Hi, I’m Elisa (rhymes with 🍕)






THE GOAL

To build a stable, usable, sellable, and scalable Enterprise-Grade MVP for a category-defining product as quickly as possible.









MY ROLE

Lead strategy, product, UX/UI design. Scope the work and manage delivery.

Lead team of engineers and visual designer to deliver the right features rapidly. 











KEY ACTIVITIES

Defining the Problem

  • Aligning on Priorities

  • Scoping and Planning

  • Clarifying the Domain Model

  • Fundamental Design Improvements

  • Moving on



THE SOLUTION

A tightly scoped, flexibly designed knowledge-sharing platform that can support knowledge-sharing at scale.

























IMPACT

CLOSED FIRST PAYING CUSTOMER 

Within the first 2 weeks of this version being demoed to customers, we closed our first paying customer. 

This platform has supported 10 customers, 500 users, and generated $300K revenue.









REVOLUTIONIZED ONBOARDING

Reduced user onboarding time by 75% and customer onboarind time by 90%. 

We never had to deliver another webinar to onboard users


LAID THE FOUNDATION FOR SUCCESS

Bugs were reduced by 75%

I was promoted to head of product and able to grow the team

PROCESS

THE CONTEXT

Sugarwork’s vision is to capture employee tacit/tribal knowledge to ensure business continuity and efficiency.


It operationalizes this information through expert templates and bot-recorded calls.




DEFINING THE PROBLEM

The original MVP was difficult to use and relied on overly stringent definitions that hindered Sugarwork’s ability to scale to new customers.

 .
The first implementation achieved only 30% adoption and suffered a lot of frustration.

The engineering and customer success teams were also forced to work 80 to 100 hour weeks to support it.




















ALIGNING ON PRIORITIES 

I brought the team together to share out their learnings from their first implementation.

There were a lot of pain points, largely due to a lack of product and design work. 


I had to figure out where to start.




 
INTERNAL WORKSHOP ARTIFACTS







THE ORGANIZED PAIN POINTS













SCOPING AND PLANNING

Replatforming sucks. It feels like reinventing the wheel, but sometimes it is necessary. 

We had to replatform and redesign at the same time.






I led the team to scope ruthlessly and plan as efficiently as possible.

We completed the full transformation in 4 months and this platform has remained in place for 16 months and counting and 500+ users.



DIAGRAMMING AND CLARIFYING THE CUSTOMER VALUE CHAIN







SCOPE OF MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT














To move quickly, I was designing screens through sketches on my ipad so that our 1 design resource could visualize and translate.

Sometimes I even had to give a sketch to the engineers. This is how we built trust--through humble necessity and grand ambition.



 CLARIFYING THE DOMAIN MODEL

Before we could address the design, we had to resolve the basic definitions and structure of the system.

Through extensive collaboration with engineering we were able to make intentional and measured changes.

We created diagrams so that we could all be on the same page.






























THE FUNDAMENTAL DOMAIN MODEL







A COMPARISON OF THE OPTIONS FOR STRUCTURING ROLES.
WE CHOSE THE MINIMAL, FLEXIBLE OPTION, WHICH HAS SERVED US WELL






NEW AND IMPROVED FINE-GRAINED PERMISSION MODEL
















The fundamental concepts of the platform were largely unclear. This was leading to bugs, misaligned expectations, and a breakdown in permissions.

Collaborating with
the senior engineer, we redefined and rearchitected the permissions model to best scale and meet customer expectations. FUNDAMENTAL DESIGN IMPROVEMENTS

Simple design techniques improved usability and navigation. 



These best-practices were relatively easy to implement, and after these updates were made, several prospects converted.



























FORMER PARTICIPANT EXPERIENCE






NEW PARTICIPANT EXPERIENCE














A lot of the issues with the original platform were fundamental design issues:
  • lack of visual hierarchy
  • lack of information architecture
  • lack of contrast for accessibility
  • long pages that require scrolling to understand
  • rigid but unclear modes of interaction
  • lack of modular design system
MOVING ON TO BIGGER AND BETTER THINGS

After we completed the work, we were able to start planning for a bolder future with a stable product supporting the business.


















A ROADMAP FOR MATURING THE PRODUCT AND SCALING THE BUSINESS












This iteration of the product was able to withstand pivots into several related use cases.

IMPACT

CLOSED FIRST PAYING CUSTOMER

Within the first 2 weeks of this version being demoed to customers, we closed our first paying customer.

 REVOLUTIONIZED ONBOARDING

Reduced onboarding time by 75% and set up time by 90%. We never had to deliver another webinar to onboard users. 

Knowledge Shares completed increased 3-fold

PROMOTED

Bugs were reduced by 75% so the product and engineering team were able to focus on building new value-added features.

After this work I was promoted to head of product and able to hire design resources.