Having led the design of Cognism’s integrations, I already had a solid understanding of our users, their needs, and the integrations themselves. While I fully backed the company’s ambition for enterprise growth, I knew there were serious usability and reliability issues that needed to fixed before we could scale. To make the case, I led an initiative to uncover these issues and present a clear, data-backed caseto senior leadership. Research areas included:

1. UX Review – Analysed the existing user journey to highlight key pain points.
2. Support Ticket Review – Reviewed CRM-related tickets to identify the volume of complaints and recurring issues.
3. Internal Workshops – Worked with CS and TS teams to map user journeys and uncover pain points.
4. Onboarding Call Review – Watched Gong recordings to gain insights into user experiences.
5. Integration Errors – Worked with Data and Engineering to quantify error occurrences and diagnose root causes.
6. NPS Review – Compared NPS scores of enterprise users with and without an integration.

The research revealed a serious problem, with poor design at the heart of it. The usability of our CRM integrations was so poor that users were unable to set them up on their own. As a result, the Technical Support team was burdened with managing and setting up integrations for customers. To make matters worse, code-related errors were causing integrations to fail, which led to a surge in support tickets and a drop in NPS scores.

In summary, the design flaws were creating a ripple effect, and if left unaddressed, these issues would only worsen as the business scaled.

After presenting the problem to management and senior leadership, significant investment was made in the team responsible for our integrations. Working closely with my counterparts in Product and Engineering, I led an initiative to achieve several key goals:

1. Design a self-serve setup process that users could complete in under 60 minutes.
2. Develop a scalable design that could be applied to other CRM integrations.
3. Address the underlying technical issues causing failures.
4. Improve the overall user experience.
5. Establish a plan for ongoing, measurable improvements.

The outcomes of this project were great. While research is often overlooked, this project really highlighted its importance. It not only uncovered a critical issue but also provided key benchmarks against which the solution could be measured. Design was both the problem and the solution, as we saw improvements across nearly every metric.