Highlight

I led the design of a self-service product builder tool that transformed how MSI's sales teams to communicate the complex ecosystem value to customers to upsell product bundles.

Working closely with researchers, sales, and marketing teams, I defined the marketing narrative and delivered an MVP that secured executive buy-in from both sales and marketing organizations.

The K-12 School Ecosystem Builder launched successfully in October 2024, generating positive customer engagement. I'm currently consulting on the enterprise version to scale the tool across new markets.

Overview

Over the past 5 years, MSI acquired 10 companies across communications, security, analytics, and AI. Despite creating a powerful ecosystem, customers struggled to understand its integrated value, with sales representatives bearing the burden of conveying complex integration benefits.

Our CX team designed a self-service tool enabling customers to explore solutions tailored to their safety needs, making the value proposition immediately clear without requiring specialized sales knowledge.

Our design initiative focused on the question: How might we empower sales to engage more customers with the new product ecosystem?

What I Did

• Conducted 8+ stakeholder interviews with sales reps, marketing reps and sales engineers to identify pain points in the sales and deployment process.

• Analyzed internal feedback and discovered critical hurdles in onboarding and adoption, particularly around customer engagement with the ecosystem.

• Researched 5 complex B2B automation tools to identify best practices for customer self-discovery and engagement

• Defined user flows and MVP scope that balanced technical complexity with intuitive exploration, creating a stepped approach aligned with user mental models

• Refined Micro-Interactions to enhance accessibility and deliver a smooth, engaging user experience.

• Supported 4 usability testing by collaborating with researchers to develop discussion guides, analyze feedback, and implement rapid iterations based on findings

Results & Impacts

The Solution Builder secured executive funding after successful stakeholder demos. The K-12 School version launched in October 2024 with positive feedback, and the concept is now expanding to enterprise markets.

MVP Overview

Guided by our "How might we" question, we developed an MVP to help users understand the ecosystem story. The Solution Builder:

• Streamlines the sales process by guiding customers through ecosystem capabilities aligned with their safety needs

• Enables effective storytelling through a structured journey that conveys integrated value to new customers. Helps customers understand their product bundle and get connected with our sales.

Approach

This project's initial objective was to develop a solution within 6 weeks that could contribute to the sales process, so I took an agile approach.

Working in close collaboration with the research team, I focused on quick iterations and continuous stakeholder feedback. This allowed us to validate concepts early, pivot when necessary, and deliver a compelling MVP that demonstrated clear value despite the complex ecosystem we were simplifying.

1/5 Understand the needs

When I got this project, I began by learning through the MSI's ecosystem through documentations and stakeholder interviews. Conversations with sales representatives and engineers revealed two primary adoption barriers:

• Sales Process Issues: Sales Reps often struggled to communicate the new ecosystem's integrated value proposition

• Technical Limitations: Complex deployment requirements created friction for customers

Leadership determined that improving the sales process would have the most immediate impact on adoption rates by better enabling teams to engage potential customers.

2/5 Solution Exploration

Once I understood the needs and pain points, I conducted benchmarking research to learn from successful approaches. Through this learning, I identified effective practices from other complex B2B products:

• Learning from Complex B2B Tools: Having researched automation tools for another project, I leveraged that knowledge to examine how B2B solutions like UI Path approached similar challenges. I found they offered interactive exploration tools that guided customers through automation benefits using scenarios relevant to their needs.

• Contextual Education: Successful tools translated technical features into business outcomes through real-world examples that resonated with customer priorities.

After brainstorming with my team, we aligned on an interactive Solution Builder that would guide users through ecosystem capabilities while connecting products to specific safety needs.

3/5 Customer Journey

Once the direction was set, I focused on drafting a user journey. A key challenge was translating complex product relationships into intuitive recommendations. Working closely with marketing, I developed a framework that mapped specific safety needs to relevant product categories, creating a logic system that showed how the system could suggest solutions.

Then, I developed and iterated on the story and flow based on early assumptions, validating each version with stakeholders during research sessions.

The feedback from the validation sessions led me to narrow our scope to focus on the most impactful area:

Empowering sales teams to raise customer awareness about the ecosystem's value, creating more opportunities and visibility

In a nutshell, the tool's scope included 4 key elements:

• 2 routes for new customers and customers/partners who were already familiar with our products

• Recommending relevant product categories based on customer safety needs

• Demonstrating how products work together within the ecosystem

• Creating natural handoffs to sales teams for detailed information and demonstrations

4/5 MVP Creation

When creating the 1st MVP, I focused on demonstrating the recommendation framework such as relationships between needs, use cases, and products:

• Micro Interaction: Designed progressive layouts starting with safety concerns before introducing product solutions.

• Recommendations: Showing how the framework can help suggest the right products and integrations more efficiently

• Visual Scenario Development: Collaborated with a designer to create illustrated narratives showing safety challenges in context.

These design decisions effectively communicated the ecosystem's value proposition, securing executive support for full development.

5/5 Development Handoff

Once the MVP design was approved, marketing decided to engage a third-party company for development. I guided this transition by:

• Facilitating feature prioritization discussions to align development scope with business goals and budget

• Creating detailed handoff documentation that ensured design intent would be maintained

To support future product optimization and marketing efforts, I also defined a high-level user data collection strategy. This enabled the internal team to effectively track and manage key user inputs, including:

• Organization details (industry, size, user role)

• Selected safety needs across three journey stages

• Product preferences (including additions/removals from the solution summary)

• Preferred product integrations

• User interaction data (e.g., button clicks)

I also proposed adding a simple CMS so internal teams could easily update content like marketing materials, solution recommendations, and use cases without needing developer help.

Outcomes

As a result, the tool launched successfully in October 2024 and is now actively used by K–12 school customers to support marketing campaigns and sales conversations.

By capturing relevant user data, it has helped improve lead quality and enabled the team to tailor follow-ups and product demos more effectively.

The tool has been well received across business lines, leading the enterprise team to integrate their product ecosystem into the platform in 2025 as well.