My Most Memorable Moment as a Product Designer Thus Far

A simple moment that captured the impact of Design

I joined SalesforceIQ (previously named RelateIQ) as a Product Designer just over two years ago. I’ve been spending some time reflecting on my experience here so far, and what stands out to me the most about these past two years. In just a short amount of time I’ve worked on the most challenging UX problems of my career, met many wonderful co-workers who I consider to be my friends, and experienced the Silicon Valley startup world followed by our acquisition by Salesforce. To be fair, there have also been a decent number of challenges and curve balls thrown at me along the way. But what stands out to me the most is a very specific incident that really highlights why I do what I do and why I choose to work at SalesforceIQ.

Let me start by giving some context behind that story. One of the things that drew me to the company and that keeps me there today are our values of People, Moments, Ideas, and Results. While these values may seem basic or perhaps overly generic, in practice they run deep in our company culture. Everything we do and how the company is run ties back to those values.

A candidate recently asked me during an interview what I’m most proud of during my time at SalesforceIQ, which made me think of a story that highlights our values so well. Our team spent many months redesigning the navigation for our core web product. This is a fairly common project that almost all UX professionals face at one point or another. But this particular effort ended up being more complex than it seemed on the surface. The effort was a truely collaborative one across many different People in the organization. We each brought our unique perspective, skills, and Ideas to the table. It took a lot of research, iteration, and creativity to get to a Result that was much more efficient, usable, and customized to our users’ needs. The data showed us that we had made a significant difference in our users’ experience.

But it was a specific Moment that really highlighted to me the impact this effort had on our customers. Every week, we invite guests to join us at our company Demos presentation to see what the team has been working on. At Demos shortly following the launch of our redesigned navigation, one of those guests happened to be one of our customers. She had heard that I had contributed to the navigation redesign effort and wanted to speak with me. I always welcome direct customer feedback and assumed she wanted to pass along some suggestions for how to improve it, or maybe complain about something that we did poorly. However, instead she surprised me by saying (paraphrased, since this happened a while ago now):

“The new navigation has made my life so much easier. I can get to where I need to go so much more quickly. It’s made a huge impact on my ability to do my job. Thank you.”

She didn’t have any complaints, she just wanted to say thank you. Something as relatively simple as a new navigation system in our product had a lasting impact on her and made her better at her job. While I’ve received positive feedback from users before, this was the first time I’ve had someone directly thank me for the impact I had on them. And it certainly wasn’t just me that made that possible— it was the team effort from the People that worked on all aspects of that project that made it successful. That Moment highlighted to me the importance of designing enterprise software. These are products that people live in all day long and need to use to succeed in their jobs. Something small can have a big impact on their lives, and we have a responsibility to make that impact a positive one. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes about UX:

What I get to do is take that insight into how people think and how people behave and turn it into something, a product or a service, that is going to make their lives better. It’s going to improve their lives in some way that they may not even be able to articulate. To be able to make some small part of their experience better, and all of those little experiences add up to the sum of somebody’s life… the ability to touch people in that way is really profound. - Jesse James Garrett

And what, really, is more rewarding to a designer than that?

If you’re interested in learning more about the navigation redesign project, I’ve written about it in depth on my portfolio.