MAKO CPQ Application Redesign
Budget Dumpster
THE CHALLENGE
Restructure and redesign the hauler hierarchy to better leverage data and scalability. The internal application built to manage haulers, products, and pricing for sales reps and service managers had reached the capacity at its current structure. Because of rapid growth, the application needed to evolve to handle more complex data hierarchy.
MY ROLE
Because our product team was slim, I stepped in to play a hybrid product manager/designer role and worked with key stakeholders across the company as well as two engineers.
DEFINING THE RIGHT PROBLEM
Before I joined the team -- which previously consisted of only the 2 engineers -- 7 months and 2 failed deployments had gone by. Upon digging in, we discovered that the team wasn’t aligned on the same problem and therefore the solution wasn’t working. I facilitated a discovery session with the cross-functional team to align first on common definitions and then the right problem.
The real problem was having the right levels built within the hierarchy and the right data mapped to the right levels so that data can be managed and displayed efficiently.
THE SOLUTION
Based on the requirements laid out by stakeholders, myself and the lead engineer worked out the information architecture. I then created low-fidelity wireframes to visualize how users would navigate the hierarchy.
Because the UI and visual design was never prioritized in this internal application before, I also incorporated a slight redesign in order to improve the user experience. One of the major improvements included an updated design system for colors and buttons to bring in more consistency and proper emphasis on actions. Another key upgrade was to incorporate destructive action validation to decrease the number of times important data gets accidentally deleted.
REFINING THE DESIGN
With an interactive prototype, I sat down with a number of our internal users and observed them complete a number of actions. The biggest sticking point identified by users was the difficulty searching for a specific region for a nationwide hauler with 20+ regions. Our internal teams are organized by territories, so we added a territory filter to improve the searchability.
THE OUTCOME
The launch of this update did exactly as we had hoped. Data within the application became cleaner and much easier to manage where the operations were actually manageable with 2 less team members. And the proper hierarchy set up the ability for the team to start building scalable features to improve the user experience for the hauler network and customer base.