Context
This project focused on redesigning an internal sales enablement platform used by go-to-market teams to access product knowledge, messaging, and supporting materials.
Prior to this work, critical information lived primarily in old email threads, static documents, and ad hoc files. Sales representatives relied on tribal knowledge, forwarded messages, and outdated attachments to prepare for customer conversations. Content was difficult to find, hard to trust, and nearly impossible to keep current.
As the organization and product offerings grew, this fragmentation became a liability. Inconsistent messaging slowed sales cycles, reduced confidence in live conversations, and increased the burden on enablement and product teams to answer repeat questions.
The platform needed to evolve from scattered, static information into a centralized, structured system that supported how sales teams actually worked. The goal was not just better organization, but faster access, clearer ownership, and a foundation that could scale as products, teams, and messaging continued to change.
This was a system-level redesign of how internal knowledge was captured, governed, and operationalized.
Business Stakes
Sales effectiveness depended on fast access to accurate, up-to-date information. Success required improving sales efficiency and confidence while reducing internal friction and long-term maintenance costs.
Team
Cross-functional team assembled from Marketing, Sales, Operations, Account Representatives, and Engineering
Constraints
Impact Snapshot
I served as Lead UX Designer and Product Lead, with end-to-end ownership spanning research, strategy, system design, and delivery for an internal sales enablement platform.
This was not a traditional sales environment. The product being sold was an ERC tax credit service, where eligibility, value, and risk varied significantly by company size, payroll structure, industry, and pandemic impact. Every sales conversation required navigating nuanced scenarios, regulatory constraints, and client-specific tradeoffs rather than selecting from a standard product catalog.
I led all primary research directly, working hands-on with experienced sales professionals to surface how they prepared for calls, evaluated fit, handled objections, and explained complex tradeoffs in real time. Much of this knowledge existed only in personal notes, memory, and ad-hoc shortcuts developed under pressure. I synthesized these inputs into a shared mental model that reflected how sales actually reasoned through complex deals.
There was no pre-existing product team for this effort. I assembled and led a cross-functional group drawn from across the organization, including sales subject-matter experts, engineering, and operations. In addition to design ownership, I defined priorities, shaped scope, and drove execution, operating as the effective product manager and project lead for the initiative.
Key Leadership Contribution: I translated a highly complex, consultative sales process into a structured, reusable system that supported speed, accuracy, and confidence while aligning sales execution with engineering and business constraints.
The core challenge was not a lack of information. It was the nature of the sales process itself.
Sales teams were operating in a high-stakes, consultative environment where each potential client presented a different combination of eligibility rules, financial impact, risk considerations, and external dependencies. Answers were rarely binary. Value had to be calculated, explained, and justified in ways that varied by audience, company profile, and timing.
I worked closely with sales to understand how they actually navigated this complexity during live conversations. This included how they framed eligibility, assessed whether a prospect was worth pursuing, handled regulatory uncertainty, and coordinated with external tax professionals who ultimately executed the work.
Rather than treating this as a documentation problem, I focused on designing a system that supported reasoning under pressure. The platform needed to help sales move quickly between scenarios, surface the right context at the right moment, and maintain consistency across conversations without oversimplifying the reality of the process.
This required shifting teams away from personal notes and tribal knowledge toward a shared system they could trust. By making implicit expertise explicit and structured, the platform became an active sales tool rather than a passive repository, supporting faster preparation, clearer explanations, and more confident decision-making across the team.
Critical sales and product knowledge lived almost entirely in people’s heads, inboxes, and personal documents. Answers to common client questions were spread across old emails, slide decks, chat threads, and individual experience rather than captured in a shared, durable system.
Experienced sales reps developed their own mental shortcuts and narratives over time, but that knowledge was difficult to transfer. Newer team members relied heavily on shadowing or interrupting subject-matter experts to get answers, creating bottlenecks and reinforcing dependence on a small number of individuals.
