Case study — Enterprise UX / platform integration
IBM Sales Platform
End-to-end enterprise UX design for IBM’s global sales platform — from designing the original internal tool to integrating Salesforce functionality, serving 20,000+ sales representatives worldwide and supporting over $1 billion in annual revenue.
The challenge
Built it, then made it better
This project had an unusually long arc. The same team of three Senior Designers that originally designed IBM’s internal global sales platform was later brought back to extend it — integrating Salesforce functionality directly into the tool we had built, to address gaps that had emerged as the sales organization grew and evolved. We knew the platform deeply because we had designed it from the ground up.
The three-designer team was distributed across geographies, each owning a defined set of screens and workflows end-to-end. My area of ownership was the core sales rep experience: the pipeline views, revenue dashboards, and deal status screens that sales reps worked out of every day. Rather than siloing our work, we collaborated continuously — sharing research, aligning on patterns, and pressure-testing decisions against all three regions before committing to any of them.
Sales Rep–Facing Screens & Workflows
I owned the design of the primary sales rep interface — pipeline management, revenue tracking, and deal status screens — from initial discovery through final developer handoff. This was the highest-traffic area of the platform: the screens reps lived in daily, where any friction had immediate impact on productivity and revenue visibility.
My approach
Deep platform knowledge as a design advantage
Leverage deep familiarity with the original platform — understanding existing mental models, workflows, and edge cases before introducing any new Salesforce functionality into the sales rep experience.
Design the pipeline, revenue, and status screens as a unified system — new Salesforce capabilities had to feel native to the existing IBM interface, not grafted on from outside.
Deliver complete, developer-ready assets for every screen owned — so nothing was lost in translation between design intent and implementation.
I partnered directly with C-level executives to define the product roadmap for the integration and directed cross-functional teams spanning design, development, and QA in a matrixed organization — keeping alignment across a complex stakeholder landscape while moving the design work forward.
The process
From discovery to global rollout
Needs assessment
Mapped workflow gaps in the pipeline, revenue, and status areas generating the most friction across global sales regions.
Journey mapping
Mapped end-to-end sales rep workflows across the pipeline and deal cycle — identifying exactly where Salesforce needed to plug in.
Design & specs
Hi-fi mockups, interactive prototypes, and complete interaction specs for all sales rep screens — published to a shared spec site for dev reference.
International testing
Structured user testing across multiple international markets on the sales rep workflows, iterating before global rollout.
Dev handoff
Production-ready assets via spec site — redlines, interaction annotations, motion docs, component definitions, and clickable prototypes.
UX deliverables — my area of ownership
What the work actually looked like
Pixel-precise, production-fidelity mockups for every sales rep screen — pipeline views, revenue dashboards, deal status interfaces — designed within IBM’s established visual language.
Fully clickable prototypes covering key sales rep flows — used for user testing, stakeholder reviews, and as a behavioral reference during development.
Component-level specs for every screen: spacing, typography, color, state variations, and edge cases — documented to a standard that needed no follow-up from developers.
Annotated interaction specs detailing animations, transitions, micro-interactions, and state changes — published alongside static assets so intent was never ambiguous.
All design assets, specs, and interaction documentation maintained in a dedicated spec site accessible to the full development and QA team throughout the build.
End-to-end documentation of key sales rep workflows, digital audience analysis, and structured international user testing — research artifacts that drove every design decision.
Figma
Sketch
Results
UX at the scale of a global sales force
Global sales representatives on the platform
Annual revenue enabled by the platform
User testing across international regions before rollout
The sales rep screens I designed — pipeline, revenue, status — were the highest-traffic area of the platform. Getting them right meant respecting what 20,000 reps already knew and trusted about the existing tool, while introducing Salesforce capabilities that closed real workflow gaps. Doing that at global scale, with zero tolerance for productivity disruption, is the kind of constraint that separates enterprise UX from product design.
What I learned
Extending a platform is harder than replacing one
Having designed the original platform gave us an advantage most integration projects don’t have: we didn’t need to reverse-engineer someone else’s decisions. We knew why things were built the way they were, where the friction points lived, and which mental models users had formed. That knowledge made the integration work faster and more precise — and it reinforced something worth remembering: the best person to extend a product is often the one who designed it in the first place.
Owning a defined set of screens end-to-end — from research through hi-fi mockup, prototype, spec, and handoff — sharpened how I think about design completeness. A design isn’t done when it looks right. It’s done when a developer can build it exactly as intended without a single follow-up conversation. That’s what the spec site was for, and it’s a standard I’ve carried into every project since.
Working across three geographies with two other senior designers — sharing research, debating patterns, and unifying findings into a single solution — also shaped how I think about collaborative design at scale. The best outcome wasn’t a compromise between regional preferences. It was a design rigorous enough to work everywhere because we’d pressure-tested it against everywhere.
