The Need
Sales teams lacked a reliable way to access accurate product knowledge. Information lived across disconnected documents, email threads, and file repositories, creating friction and inconsistency in live conversations.
What I Led
Led the redesign of an internal sales enablement platform, transforming scattered content into a structured, governed knowledge system aligned to real sales workflows.
How it Worked
Defined content architecture, ownership models, and interaction patterns that made information easier to find, trust, and maintain without requiring formal training.
Impact
Established a unified enablement foundation that improved sales efficiency, reduced duplication, and supported scalable growth across products and teams.
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Context
This project redesigned an internal sales enablement platform used by go-to-market teams to access product knowledge, positioning, and support materials.
Before the redesign, critical information was spread across disconnected documents, email threads, and file repositories. Sales representatives often relied on forwarded attachments and tribal knowledge to prepare for customer conversations.
As the organization grew, this fragmentation slowed sales conversations, reduced confidence, and increased maintenance overhead. The opportunity was to replace a loose collection of content with a structured, governed system aligned to real sales workflows.
This was a redesign of how internal knowledge was organized, maintained, and scaled.
Business Stakes
Sales performance depended on fast access to accurate, current information. The platform needed to reduce friction in live customer conversations while lowering the maintenance burden on marketing and product teams.
Success required improving speed and confidence without disrupting active sales cycles.
Team
Cross-functional team spanning Marketing, Sales, Operations, Account Representatives, and Engineering.
I partnered closely with sales leadership and frontline representatives to align the system to real workflows, while coordinating with engineering to support long-term maintainability.
Constraints
Impact Snapshot
I served as Lead UX Designer and Product Lead, owning end-to-end work across discovery, system design, and delivery for an internal sales enablement platform.
This was a consultative sales environment for an ERC tax credit service, where eligibility, value, and risk varied by company profile, payroll structure, industry, and pandemic impact. Sales conversations required scenario-based reasoning rather than a fixed product narrative.
I led primary research with experienced sales professionals to understand how they prepared, evaluated fit, handled objections, and explained tradeoffs in real time. Because there was no pre-existing product team for this effort, I assembled and led a cross-functional group spanning sales SMEs, engineering, and operations. In addition to design ownership, I shaped priorities, scope, and execution as the effective product manager and project lead.
Key Leadership Contribution: Translated a high-complexity consultative sales process into a structured, reusable system that improved speed, accuracy, and confidence while aligning sales execution with business and engineering constraints.
The challenge was not information scarcity, but the nature of the sales process. Each prospect introduced a different mix of eligibility rules, financial impact, risk considerations, and external dependencies. Answers were rarely binary, and value had to be explained differently by audience and context.
Rather than treating this as a documentation problem, I designed a system that supported reasoning under pressure. The platform needed to help reps move quickly between scenarios, surface the right context at the right moment, and maintain consistent guidance without oversimplifying the work.
The goal was to replace tribal knowledge with a shared system teams could trust, turning implicit expertise into reusable structure.
Critical product and sales knowledge lived in inboxes, slide decks, chat threads, and personal documents rather than a shared system. Experienced reps developed effective shortcuts over time, but that knowledge was difficult to transfer. Newer team members relied on shadowing or interrupting SMEs, creating bottlenecks and reinforcing dependence on a few individuals.
As the organization grew, the lack of a reliable source of truth made messaging harder to maintain and scale.
Existing tools were optimized for static reference, not live conversation support. Reps needed to pivot quickly based on questions, objections, and use cases, but the systems forced linear navigation and broad searching. Finding the right answer in the moment was often slower than relying on memory or improvisation.
As a result, teams worked around the tools rather than through them.
At first glance, this looked like a content organization issue. Discovery showed the deeper problem was how knowledge was used. Sales conversations were dynamic, situational, and nonlinear, so guidance had to adapt continuously based on client context and the direction of the discussion.
Reorganizing static content would not solve the problem. The system needed to reflect how sales teams reasoned in real conversations, not just how information was stored.
A viable approach needed to balance:
The challenge was to make tacit expertise explicit while still feeling natural to use. That reframed the effort from documentation cleanup to system design.
Discovery focused on how sales teams learned, retained, and reused knowledge, and how customers experienced that information in live conversations. The existing system relied heavily on tribal knowledge, outdated documents, and long email threads that were difficult to search, update, or trust.
I led discovery across internal sales teams and customers, synthesizing qualitative and quantitative inputs into a shared view of where breakdowns occurred and why the current system was failing to scale.
