Case Study 1
Designing a Custom Sales Enablement Platform
CLIENT: Splunk | ROLE: Creative Director & Senior UX/UI Product Designer | AGENCY: Emerge Interactive
Challenge:
Splunk, one of the top machine learning companies in the world, came to Emerge Interactive in late 2016 / early 2017 with a unique challenge. Their flagship customer-facing product suite at the time could capture, index and correlate real-time IT data in a searchable repository and generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards and visualizations for IT audiences and business executives alike. Despite this incredible technology, Splunk lacked an internal sales tool that could do the same for the lifecycle of their own prospective and existing customers. Illustrating to customers a forecasted ROI from increasing their deployment of Splunk products over time was essential to their business growth model.
An interim solution was created in the form of a highly complex spreadsheet called the Data Source Assessment tool (DSA), but this was both cumbersome to use and prone to human error as sales staff had to copy and paste data and results into different platforms used throughout their sales pipeline process such as Salesforce.
goal:
After many initial discussions between Splunk and Emerge — a phased multi-year relationship to address this challenge was finalized and initiated. Splunk knew it had to solve the urgent challenge of building a SaaS version of the DSA tool, but over time realized the value and potential in building an entire digital product platform to house this tool as well as other tools that would benefit from a similar evolution. Doing so would increase data integrity across essential 3rd party platforms such as Salesforce and the overall level of accuracy everywhere in highlighting a client’s forecasted and existing Splunk data capture implementation. The results of these discussions led to a 0.5 “proof of concept” (PoC) release which focused exclusively on the SaaS version of the DSA tool.
For the review of the 0.5 PoC multiple senior Splunk executives flew out to Emerge’s headquarters in Portland, Oregon for a multi-day white boarding session to understand the vision for the 1.0 release which would focus on improvements to the DSA tool and an introduction to the digital product platform suite concept which would house the DSA tool as well as other tools to be built over time such as an Interactive Value Assessment (IVA) tool and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) tool. The 1.0 release would also introduce single sign-on functionality and the ability to view high-level account information to see progress and identify areas of opportunity and action.
PROCESS:
After partnering with Emerge, the agency product team was assembled consisting of myself as acting Creative Director and Senior UX/UI Product Designer, a Jr. UX Designer, a Project Manager, and Solutions Architect Lead.
In the first wave of work targeting the 0.5 PoC, we knew we needed to obtain a comprehensive end-to-end understanding of the entire sales lifecycle from Splunk’s experts. My Jr. UX Designer and I thus talked to a number of sales individuals and business executives to gain insights into their day to day process, what best facilitates sales, and their own thoughts on what they wanted to see in a product release. Interview scripts were promptly created and multiple zoom calls were queued to listen and document this important information.
Armed with data from our interviews, we quickly visualized a sales user journey that would validate specific use cases and needs while satisfying business requirements and removing common areas of frustration and other pain points, built low fidelity wireframes, and finally translated these higher fidelity prototyped UI comps. The entire process to get a 0.5 PoC up and running from project launch (including the interviews) took just a few months, and involved a lot of whiteboard sketching and rapid design iteration cycles.
Following the 0.5 PoC release, the agency product team shifted into an agile working style to continue towards the 1.0 release and beyond. Weekly scrum meetings were held, usually lasting 15 minutes, to report progress and address blockers. Kanban systems across Jira and Trello assisted with this process, with the latter helping a new client-side product manager come quickly up to speed with our design process and progress as well as add feedback to the designs in an intuitive fashion. Components from UI comps were migrated into a design system to ensure accuracy and consistency.
Two years into the client relationship, Emerge had grown the project team into a rotating cast of around 20 dedicated individuals including internal and external freelance UX and UI designers as well as front and back end developers working on different project streams concurrently. I led the team through our design process at Emerge and managed the entire evolution of the platform as it evolved from a single tool to an entire suite of tools.
The agency team used Reframer for assisting with interview analysis, Axure RP for visualizing user journeys, low and medium fidelity wireframes, and prototypes, Sketch for creating UI comps, building out product designs, and cataloging UI components, Marvel for UI prototypes, and Zeplin.io for creating developer friendly design annotations and hand-off links.
OUTCOMES:
Splunk over time saw a 250% increase in YoY sales and key metric delivery to its prospective and existing clients and is a $27 billion company today largely in part from the efforts of Ermerge’s product team. The client relationship lasted until early 2023 when Splunk internalized all product design and development. This was the intended goal from the start of the relationship however, and itself was an indication and metric of success — to allow time for Splunk to grow an internal product team consisting of designers and developers that could eventually take on all work themselves.
As for Emerge as a digital product agency, this cemented an agile workflow and iterative product design process model that was adapted and utilized successfully for other client projects the company took on. Personally and professionally, I grew from this experience as both a team leader and product designer by successfully adopting and applying an agile workflow and iterative product design process.
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