An enterprise services-estimation tool had become so painful that users abandoned it for offline spreadsheets — returning only at the very end to submit. I led an end-to-end UX discovery that reframed the problem for leadership and redirected the roadmap toward fixing core workflow integrity.
The estimation platform sat at the heart of a sales-to-delivery process for a global enterprise-software company. It was meant to speed estimation, improve accuracy, and protect margin — but the experience had degraded to the point where users routed around it entirely.
Instead of jumping straight into user interviews, I designed a multi-layered discovery that first built a shared organizational baseline — a single definition of the users, a structured body of evidence, and a usability baseline — before involving end users. That sequencing is what let the findings land with leadership later.
The experience was so compromised that users completed estimates offline in spreadsheets and logged in only at the end to submit.
Internal product teams, the external platform vendor, and engineering operated in silos with little shared accountability.
The organization relied on scattered, anecdotal complaints rather than structured, prioritized user signal.
There was no single, agreed definition of who the users actually were or what their core workflows required.
The system wasn't just hard to use. It had lost the argument — people had already decided the spreadsheet was safer.
Rather than a single research method, I ran three layers that reinforced one another — establishing a baseline, mining what already existed, and then validating with real users across the globe.
Documented pain points, scored by severity and tagged by type to guide prioritization.
All validated findings were consolidated into one centralized, cross-functional accountability matrix. It became the foundational backlog for the program, dictating immediate "quick wins" and scoping the longer-term redesign.
Interface, navigation, and interaction issues.
Workflow order and business-rule gaps.
Inputs and rules that compromised trust in the data.
Every finding was assigned explicit technical ownership across the partner ecosystem:
Out-of-the-box — configurable in the platform.
Net-new development.
Enablement & training.
The hardest part wasn't finding the problems — it was building shared accountability for them. The real unlock was sequencing: establishing one agreed definition of the user and one prioritized, jointly-owned backlog meant that by the time leadership saw the findings, there was nothing left to argue about — only decisions to fund.
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