As the organization grew, this model became increasingly fragile. The business lacked a single source of truth for how products were explained, positioned, or differentiated in real sales conversations.
Existing tools were designed for static documentation, not live sales conversations. Content lived in long-form documents, folders, and wikis optimized for reference, not retrieval under pressure.
Sales conversations rarely followed the structure of these systems. Reps needed to pivot quickly based on client questions, objections, or use cases, but the tools 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. Documentation existed, but it did not meaningfully support how sales actually operated day to day.
Because knowledge was fragmented and tools failed to support real workflows, customer messaging varied widely. Different reps answered the same questions differently, emphasized different features, or framed products inconsistently depending on experience level and personal understanding.
This inconsistency increased business risk. Clients received mixed signals, follow-up clarification became common, and confidence in product claims was harder to maintain. In some cases, inaccurate or incomplete information required escalation or correction after the fact.
What began as an internal knowledge problem became a customer-facing trust issue. Without intervention, scaling the sales team would only amplify these inconsistencies rather than resolve them.
At first glance, the problem appeared to be a content organization issue. Sales needed better documentation, faster search, or a cleaner place to store answers. Early discovery showed that this framing was incomplete.
The real challenge was not the absence of information, but a mismatch between how knowledge was captured and how it was used. Sales conversations are dynamic, situational, and nonlinear. Reps do not reference information once. They adapt it continuously based on client context, objections, and the direction of the conversation.
Simply reorganizing existing content would not address these realities. Information would remain detached from real sales scenarios, interpretation would vary by individual, and static artifacts would continue to struggle to support live decision-making.
To be effective, the system needed to reflect how sales actually think and operate in real conversations, not just how information is stored.
A viable approach needed to balance competing forces that were often in tension:
Solving only one of these dimensions would fail at scale. The challenge was designing a system that could make tacit knowledge explicit while still feeling natural to the sales team using it.
This reframed the work from a documentation problem into a system design problem, one focused on translating lived expertise into a shared, flexible, and trustworthy sales foundation.
Discovery focused on understanding how sales teams actually learned, retained, and reused knowledge, and how customers experienced that information during 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 understanding of where breakdowns occurred and why existing tools were failing to scale.
To ensure we were solving the right problem, discovery combined multiple sources of input to confirm patterns rather than relying on isolated opinions or one-off stories.
I partnered with a specialized research firm to conduct moderated user interviews, while remaining directly involved in research planning, live sessions, and synthesis. In parallel, I led large-scale surveys to understand audience demographics, motivations, and behavioral differences across small business owners and growth-oriented entrepreneurs.
Interviews began at a higher level to surface patterns, then narrowed to deeper sessions with selected participants and internal SMEs. This allowed us to validate assumptions, pressure-test emerging themes, and distinguish edge cases from core needs.
Importantly, personas were derived from both customer research and extensive sales team input. After synthesis, these personas were reviewed and validated with sales to ensure they reflected real conversations, objections, and decision dynamics encountered in the field.
Research combined multiple methods to ensure findings were grounded and defensible:
Interviews began at a higher level to identify themes, then narrowed to specific workflows, language, and decision-making behaviors. This progression helped avoid prematurely designing for edge cases while still surfacing meaningful differences across roles.
One critical insight was the behavioral difference between small business owners (SBOs) and more entrepreneurial operators, even when company size was similar.
These groups approached the ERC conversation very differently:
This distinction mattered because a single, fixed sales narrative could not effectively serve both audiences. Treating them the same either slowed entrepreneurial buyers or overwhelmed more compliance-oriented operators.
To make this difference actionable, I mapped key behavioral dimensions across both archetypes, including risk tolerance, decision style, and comfort with financial complexity. This framework helped the team align on why guidance needed to adapt by audience, without fragmenting content or creating inconsistency across reps.
Sales teams held deep, experience-driven knowledge about objections, explanations, and successful framing. However, this knowledge lived in conversations, personal notes, and memory rather than in a shared system.
