Building My Day:
Lessons Learned in Shipping Product
Building an all-in-one workspace for sales reps to manage their day and learning a thing or two about “big boy” product development.
Demonstrated Competencies:
Design Leadership & UX Design
Year Completed:
2012
Objective
Help sales reps focus on the most important activities of the day by centralizing their tasks, appointments and opportunities
Critical Problems to Solve
- As a sales rep, I don’t know what I should be focusing on to help me prevent deals from falling through the cracks
- My customer history, tasks and appointments for the day are spread across multiple sections of the app and sometimes across multiple systems
- Creating a new task or appointment is a difficult and time consuming task in the current Infusionsoft app
- It’s not possible for me to see a consolidated list of user and auto-generated tasks and appointments in the current Infusionsoft app
- It’s difficult for me to prioritize my list of tasks
Design Approach
In the summer of 2012, Infusionsoft was getting a lot of press for the launch of its new marketing and workflow automation solution, Campaign Builder, which had launched at the beginning of the year. That product launch was the catalyst for the company securing a Series C investment of $50 million from Goldman Sachs and me being promoted to Manager of Interaction Design, becoming Infusionsoft first ever product design leader. For our next major release, we knew it was critical for us to deliver an equally noteworthy feature that would sustain the wave of press and new subscribers we were generating. During our first few rounds of product discovery it became clear that there was a major market opportunity to service small sales teams in a way that drastically streamlined their workflow.
It’s important to note that at the time we had structured our scrum teams to develop feature sets totally independently from each other (this is a terrible move for the overall user experience by the way. Design teams should always be aware of the end-to-end customer experience and the resulting ripple effect of their decisions and the decisions of other teams). As teams were starting to swarm around the same set of customer needs and problems we made the decision to combine teams to work in Death Star fashion to build something great. This was uncharted territory for us - we had never attempted to take the ideas from so many people across the CRM, Marketing, ECOM and Architecture teams and combine them into something that actually made sense to the user. My first big test as a newly minted leader was to lead the design team in the development of a cohesive solution. It was nothing short of a big task. Design standards weren’t even something the team was operating against and we had to learn, quickly, how to point our creative tastes towards a common vision. This experience taught me a lot about how to lead a design team towards a unified direction without stifling innovation.
When it was all said and done we launched a product that many of our customers were very excited about, only to find that the depth of the feature set was too limiting. We had lots of big ideas that would have addressed those limitations in spectacular fashion and positioned us to be first-to-market in our category had we stayed the course. Looking back, 242 days to the launch of an MVP was just entirely too long. Unfortunately, it took several years to realize the importance of delivering with speed, having merciless focus in your distinctive competencies and product roadmap while always having an eye on direct and indirect competitors. Great product organizations realize that fast, continuous learning and improvement is always better than perfection.
Still, I see the upside of this experience as follows:
- Priceless learnings on large-scale product management, rapid development and design team operations
- Press coverage in ZDNet, Small Biz Trends
- A cool story to tell :)