Data Axle

Data Axle helps companies of all sizes to be more effective by making our data actionable. We offer data-rich sales enablement tools that combine sales, marketing, and analytics to help small to medium sized businesses find, reach, acquire and retain new customers. We also provide API's that integrate with Salesforce and Dynamics to give clients fast, flexible, and dependable access to our data.

Challenges

  • Critical user experience shortcomings that significantly hindered customers from utilizing the product to its fullest potential, leading to a gap between the product's capabilities and user engagement.
  • Lack of intuitive guidance and clear starting points within the product interface resulted in user confusion on how to begin and proceed, complicating the user journey and reducing overall satisfaction.
  • Diagnosed sales stagnation as a symptom of the product's user experience issues, highlighting the direct impact of UX barriers on the company's revenue growth.
  • Legacy technology that restricted the ability to innovate and implement necessary improvements, making it difficult to address evolving user needs and stay competitive in the market.
  • Addressed inaccuracies in the data provided by the product, recognizing that unreliable data undermined user trust and the product's value proposition.
  • Operated within an environment lacking a dedicated design team, necessitating a self-driven approach to advocate for and implement UX improvements amidst resource constraints.
  • Navigated a predominantly sales-driven organizational culture, advocating for a balanced focus on enhancing the user experience alongside sales efforts to achieve long-term product success and customer satisfaction.

Role & Responsibilities

As the VP of Product Design my resposibilities included:

  • Build and scale design team 
  • Manage a team of 6 fully remote Product Designers
  • Collaborate with the product and engineering team on a shared vision for success
  • Establish a design process and foster design culture
  • Advocate and lead researching efforts (Qualitative Data)
  • Plan product roadmap with VP of Product Management and Engineering

IMMEDIATE IMPACT

Tool and file structure

Chose Figma as our primary design tool for collaboration purposes and to promote full tranparency into our process. I aligned the UX design process which consists of the five stages of Design Thinking (Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test) to the pages in a Figma project. Stakeholders and team members can see where we are in the design process and provide feedback to the design team before moving on to the next stage.

structure

UX Playsheet

I created and iterated on this UX playsheet over the last 2 years and brought it to Data Axle. This playsheet is a strategic document that contains the entirety of UX solutions that I expect my team to bring to the table. It describes the deliverables, the processes, and the workflows that define what we do every single day.

Design Process

How does the PM's strategic direction feed into design? How do our research findings guide future experiments and explorations? How do we collaborate with PM's, PO's, Stakeholders and Engineers? That is all documented here. We wanted to visually communicate to other teams what they should expect from the design team.

Resourses & templates

We remixed resources and created our own kit of UX tools to use in our projects. No more messy projects! This is a WIP but having a centralized set of reusale components for the team allows us to focus on the important areas in the design phase.

Collaboration

I've set the example by facilitating workshops and brainstorming sessions with many teams in different orgs. From value prop exercises for the marketing team to design thinking workshops with sales, engineers, and PM's.

omaha

Research Plan

The research proposal describes what we will investigate, why it’s important, and how we will do the research. Research is new to Data Axle, so we wanted to present a proposal to persuade stakeholders why this phase in our project is so worthwhile.

"Your team is the happiest group in the whole company"

-Robbie Adams
Business Systems & QA Analyst