Customer Relationship Management
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Note: Due to confidentiality, some specifics of this project have been left out of this case study. Instead of going into specific findings and decision making, I focus more on my role and the sequence of work. If you would like to learn more about this project, or any other project, please contact me directly.
How might we help our users build and maintain relationships with investors?
When I began work at Q4, the company had already made commitments to build and provide their customers with a platform experience. The work of an Investor Relations Officer requires so many facets and moving parts that segmenting their work into separate digital solutions was just not cutting it.
I was brought onto the team to help build a brand new section of the platform focused specifically on Customer Relationship Management — or, as some of us might be more familiar — a CRM.
Design challenge
Build a brand new product to help customers track their existing relationships with investors, and pave the way for brand new connections.
Phase 1: What’s the Problem?
When faced with a monolith design challenge like this one, and in order to understand how best to begin work on a project this large, we first had to understand what major pains and problems existed for our users in their relationship building work.
Using interviews with some of our internal stakeholders, the Lead Product Manager on the project had already prepared a user journey for us to analyze. The user journey catalogued the steps taken around earnings, a quarterly milestone for companies to declare the progress of their business to shareholders. We had an initial workshop to review the user journey as an extended team, and to pinpoint where we should begin work.
It was immediately clear to me that we were missing vital information. Earnings was not the only time for users to build relationships, and we were missing insight from real users. Work was already slated for the quarter to build out an email solution, and it was clear that this plan was creating bias for members of the team to zero in on the communication sections of the user journey.
We had a quarter to plan out our work, so I proposed the triad conduct a series of user interviews to help pinpoint a more clear user journey and related pain points. Then we would develop a product plan to be shared with the group near the end of the quarter. It was agreed, so we began to interview.
User interviews
Getting a hold of users proved to be easier said than done. Ultimately, we managed to host six interviews. In order to help augment our knowledge, we conducted additional interviews with internal customer facing teams.
All members of the triad were involved in the user interview process, so as a team we converged to pinpoint areas of opportunity. I’m a big advocate for the Continuous Discovery framework, and lead the triad in the process of identifying our outcomes and subsequent areas of opportunity. We identified three major opportunities, and as a team converged on an area of focus.
In the interviews, we had learned that the most difficult part of relationship management was understanding who you were speaking to. Key information on investors was scattered between softwares, and understanding what was talked about in past meetings required the review of notes on notes on notes. It was clear to us that in the building of an MVP for our CRM, our time was best spent bringing all this data into one place in an easy to consume way.
Phase 2: What’s the Minimum?
User flows
I guided the triad through the process of creating user flows. We broke our problem down into smaller chunks, then individually mapped out what steps we imagined a user would take to satisfy each task, keeping the pains we had learned front and centre.
In comparing notes, we generated a list of similarities and differences to help focus our discussions and converge on a shared vision. We worked on a second iteration of the user flows, this time together.
At this point, we were entering the tail end of the quarter, and there was quite a bit of pressure to deliver a list of features to be built in the MVP. From our amalgamated user flows, we extracted a list of pages and actions that the user should be able to access.
Site maps and sketches
Now that we had a list of pages and actions, it was time to create an artifact to represent the vision of the CRM. I took this mission away, and began to work on a site map with the support and input of my triad partners and design leaders. After reviewing this with our stakeholders, we began to sketch out our vision. I hosted design workshops to solicit the ideas of our stakeholders and larger teams.
In the end, we developed multiple iterations on our site map and sketches. Once we had consensus, we annotated the artifact to indicate what we intended to deliver in our MVP.
Phase 3: Where’s the Alignment?
One of the major pains of this project was the classic issue of too many cooks. The company had assigned two development teams to developing the MVP, each with their own PMs and dev leads. At the time, we had only two designers on the project: myself, and a junior designer. The junior designer covered the work of one development team, and I covered the work of the other while simultaneously delivering the generative work outlined here.
