Salesforce
Service Design
Internal Tools
Research
Facilitation
From fragmented
enablement to
personalized growth
Designed a data-driven internal seller hub that connects performance, learning, and career into a single, coherent experience. Replaced five disconnected tools with one place built around how sellers actually work.
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ROLE
Lead Design Strategist & Researcher
RESEARCH SCALE
60+ In-Depth Interviews ·
3 research phases
TIMELINE
2022 - 2023
DISCIPLINES
Service Design · Generative & Evaluative Research ·
Workshop Facilitation · JTBD · Systems Mapping
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THE CHALLENGE
Sellers spending hours each week
just to find their own numbers
Sellers were navigating performance and learning across at least five disconnected tools. To answer three basic questions about their own role, they had to run reports across multiple platforms, check separate dashboards, and mentally stitch together a picture that should have been available at a glance.
5+
disconnected tools sellers navigated to find their own KPIs
60+
research sessions across sales team members
3
phases from discovery through service design and handoff
The surface problem was fragmentation. But below the surface, the root causes ran deeper: no single owner of the seller's end-to-end experience, enablement designed around content delivery rather than seller goals, and competing organisational priorities that had led to fragmented investments across tools that didn't talk to each other.
What sellers needed was not another tool. They needed the three questions at the centre of their working life to be answerable in one place: How am I performing right now? What should I learn to improve? Where can I go in my career?
"Right now I have to look in 5 different places and run reports to get this info. I don't even know where to go to find out my real [internal KPI]." - Discovery Interview
Due to NDA and confidentiality constraints, some project details have been generalized and sensitive information has been redacted. The visuals below are abstracted representations of the design work, not reproductions of proprietary information.
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THE REFRAME
Not better content.
A connected performance system.
Research with internal stakeholders reframed the problem from fixing isolated touchpoints to designing a coherent, data-driven learning experience. The question shifted from "how do we deliver better training?" to "how do we design a single experience that makes a seller's next best step obvious?"
What Existed
- Disconnected tools and reports across platforms
- Generic, role-agnostic content that didn't connect to goals
- Learning treated as a separate, compliance-driven task
- "Enablement happens to us" — not designed for sellers
- Career paths and performance data siloed from each other
- No single coordinating experience across the seller lifecycle
What We Designed
- A unified hub surfacing performance, learning, and career
- Personalised, KPI-aligned content recommendations
- Learning embedded in performance context, not separate from it
- Goal-oriented, motivating journeys designed around seller needs
- Career trajectory connected to current-state skills and gaps
- Continuity from onboarding through promotion — one narrative thread
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RESEARCH AND PROCESS
60+ sessions. Three phases.
One clear direction.
Led generative and evaluative research across three phases; designing and conducting discovery interviews, facilitating validation workshops, and running moderated prototype testing sessions across segments and tenure levels. Research was paired continuously with synthesis: every phase fed directly into the design work that followed.
Phase 1
42
Discovery & Generative Research
23 discovery interviews exploring the full seller experience. 19 user validation sessions testing early concepts. Mapped end-to-end seller experience from onboarding through ongoing performance, surfacing systemic pain points across all stages.
Phase 2
17
Prototype & Validation
10 research interviews to understand the manager perspective on seller development. 7 prototype user testing sessions with a Figma prototype connecting Onboarding, Home, Insights, and Career. Moderated, observation-led sessions with no task guidance.
Phase 3
+
Service Design & Handoff
Leader validation sessions, ecosystem mapping, and a comprehensive service blueprint structured for implementation. Facilitated design reviews and cross-functional alignment sessions with Salesforce stakeholders across product, engineering, and enablement.
Across all three phases, we applied four core research methods. Chosen to build from systemic understanding toward validated design direction:
Systems Mapping
Visualized the full complexity of the existing learning and performance ecosystem: tools, platforms, touchpoints, and the gaps between them. Made the structural problem legible and shareable with stakeholders who hadn't been able to see it from inside.
Exploratory Research
Interviews and journey mapping with AEs, SEs, BDRs, and Sales Leaders across tenure levels. Captured the full emotional, operational, and motivational arc of the seller experience. Not just what they did, but how they felt about it and what they were telling themselves at each step.
Evaluative Research
Concept testing and prototype validation across multiple rounds, grounding design decisions in real observed behavior rather than self-reported preferences. Moderated sessions let us watch sellers navigate, not ask them what they would do.
JTBD & Storyboarding
Jobs-to-be-Done framework applied to surface the underlying motivation behind seller behavior. Not just "takes a training course" but "wants to close more deals and see a clear path to promotion." Storyboarding translated insights into design scenarios that communicated context to cross-functional partners.
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DESIGN PRINCIPLES
Four ideas that shaped
every design decision
These principles were derived directly from research synthesis and used throughout the engagement as the lens for evaluating design trade-offs. Every major design decision - navigation structure, content recommendation logic, career path architecture - was tested against them.
