously spent chasing usage data.

Link for the visuals:
https://www.twine.net/signin