Initially, our generative triad consisted of myself, the more senior PM from the two teams, and an overseeing development partner. As work began on building out the MVP, it was clear that the Lead PM that oversaw both teams was no longer comfortable with the delegation of the generative work to the PM that had worked with us up to that point.
As he began to take over the work, we noticed a fair amount of friction because he was missing key context to the decisions we had made. At the suggestion of the Director of Design, I rolled back the generative work we had done to bring him in from the beginning again.
Scenarios and other artifacts
Our decisions had all been heavily based on the research we conducted, so in starting again with our new product partner, we needed to go back to the recordings. Individually we watched the interviews back, and came together to review our findings and notes.
Instead of immediately mapping out opportunities as we had before, this time we began with defining scenarios. Based on our scenarios, we mapped out user journeys using our findings from the customer interviews. There were many new ideas that came from this work, so we extracted a number opportunities from the user journey and mapped out ideas.
Using these ideas, we created mega user flows to illustrate how the user might achieve their tasks. Again, we were under quite a bit of pressure to map out features, especially given that work was underway.
With this in mind, I took this back and developed artifacts that mapped our scenarios to features that were being built. The intention was to provide an easy ability for our stakeholders to map the features to the problems that were being solved.
Hiccups
In revisiting the interviews and reframing our problems, I discovered that there was a major opportunity in how we could design our solutions. Through the exploration of our problems as scenarios, and the creation of user journeys, it created links between tasks in a way that our initial discovery failed to illustrate. I began to explore the user experience as a holistic entity. This pivot opened the door to a vision for the product that was much more innovative and effective.
The problem was bandwidth. Management was still focused on features over experience, which ultimately led to the descope of the new concepts. Fast forward for a moment past the MVP, and I am pleased to report that design was able to get that work reprioritized in the roadmap.
Phase 4: What’s the Vision?
We were missing a shared vision. We had artifacts on artifacts to illustrate an MVP, perhaps even a post MVP, but we didn’t have a clear and shared idea of where we were ultimately headed.
The biggest pain that resulted from this was from our stakeholders. They were seeing things from such a zoomed out lens it was difficult for them to make meaningful connections between what was being built and what they ultimately wanted to see from the CRM.
This kicked off a new initiative for me: defining the vision.
Interviews, again
We had been having ongoing interviews and research sessions with users, but we were missing the stakeholder vision. I immediately moved to rectify this. I hosted a series of interviews with internal stakeholders, and our internal Investor Relations Officer to understand their visions, priorities, and ideas on specific topics.
From these interviews, I extracted a list of user stories and pains that related to each macro topic. We then used this list to determine which user stories we intended to solve in the upcoming quarter, and shaped our work using that as our base.
Phase 5: What Now?
Next Steps
Moving forward, we intend to take the developed user stories and continue to learn, add, and iterate. With the goal to have a shared vision, we will begin to sketch out a high level representation of what the product will look like. This will then be reviewed with the triad, team, and stakeholders.
We will continue to iterate, fill in more details, and test in a cyclical process until we have a detailed shared vision to use as our north star.
Pilot Users and Validation
At present, we are testing our CRM MVP with three accounts. This is providing immense insight into how people are interacting with our product, and helping us pinpoint opportunities for growth.
In Conclusion
When building a product from the ground up, especially one like a CRM where solutions exist as far as the eye can see, it can be easy to define success through the minimum feature requirements of a product of that type. However, we found success to be more accessible through a user-centric lens that allowed us to stand out and customize our experiences to our target audience.
Given the need to pivot and restart our discovery, we had the unique opportunity to try multiple methods of turning research into a product. We found that starting with user journeys rather than opportunities provided a more holistic view of the problem space, which was still manageable to solve for. I will continue to sing the praises of Continuous Discovery, but this project provided me with valuable learnings on the nuances of discovery for a brand new project versus an established one.
There is still a lot of work to be done to fully build out our CRM solution. But that’s the case with all products — we are constantly learning and iterating as we go!
