My Role
Lead Product Designer
Time Frame
3 months
Problem
I joined the Salesforce CRM team with them not having had any sort of prior design or user experience role on the team. Additionally they hadn’t tackled many problems with user centered thinking. The first thing to tackle with the team was this pretty big problem of who are our users?
Background
I was given an artifact from a workshop that showed that they identified many different roles and put them into three different buckets: sales, sales support, and customer service. Currently the Salesforce CRM team has hundreds of users and roles categorized into those three buckets. Those buckets are too general to aid us in identifying and prioritizing real user problems.
First Steps
The first step was to start really identifying what groups we could put our users in that were smaller than the big general labels of “sales, sales support, and customer service” but bigger than their individual roles, as these roles had overlap and shared experiences. I facilitated workshops with stakeholders for each of these three buckets and had them rethink how they approached these roles and groupings. Stakeholders were to consider the following:
How do these users actually use the Salesforce platform?
Are they using the same objects within Salesforce as another role?
Are roles using the same object, using the objects differently?
We did this exercise with stakeholders from sales, sales support, and customer service. From the three buckets that we began with we ended up with a total of 23 user groups, which would require prioritization.