Organizational Management Softwar
COMPANY
SwiftConnect
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
YEAR
2023
Problem
The onboarding and management of new customers are causing significant delays and pressure on the team. Our internal tool, ConfigCloud, lacks features that allow Implementation Engineers and Customer Success Managers to handle these tasks independently. Currently, these processes rely on queries and backend development, which only a few engineers can perform, creating a bottleneck.
Team & timeline
Myself, Product Manager, 4 Engineers, 1 QA / 3 months
Background
SwiftConnect enables Enterprises and Landlords to unify their building access systems into a single ecosystem. This requires integrating various systems and software, a complex process that demands significant manpower from our team.
Problem statement
Understand our users and their pain points.
User frustrations
Implementation Engineers and Customer Success Managers rely on a small group of engineers to perform their tasks, causing frequent delays. Engineering resources are constantly diverted to unblock these tasks, slowing progress. Onboarding new clients requires hours or even days of coding, pulling engineers away from their core projects.
The business problem
Delays in onboarding prevent clients from getting started quickly, as an entire team depends on core engineers to complete their tasks. Redirecting engineering resources to unblock the CX team further slows progress on other projects.
Research
We collaborated with the Senior Product Manager to conduct user interviews with CX team members, focusing on Customer Success Managers, Implementation Engineers, and two Senior Backend Engineers frequently assigned these tasks.
Interviewing CX Team
Our interviews with the CX team revealed that a visual representation of a customer's organization and portfolio is crucial for understanding integrations and dependencies. Currently, the app only displays a flat list. To bridge this gap, the team manually creates diagrams in LucidChart to map out organizations and share them with engineers to complete their tasks.
Interviewing Engineers
Interviews with Engineers revealed why this task is time-consuming and highlighted the system’s complexity. We discovered numerous undocumented parent/child rules, which lack validation and guardrails. Relying on 3-4 different systems for a single task increases the risk of errors, often leading to delays or future issues.
Early Ideation
Our interviews helped refine our focus and identify key areas for improvement.
Guardrails and Validation
Discussions with Engineering highlighted the risk of errors due to the absence of validation and guardrails. While customer setups vary, the relationships between parent and child entities follow consistent rules, making structured validation essential.
Proof of concept
Our plan was to design a user-friendly flow diagram tool, allowing the CX team to create organizations and visually see everything. When pitching this idea to the Engineers, a concern was that a large organization with 20+ buildings and integrations might cause the tool to be slow or crash. To validate the concern, I created a simple version of what we thought the tool can look and feel like. We then created a proof of concept for our engineers to test if the tool would have any issues. We also asked the backend team to create 3 validation rules to test with the tool. The tool was a success, causing no delays or friction for the user. The validation steps worked as intended.
Getting feedback
With Engineering’s support, we tested the proof of concept with the CX team to gather their feedback. They confirmed that this solution met their needs and believed it would effectively remove existing roadblocks.
Solution
A timeless design, offering users a rich set of features within an intuitive, well-organized layout. By grouping content logically, we ensure that users can perform their tasks with this powerful tools without feeling overwhelmed, enhancing both efficiency and the overall user experience.
Organization View
Entity Diagram Tab: A visual and interactive representation of the organization's structure, offering a clear overview of entities and their relationships.
Draft Section: A list of ongoing additions and modifications being made to the organization by the CX team, providing visibility into the current changes.
Editing and Creating
Integration specialists can create and edit entities for their customers organization with a simple click!
Setting up guardrails
Defining rules to prevent errors on validation and helping the user know they are on the right track.
Defining and editing entities
Whether editing an existing entity, or creating a new one, each entity has a set of requirements to help define its functionality.
Collaboration
Users can collaborate and support the process by leaving comments in the comment section.
Live feedback
The validation step ensures users are on track by notifying them of any errors, allowing for corrections before proceeding.
Once the validation is error-free, users can publish their draft. Upon approval, the draft is merged into the customer’s existing structure, becoming the new source of truth.
Results
3-4hrs
Average client set up
6x
Onboarding a month
98%
Less errors published