Workflow Management:
Building a 0 → 1 list procurement and outreach tool
MY ROLE
Designer and Product Manager
SUMMARY
I was hired as a UX designer to help solve for our participation problems and list management but soon saw a need for strong product management. With very little domain knowledge, I led the team in the PM and UX effort to solve for improving participation by creating a tool in the platform to help collect and manage participant data.
Where We Started
“Collecting and managing participant data sucks. We should be better at this. Not to mention you have to do it outside the platform.” The CEO said, leaning back in his chair, frustrated. “Why the hell haven’t we figured this out yet? If we can’t get people to participate, our customers won’t finish their programs. If they don’t finish their programs, they leave.”
And he was right. If our customers didn’t have more than a 75% completion rate for their program, they were going to walk.
The number 1 reason companies weren’t completing their programs? They couldn’t get enough people to participate in feedback. The manual process for collecting participant information was tedious and slow. It could take companies up to 6 weeks to complete a list of customers they could reach out to.
The goal was to help the customer achieve success in the platform by collecting feedback quickly and acting on insights.
Facing Big Challenges
It was taking too long: Participant management was proving to be a complex and difficult problem to solve. The previous 6 months had been spent defining requirements and meeting with stakeholders to really understand the job to be done.
We had to take the discovery we had and move forward with what we thought was good enough. After several more weeks, we had what we thought was a compelling plan to move forward and provide our customers with something that would work.
Kickoff to get insights into the job to be done
Early user flows
It wasn’t a consumer-grade product: One of the biggest challenges was going to be creating an experience that would help users find a “soft landing” inside of our platform and start to use it for their day-to-day operations. What we currently had was not easy to use and required a lot of upfront knowledge on the the inner workings of program management.
We had a lot of disparate pieces that helped with participant management but they were scattered throughout the platform.
Lists were created and curated outside of the platform usually in a spreadsheet and were passed around to collect participant data and approvals.
Automations couldn’t be trusted: Automations in the platform were flawed. They were confusing (I still don’t understand how they worked), they were complicated, and they didn’t provide any visibility to outreach. Customers and consultants couldn’t trust them. Knowing who was getting notified and why wasn’t obvious.
Slow feedback loop: When exporting a list of participants, the customer had to wait for the list to be approved and participant information to be updated. It could be a while before a list was completed, uploaded back into the platform, and outreach was started. This distance made it frustrating to get to the desired outcomes.
There was also no mechanism to remind contributors they had information that needed to be updated or approved. Admins needed to create the list, send it to stakeholders, and follow up through chat apps and email.
Making Changes
The work required was complex and it was difficult to find a straight path forward. Especially when we were given an abbreviated timeline. Even with several early iterations on designs, we struggled to come to concrete conclusions. It was going to require we look at the long-term vision and strategy and then break it down into phases.
Long-term Vision
The long-term vision was to create something modular enough and flexible enough that it could potentially extend beyond just sales enablement. Part of our long-term product strategy was to encapsulate work beyond win-loss so we had to prioritize where we were going without “boiling the ocean”.
However, as we started to peel back the layers it was evident that we were going to have to spend some serious time working on building to what we wanted long-term. Even broken down into phases, it was going to take a measured amount of time to accomplish.
For us to be successful, we needed strong metrics. Knowing if we had adoption and whether or not it was leading to strong business outcomes was key to us solving our problem.
25%
Companies with 1 workflow
52 → 79
Companies with L90 logins 10+
20%
Increase in automation
30%
Baseline churn
How do we get there?
Looking at the overall work it was obvious that we needed to break it down. In fact, most of the long-term vision we wouldn’t even approach until the following year. What followed was a lot of learning.
What we did
Looking at the overall work it was obvious that we needed to break it down. In fact, most of the long-term vision we wouldn’t even approach until the following year. What followed was a lot of learning and quite a few iterations.
We started with low-fidelity sketches to really understand what possible solution could help solve our problem.
From there, we were able to start exploring wireframes. It took us a few concepts, coupled with user and internal testing, to come to the right conclusions. It was time for us to move forward with a possible solution.
Deals
Decision Drivers
Competitors
Tags
Reports
Dashboard
Win Rates
Configuration
Organizations / NASA / Mars Mission / Deals
Published Deals
First Win/Loss
Amount: $10k - $25k
Status: Needs Approval
Region: US/Canada
Add Filter
Name
Status
Primary Contact
Sales Rep
Closed Date
Outcome/Type
Amount
Boeing
Needs Approval
Jan 23
Win/Win back
$12,245
Deals
Decision Drivers
Competitors
Tags
Reports
Dashboard
Win Rates
Configuration
Organizations / NASA / Mars Mission / Deals
Nasa Win/Loss
Name
Status
Primary Contact
Sales Rep
Closed Date
Outcome/Type
Amount
...
SpaceX
Missing Data
Jan 23
Win/Win back
$25,235
SpaceX
Status
Closed Date
Jan 23
Win
Win back
$25,235
Outcome
Type
Amount
Tags
Elon Musk
Name
Elon Musk
Name
-
Phone
801-345-5555
Phone
-
elon@spacex.com
Auto-fill
Primary Contact
Sales Rep
Missing Data
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Mark as Approved
We ended up with quite a few iterations in high-fidelity so we could test some of our assumptions when it came to navigating through our solution. Several of our early ideas were deal based and didn’t focus on the participant. Customers wanted to see who was participating beyond just the deal.
Meeting with engineering uncovered a lot of technical challenges that weren’t obvious to us in early discovery. With their help, we were able to create a more comprehensive solution
What’s Next?
The work for this project is still ongoing and will most likely carry out for the rest of 2024. We have a small team with limited resources and time.
Once we have a solution that we could reasonably put in front of our customers, we will run it in a beta experience. For 2-4 weeks, we would test and collect feedback to see how our first approach would score and understand if we need to tweak or pivot.
The next phase and release would be building automation in data collection, approvals, and notification. Plus anything that we would hear in our beta release that needed to be fixed.
The final stage would be our delighters and additional features to help round out the experience. The hope would be to have an experience that feels connected and complete. It may not be the perfect solution but it would give us a good baseline to build off of.
Lessons Learned Along the Way
This was a project we learned a lot from and if I were to do it again, I would have done it a little differently.
🍰 Make it smaller. If it takes a long time to plan, it’s going to take a long time to build. Make sure to figure out the smallest part you can release that is useable, build it, test it, and then build the next iteration. No one started out planning out the whole empire.
👩🏻💻 Bring engineering and stakeholders in early. Don’t wait to “handoff” the work. Bring in the people that have domain knowledge and valuable insight at the first of ideation. If you wait, you will be behind because they will have questions and you will have missed something.
💨 Move fast. Our impulse was to make sure we had all details but in reality I think we could have started at 80% confidence. We always make changes later in the project based on customer’s feedback.
© Ryan Comte 2024