I synthesized interview data, call insights, FAQs, and survey responses into structured themes that reflected how sales teams actually thought and spoke.
This synthesis focused on:
Draft personas were created using both customer and sales inputs, then reviewed and validated with the sales team to ensure accuracy and usefulness. Personas were not treated as abstract artifacts, but as working tools that informed 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 informed how the system was framed, organized, and designed in later phases.
The strategy was shaped around four non-negotiable goals:
Rather than treating the knowledge base as a support artifact, we reframed it as a strategic sales enablement platform.
Its role was to:
This framing allowed us to evaluate features and tradeoffs through a strategic lens, not just usability or content volume.
Several constraints directly influenced the strategy:
These guardrails helped prevent overengineering while keeping the solution grounded in real-world usage.
The result of this framing was a clear direction:
Build a knowledge system that turns sales expertise into explicit, reusable guidance, tightly integrated into how the organization already works.
This set the foundation for system design, prioritization, and phased delivery.
This 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 translate dense ERC rules on the fly, the system surfaces clear guidance at the moment of need, helping teams respond with confidence, consistency, and credibility.
Instead of organizing content by policy or regulation, the experience is anchored around nine customer archetypes that reflect common mental states encountered during ERC conversations.
Each archetype encapsulates:
This structure allows teams to quickly recognize who they are 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, not one-off scripts or FAQs.
Each conversation includes:
This reduces reliance on tribal knowledge while still allowing human judgment and flexibility in delivery.
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The experience supports different levels of urgency and expertise without overwhelming the user.
This ensures the system works equally well during a live call, async follow-up, or internal prep.
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Beyond surface-level UX, the system was designed to support:
The result is a durable foundation that scales with the organization while maintaining trust, accuracy, and consistency.
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This work required more than research and design. It required moving the organization from scattered knowledge in emails and static documents to a shipped system with real adoption.
Because a formal product team did not exist for this initiative, I led delivery end to end. I assembled a cross-functional team from across the company, aligned priorities, created the phased rollout plan, and coordinated execution with engineering while keeping sales and operations engaged throughout.
Delivery was structured as a sequence of milestones so value could ship quickly while the system scaled in parallel. Early milestones focused on establishing the core CMS and information model, standing up the initial design and content, and getting the first version into real internal use. Later phases expanded content types, refined interaction patterns, and introduced integrations and automation opportunities.
This phased approach reduced delivery risk, prevented scope sprawl, and ensured the platform could improve continuously without disrupting active sales cycles.
Once the core knowledge structure, interaction patterns, and delivery plan were in place, validation focused on confirming that the system aligned with real sales and customer-facing scenarios.
Validation was conducted through working sessions with sales, account representatives, and internal subject matter experts. These sessions tested whether the system supported live conversations, reduced ambiguity, and allowed teams to respond confidently without relying on tribal knowledge or one-off guidance.
Rather than optimizing for hypothetical usage, validation emphasized realism: could this system support how teams actually talk to customers under time pressure?
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.
These reviews focused on:
Feedback confirmed that the information model matched how sales teams reason about objections, questions, and trust-building moments. Refinements were made to labeling and hierarchy, but the underlying system design remained intact.
The validation process established strong confidence in the direction and execution.
The work resulted in:
This project demonstrated how to design for clarity and scale even in uncertain environments, delivering a system that was ready to ship and adaptable to future needs.
The project created organizational value by providing:
The outcome was a system-level blueprint for enabling confident, consistent customer communication at scale.
Internal platforms succeed or fail based on adoption, not features.
This work reinforced that effective enablement systems require:
Leading this effort required aligning multiple stakeholders with competing priorities and shifting the focus from “more content” to clearer decisions and faster execution.
The result was an internal product that supported revenue outcomes indirectly by enabling people to do their jobs with less friction and more confidence.
