Highlight

I led the design of a self-service product builder that addressed ecosystem sales challenges following few company acquisition, helping create stronger synergy across our product portfolio.

Collaborating closely with researchers, sales, and marketing teams, I shaped the marketing narrative and delivered an MVP that earned executive buy-in from both sales and marketing leadership, who recognized its high ROI potential for supporting cross-product integration.

The K–12 School Ecosystem Builder launched in October 2024 with strong customer engagement and is now serving as the blueprint for versions tailored to other industries.

Background

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 design initiative set out to answer one key question:

How might we foster integration and empower our sales teams to bring the ecosystem story to life for customers?

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 services 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

I created this solution builder tool that allows customers to build their own security packages by defining their industry and needs in an interactive and visual way. Based on the recommended packages, the tool also automatically sends requests to the relevant sales teams so they can quickly start collaborating on a demo.

MVP Overview

• Streamlines the pre 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.

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.

Approach

This project's initial objective was to develop a solution 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 took on this project, I started by diving into MSI’s ecosystem through internal documentation and stakeholder interviews. Conversations with sales reps and customers quickly revealed two major barriers to adoption:

Sales process challenges

Sales reps struggled to communicate the value of the integrated ecosystem. Teams were still working in silos, and coordinating cross-product demos required significant extra effort—so collaboration rarely happened.

Misaligned value proposition

Customers, especially schools, couldn’t clearly see how our solutions addressed their real-world security needs. The messaging felt too abstract and failed to connect with their everyday challenges.

The key insight from this stage was that improving the sales process would yield high ROI—driving ecosystem adoption by enabling cross-team collaboration and laying the foundation for deeper product integration.

2/5 Bridging Safety Needs to Product Solutions

After identifying a gap between how customers perceived the ecosystem’s value and their real-world use cases, I focused on bridging that disconnect. I started by summarizing key customer needs and mapping out how each safety need aligned with different product combinations—filling the gap left by the existing marketing story.

One major challenge was translating complex product relationships into intuitive, actionable recommendations.

To solve this, I partnered with the marketing team to develop a framework that linked specific safety needs to product categories. This became the foundation for a logic system that could intelligently suggest solutions based on customer goals.

3/5 Explore and Validate the Solution

To explore potential directions, I led several brainstorming sessions with our design team and key stakeholders. Together, we aligned on the concept of an interactive Solution Builder—a tool that would guide users through our ecosystem’s capabilities by connecting specific products to real safety needs.

To validate this direction, I conducted additional research, drawing from lessons learned in other complex B2B tools:

Learning from B2B Best Practices

• Having previously researched automation tools, I revisited platforms like UiPath to understand how they addressed similar challenges. Their interactive exploration tools allowed customers to discover automation benefits through scenario-based guidance tailored to their needs.

Contextual Education

The most effective tools translated complex technical capabilities into business outcomes, using real-world examples that aligned with customer priorities.

4/5 Create The MVP

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 Design The MVP

When building the first MVP, my focus was on demonstrating the recommendation framework—specifically the relationships between customer needs, real-world use cases, and relevant products. Since the core goal was to connect users with our value proposition through interaction and visualization, I paid close attention to the micro-level experience:

Micro Interactions

• I designed progressive layouts that began with user safety concerns, then gradually introduced matching product solutions to maintain clarity and engagement.

Solution Recommendations

I showcased how the logic framework could efficiently suggest relevant product combinations and ecosystem integrations.

Integration Exploration

I designed an AI-powered feature that allows customers to explore how different products integrate by selecting them and seeing how they work together in real-world scenarios.

Visual Scenario Development

I partnered with another designer to create illustrated narratives that placed safety challenges in relatable, real-world contexts.

These design decisions helped communicate the ecosystem’s value clearly and compellingly—ultimately securing executive support for full development.

5/5 Hand Over to Development

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

Usage Data Requirements

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.