01
Data is the foundation
Personalized, real-time KPIs are the entry point to every other experience in the system. Sellers aren't motivated by training content — they're motivated by performance. This drove the insights-first navigation model: make every session start with performance data, not a course catalog. What we designed toward: a hub where the first thing a seller sees tells them exactly where they stand, and what they can do about it.
02
Opportunity, Action, Outcome
Every learning surface should start with the why, then show the how, then make the result visible. Sellers pushed back hard on generic content cards during prototype testing: "why are you recommending this to me?" This principle reframed how content was surfaced — connect every recommendation to a performance gap and a measurable outcome. Without that chain, enablement feels like homework, not a tool.
03
Choice within boundaries
Sellers are driven by autonomy. They want to customize which KPIs they see, choose their own career targets, and feel like the experience is theirs. But unconstrained choice creates paralysis and low-quality outcomes. This principle shaped the KPI dashboard and career path logic: curated guardrails that enable personalization without chaos. Choice is a luxury, best offered in moderation, especially when the goal is already clear.
04
Continuity across the seller journey
Onboarding, performance, and promotion should connect into one coherent narrative thread, not three separate experiences a seller has to mentally stitch together. This principle informed the unified Home, Insights, and Career structure — ensuring that a seller moving from new hire to top performer to manager never has to start over in a new system. The journey is one story, not three chapters in different books.
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THE SOLUTION
A unified seller hub built around
performance, not content delivery
We designed a layered experience that combines real-time performance data, personalised career paths, and a gamified, adaptive learning model; all surfaced through a single internal seller hub. The architecture was structured around three interconnected layers, each designed to answer one of the three questions sellers could never answer before without running reports.
Home & Insights
Performance at a glance
Real-time KPIs anchor every visit, replacing the multi-platform report-running ritual. Sellers see quota attainment, pipeline metrics, and performance vs. peers in one place, with recommendations tied directly to the gaps. The Insights section became the most-visited and highest-engagement area in prototype testing.
Learning Paths
Contextualized development
Learning surfaced through performance context, not a course catalog. Every recommended path shows the seller why it matters to their specific role and KPIs, connecting the Opportunity to the Action to the measurable Outcome. Designed in partnership with a gamification consultancy using eight core motivational drivers.
Career
A visible path forward
Career trajectories mapped to current role, skills, and performance, giving sellers visibility into what promotion actually requires, not just generic role descriptions. Sellers can set a target role, see skill gaps relative to it, view common career moves from their peers, and connect with mentors in their target function.
Good morning, Yasmine
It's Q2 — here's where you stand.
For Your Performance
Improve Pipeline Quality
Connected Vision Workshop · 2 modules
For Your Career
Territory XX is your best match
90% skills overlap · Set as target →
Abstracted representation of the Insights hub — real-time KPIs anchor every visit, with performance-linked recommendations surfaced below.
A key design decision was the gamified layer, developed in partnership with a gamification consultancy whose framework identifies eight core drives of human motivation. This shaped the learning path architecture: not a linear course list, but an adaptive journey designed around what actually motivates sellers to grow. From achievement and progress tracking to social comparison and community recognition.
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FACILITATION AND STAKEHOLDER WORK
Bringing a cross-functional team
to a shared direction
This project involved a complex stakeholder landscape: Salesforce product, engineering, and enablement leads; an external gamification consultancy; and our own multi-disciplinary design team. A significant part of my role was designing and facilitating the sessions that kept this diverse group aligned on a shared vision, and redirected when competing priorities threatened to fragment the work.
Experience Vision Workshop
Materializing a shared north star
Facilitated a full-day vision workshop with product leads, enablement leaders, engineering representatives, and the gamification consultants. The goal: move from a loose ambition ("personalized learning") to a defined experience vision that everyone could design toward. Outputs included a prioritized design challenge statement, shared experience principles, and alignment on the key user narratives that would anchor the prototype direction.
Design Reviews & Stakeholder Alignment
Turning decisions into direction
Led biweekly design review sessions with stakeholders, structured not as show-and-tell but as decision-making forums with clear inputs, trade-offs framed, and resolutions documented. Conducted a phase retrospective identifying areas of alignment and gap ("Liked / Learned / Lacked / Longed For") that re-established governance and clarified cross-team ownership at a critical project transition point.
Leader Research & Persona Development
The "3 Faces" of the Sales Leader
Ten in-depth interviews with leaders revealed a persona more complex than initially assumed. Leaders wore three distinct hats: strategic decision-maker, continuous learner, and growth-oriented career builder, often simultaneously and with competing demands on their time. This "3 Faces" insight directly shaped the leader-facing experience design and reframed how enablement needed to serve managers, not just individual contributors.