Discovery combined multiple inputs to confirm patterns rather than rely on isolated anecdotes. I partnered with a specialized research firm to conduct moderated customer interviews while remaining hands-on in planning, live sessions, and synthesis. In parallel, I led large-scale surveys to understand demographics, motivations, and behavioral differences across small business owners and more entrepreneurial operators.
Interviews started broad to surface themes, then narrowed into deeper sessions with selected participants and internal SMEs to validate assumptions and separate edge cases from core needs. Personas were derived from customer research and extensive sales team input, then reviewed with sales to ensure they reflected real objections, decision dynamics, and conversation flow.
One key insight was the behavioral difference between compliance-oriented small business owners and more entrepreneurial operators, even at similar company sizes.
A single fixed narrative failed both groups, either slowing entrepreneurs or overwhelming more compliance-oriented buyers. To make that distinction actionable, I mapped key behavioral dimensions across both archetypes so guidance could adapt by audience without fragmenting messaging across reps.
Sales teams held deep experience-based knowledge about objections, explanations, and successful framing, but much of it lived in conversations, personal notes, and memory.
I synthesized interview data, call insights, FAQs, and survey findings into structured themes that reflected how reps reasoned through complex deals.
Synthesis focused on:
Personas and themes were validated with sales and used as working tools that directly informed content structure, language, and prioritization.
Discovery clarified that the core problem was not a lack of content, but a lack of structure, context, and confidence. Information existed, but it was fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult to apply in real conversations.
Any solution would need to:
These insights directly shaped how the system was framed, organized, and designed in later phases.
The strategy centered on four goals:
The strategy was shaped by a few core guardrails:
This led to a clear direction: build a knowledge system that turned sales expertise into explicit, reusable guidance integrated into how the organization already worked.
The experience was designed around how sales and support teams think, speak, and respond in live customer conversations, not how knowledge is traditionally documented.
Rather than forcing users to interpret dense ERC rules on the fly, the system surfaced clear guidance at the moment of need so teams could respond with more confidence and consistency.
Instead of organizing content by policy or regulation, the experience was anchored around nine customer archetypes reflecting common mindsets in ERC conversations.
Each archetype captured:
This let teams quickly recognize who they were talking to and tailor their response without searching or guessing.
Impact: Faster onboarding, fewer stalled calls, and more consistent messaging across the organization.
Common customer discussions were treated as repeatable conversation patterns rather than one-off scripts or FAQs.
Each conversation included:
This reduced reliance on tribal knowledge while preserving human judgment in delivery.
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The experience supported different levels of urgency and expertise without overwhelming the user:
This helped the system work during live calls, async follow-up, and internal prep.
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Beyond the interface, the system was designed to support:
The result was a durable foundation that could scale while maintaining trust, accuracy, and consistency.
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This work required more than research and design. It required turning scattered knowledge across emails and static documents into a shipped system with real adoption.
Because no formal product team existed for this initiative, I led delivery end to end. I assembled a cross-functional team, aligned priorities, created the phased rollout plan, and coordinated execution with engineering while keeping sales and operations engaged throughout.
Delivery was structured as milestones so usable value could ship early while the system scaled in parallel. Early phases focused on the core CMS, information model, and first release for internal use. Later phases expanded content types, refined interaction patterns, and introduced integration and automation opportunities.
This phased approach reduced delivery risk, contained scope, and allowed the platform to improve without disrupting active sales cycles.
Validation focused on realism: could the system support live conversations under time pressure?
We ran working sessions with sales, account representatives, and internal SMEs to test whether the structure reduced ambiguity, supported scenario-based navigation, and enabled confident responses without relying on tribal knowledge. Feedback led to refinements in labeling, structure, and retrieval patterns while confirming that the core interaction model matched how teams actually sold.
Concepts and flows were reviewed iteratively with sales leadership, operations partners, and engineering stakeholders to ensure the system was viable within organizational and technical constraints.
Reviews focused on:
Validation confirmed that the information model matched how sales teams reasoned about objections, questions, and trust-building moments. Refinements were made to labeling and hierarchy, but the underlying system design remained intact.
The work resulted in:
More broadly, the project created a reusable model for structuring complex, high-risk information and aligning sales, operations, and engineering around a shared system.
Internal platforms succeed or fail based on adoption, not features.
This work reinforced that effective enablement systems require:
Leading this effort required aligning stakeholders with competing priorities and shifting the conversation from “more content” to clearer decisions and faster execution.
The result was an internal product that supported revenue outcomes indirectly by helping people do their jobs with less friction and more confidence.
