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Project Role:
Product Design Director
Responsibilities:
- Leverage design/UX to drive strong business outcomes
- Advocate for exceptional UX, research, content strategy
- Maximize alignment with cross-functional partners, executives, stakeholders
- Drove quality design outcomes with best-in-class practices and tooling
- Establish a strong vision and drive clarity from ambiguity
Team Composition:
Leadership: Director of Product Design (Me), VP of Engineering, Sr Director of Product Management
Product: 2 product managers
Design: 1 principle product designer, 2 product designers
Eng: ~30 engineers
01 / Reverse Chronology
Enablement Planner is an agile all-in-one planning and reporting tool that simplifies content audits, field requests, product launches, and training & onboarding initiatives. It empowers teams to stay organized, maximize their revenue impact, and back up decisions with data.
02 / Product Background
Rewind to 2019 Seismic acquired a company called Percolate. Percolate was a Content Management Platform quickly moving into the Marketing Resource Management arena. Percolate was a platform for marketers to plan their marketing campaigns for all their channels (Social, Blog, Print, Ads, etc) through content creation, task management and delivery with full Enterprise grade governance, approvals and proofing.
Percolate fully integrated with Seismic for customers that managed their sales content through Seismic. After the acquisition the goal was to create the best seamlessly integrated experience of planning, preparing and managing content through programs, projects and tasks for sales enablers.
This gave us the opportunity to make improvements to what could be improved in our current experience in Percolate and make them better all within Seismic.
Seismic Enablement Cloud
Within the broader Seismic Enablement Cloud to unify the enablement and sales needs to ignite growth for teams. The Enablement Strategy and Planning projects were key to the success of teams to manage their work
03 / Intent-Centric Personas
To make sure we were building the tools we thought worked best for Sales Enablers we did deep discovery research across our customers to best understand their current process across Percolate, Seismic and any other tools they were using to provide content to their sales teams. Looking at our experience from an end to end we created a full set of personas across the full suite of products.
04 / Journey Map
After the merging of Percolate and Seismic, Lisa (our Product Design Manager) and I got together and mapped out the full end-to-end journey of what our customers experienced across sales enablers, sellers and buyers in and outside of our platform. This really drove clearer understanding of how our customers navigated through their daily work and collaborated together as individual teams and cross teams internally. It also exposed what was working well and what wasn't across the platforms. At this point (Early 2020) we had two separate platforms working together through integrations.
Through a lot of customer research, strategy and visionary thinking we went the direction of building project, task, and request management into Seismic to make the enablement journey seamlessly interconnected with the power and governance of the Sesimics content management platform.
Through this research we found that the following capabilities were the most valuable to our customers.
Enablement Project Planning
A streamlined workflow with planning tools designed for enablement teams and built directly into Seismic. Ability to create playbooks, onboarding programs, sales plays, and more.
Content Auditing
Ability to decide quickly which content to keep, archive, or update with performance data at their fingertips in their existing content management workflow.
Planning Impact Reporting
Get actionable insights into how their team’s time and effort impact revenue with planning and efficiency reporting they can connect to their CRM.
Requests Management
Ability to arm their team with a centralized hub to receive, prioritize, and triage requests and feedback from the field.
05 / Architecture & User Flows
To build a fully integrated project and task management system into Seismic we needed a vision of what that would look like and how it would fit the Seismic patterns and system while also laying the foundation of our new Mantle Design System. So we started with laying the foundation of the patterns and system we felt was an easy object oriented ux approach to tying projects, tasks and content together to connect all the work they were doing across multiple platforms into one.
06 / Lists and Panels
With Planner being a net new product in our system we tool and us building the foundation of our Mantle Design System. We needed a new and improved list viewing experience to manage the 1,000's of projects and tasks that would be created by our clients.
A few of the capabilities of the new list experience were...
- Nesting tasks
- Inline editing
- Quick actions
- Bulk editing
- Reordering (Drag and Drop)
- Search
- Filtering (Complex and Quick)
- Contextual Panel interaction
- Sorting and Grouping
- Resizing
07 / Projects
Projects are the main grouping mechanism for customers when planning. Within a project customers can create tasks, add content that needs to be audited or create net new content. Many customers needed and wanted the ability to add custom properties to their projects to help organize and ensure they had all the information they needed to plan and accomplish the goals of the projects effectively.
Customers now have tooling right within Seismic to organize and plan work. They have full access to activity on projects, and collaboration tools like commenting to better communicate around the plan all tied to their sales content.
08 / Tasks
Customers needed a light weight way to create and assign tasks to themselves and their team members to work toward their goals. Instead of having a full on detail page for tasks we created a simple contextual panel with the ability to add basic details, create custom fields, add content, sub tasks and comment. The interaction solution allowed for easy access to the information in a quick efficient manner while giving them the ability to go from task to task with ease.
Tasks had clear visibility into what project, content, status and priority were all associated to it. You can create a task with or with out any of those associations.
09 / Content
Content is the core heartbeat of Seismic. Connecting contextual content from the core library with hundreds of pieces of content to a project and tasks was key to helping enablement teams focused on the content they need to update or create that was missing in sales stages and conversations. So connecting that content either at the project level or the task level was important. Helping customers know what content was new and what was reference was also important.
10 / Requests
Requests were very important to the Sales teams. They needed a way to ask enablers for specific things and they needed a way to tie that to already existing content in the system. Engablers needed a way to triage the requests coming in from sales teams with thousands of sellers and easily accept, reject and convert them into actionable projects and tasks. Using our core task model we created a way to solve those problems in a very systematic way.
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