Community Design Workshop
Designing with stakeholders, not for them
Facilitated a co-design session with enablement leads to surface the strategic intent behind the platform's Community section, asking what value it should provide, what problems it would solve for sellers, and what would make it meaningfully different from existing community tools. Outputs directly shaped the Community feature brief and prevented the team from building a feature no one had a clear rationale for.
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DESIGN ARTIFACTS
Research translated into
shared working tools
Three core artifacts anchored the design work and aligned cross-functional partners across phases. Each was built to serve not just as a deliverable, but as a live working document used in design reviews, stakeholder sessions, and implementation planning throughout the engagement.
Artifact 01
Seller Journey Map
End-to-end map of the seller experience across pre-SEED fragmentation, onboarding, in-product engagement, and ongoing growth. Synthesized from 50+ qualitative interviews. Documented actions, emotional state, key thoughts, pain points, and opportunity areas at every stage, and surfaced the critical intervention moments that shaped the product architecture.
Artifact 02
Ecosystem & Service Blueprint
Mapped the full seller performance and learning ecosystem: platforms, data sources, human touchpoints, and the gaps between them. Phase 3 extended this into a full service blueprint connecting frontstage seller actions to backstage systems, data pipelines, and organizational owners. Made the structural complexity legible and directly informed the implementation handoff documentation.
Artifact 03
JTBD Framework
Jobs-to-be-Done analysis synthesized from discovery interviews across AEs, SEs, BDRs, and Leaders. Reframed seller motivations from task-level ("complete a training module") to goal-level ("close more business and get promoted"). Became the evaluative lens for content recommendations: if a learning surface doesn't connect to a seller's job-to-be-done, it doesn't belong in the experience.
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PROTOTYPE TESTING
What was revealed
in moderated sessions
Phase 2 of the research culminated in moderated, observation-led prototype testing with internal stakeholders across segments, industries, and tenure levels. They were tasked with walking through a Figma prototype that connected Onboarding, Home, Insights, and Career. Sessions ran 45–50 minutes with no task guidance: we watched sellers navigate, then conducted structured post-observation interviews.
Testing revealed four clear signals that shaped the final design direction:
Insights is the hero
Sellers gravitated to the performance KPI section immediately. It produced the highest engagement and longest dwell time in every single session. Every user navigated to Insights either immediately after onboarding or right after completing overdue training. Performance data, not content, is the primary motivator for return visits.
Recommendations need a why
Sellers pushed back on generic content cards without context. They wanted Opportunity, Action, Outcome framing: "why is this relevant to me right now?" Without that chain, enablement felt like homework. With it, it felt like a tool for performance improvement.
Personalization beats prescription
Sellers consistently asked to customize their KPI views, choose their own career target role before receiving recommendations, and see comparison data against peers. The principle of "choice within boundaries" was validated directly from observed behavior, not self-reported preference.
The UI is intuitive
Every user found every major CTA and navigated through the prototype with confidence. Onboarding went quickly and with little question or confusion. One seller said: "It doesn't take a lot of explanation. You can figure it out on your own." This validated the visual and interaction design direction ahead of technical prototype build.
"It's great to see this all in ONE PLACE. I see it as a centralised location for many things. Right now I have to look in 5 different places and run different reports to get this info."
- Prototype Testing
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IMPACT
What this work delivered
Established a personalised, data-driven enablement model that connects learning directly to sales performance. Validated through 60+ research sessions and prototype testing with real sellers. The impact spanned product, experience, and organizational dimensions.
Business
Established a personalized, data-driven enablement model that connects learning directly to sales performance, replacing the multi-platform report-running ritual with a single, real-time hub. Designed to improve seller productivity, reduce time lost to tool fragmentation, and create measurable links between enablement investment and quota attainment.
Experience
Replaced fragmented, transactional learning with a continuous, role-aware seller journey. A single narrative thread from onboarding to promotion replaced three siloed platforms that sellers had to mentally stitch together. Prototype testing validated that sellers found the experience intuitive, motivating, and meaningful to their actual work.
Value-Prop
Shifted enablement from "content delivery" to "performance partnership." The design reframed Salesforce's internal enablement function from a compliance and training operation to a strategic capability that gives sellers real-time intelligence and a clear path to improvement. Backed by 59 sessions of user-validated evidence.
Organizational
Established reusable journey, service blueprint, and JTBD frameworks applied across other Salesforce workstreams beyond the original SEED scope. The research methodology and synthesis approach were formalized into a repeatable testing process for ongoing product validation as new user types and features were added. Designed to scale across the full Salesforce employee base, not just sales.
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DESIGN ARTIFACT 01
Seller Journey Map
An end-to-end map of the sellers experience; from the friction of navigating five disconnected platforms, through onboarding into the seller hub, to ongoing performance-driven engagement. Synthesised from 60+ qualitative interviews across discovery and validation phases.
