Role: Manager of Product Design
Year: 2023
Overview
As Manager of Product Design, the Product Design team I lead worked on a feature to offer configuration options that would allow internal teams to make customer-requested configuration adjustments to a website widget more quickly.
The Product Manager presented the main inefficiency for our internal teams: Any
edits to this widget had to be custom coded by the Design team
Allowing Customer Support reps to make minor configuration adjustments dramatically cut down on the amount of time needed to make these updates. This lead to a 72% reduction in Design team tickets related to this widget.
Business Problem
At the time the project kicked off, the Design team had to custom code any configuration change to the widget, no matter how small. Allowing Customer Support reps to make some config changes themselves would lessen the time it took for the edits to be made, as well as take pressure off the Design team.
Solving this issue supported the organizational goal of workflow efficiency for our support teams
My Role
I managed cross-functional collaboration for this project, aligning Product Design, Design, Product Management, Product Marketing, Training, and Support teams. I oversaw research, synthesis, design, and engineering handoff, provided onboarding strategy, and reported on post-launch feature performance.
The Project
Through interviews with Customer Support team members, analysis of Jira ticket patterns, and ongoing collaboration with the Product Manager, we identified a recurring operational bottleneck: Customer Support representatives had to submit tickets to the Design team in order to access data or make even minor configuration changes to a site’s widget.
This dependency created unnecessary handoffs, increased ticket volume for the Design team, and slowed response times for customer requests.
Based on these findings, the project team identified that enabling Customer Support to make approved configuration changes directly would address the root cause of the inefficiency by significantly reducing Design team involvement.
Successful delivery depended not just on shipping the feature, but on ensuring adoption across teams. I partnered with Product Management, Product Marketing, and Training to plan and execute onboarding ahead of launch.
This included:
- Defining a new workflow for Customer Support teams
- Coordinating cross-functional communication prior to rollout
- Delivering a Lessonly training module alongside the release so teams could quickly learn and adopt the new UI
This approach ensured teams were prepared to use the new capability immediately, maximizing the project’s impact.
Outcomes & Impact
In the month of October, the configuration screen was visited 149 times. Over the course of October, only 15 Design tickets were created relating to the widget – a 72% reduction over the prior month.