Pivot Edge
Internal sales-ops app that lifted pipeline velocity 10× for an enterprise category team.
Before a single pixel.
Discovery, framing, structure and validation — the work that decided what the screens had to be.
- 01Discover
Ride along with the RMs
Two weeks shadowing relationship managers across three regions, timing every switch between CRM, WhatsApp and spreadsheets.
Contextual inquiryDay-in-the-life timelinesTool-switch audit - 02Define
Name the real bottleneck
Mapped the enquiry-to-order journey and found the delay wasn't decision-making — it was waiting on data that lived in someone else's inbox.
Journey mapPain-point matrixProblem statement - 03Structure
One thread per enquiry
Modelled a single deal-state object with engineering so every screen reads the same truth, then wrote the IA around that thread.
State modelInformation architectureContent priority - 04Ideate
Sketch the worklist
Low-fidelity flows for queue, share and error states — tested on paper with RMs before a single component was styled.
Crazy 8sFlow diagramsPaper prototypes - 05Validate
Weekly think-alouds
Clickable prototypes tested every Friday; the share module alone went through four rounds before the margin field earned its place.
Usability testingTask success metricsIteration log
Straight from the source.
Live captures of the shipped product and the design files behind it.
Every enquiry, one thread.
12 screens across enquiry → response → order, walked through as an RM and Category Manager would actually meet them.
The pipeline, at a glance.
Open and closed enquiries live in one list, each card carrying the buyer, the enquiry ID, the value and the outcome. Repeat business is the norm in steel, so cloning a won enquiry is a first-class action — not a copy-paste ritual across three tools.
Three steps to a live enquiry.
Creating an enquiry used to mean a spreadsheet, a credit check over the phone and a WhatsApp thread. The flow compresses it into three signposted steps — buyer, products, terms — with credit limit surfaced at every point where it changes a decision.
The handoff.
An RM can't price alone. Assignment is modelled as an explicit, reversible handoff to a category manager — with a comment field that carries the negotiating context, so the CM never opens a cold enquiry.
The queue.
An RM opens to a single worklist — every enquiry stamped with its stage, its margin, and who's holding the ball next. Nothing needs a second screen to explain itself.
The exchange.
Buyer POs still travel as PDFs and WhatsApp messages. Instead of fighting that, Pivot Edge builds it in — export as PDF, image, or Excel, send it wherever the buyer actually reads it, and thread the back-and-forth alongside.
When the data isn't ready.
Missing contact details fail a share every time. Rather than a generic error, the module names the exact field and points back to the fix.
The brief.
Sales ops teams were stitching pipeline data together across four systems and a forest of spreadsheets. Pivot Edge replaced that with a single opinionated cockpit — one that knows what the next best action is and surfaces it before anyone has to ask.
The team was losing hours every day to data reconciliation, not selling. Reps couldn't see deal health without exporting CSVs, and managers were flying blind on forecast risk. The brief: design a workspace that thinks ahead — and ships in a quarter.
Talking to real users.
- ✦Contextual shadowing
- ✦Diary studies
- ✦Jobs-to-be-done interviews
- ✦Usability testing
7 sales reps · 3 regional managers · 2 ops leads
6 weeks discovery + weekly validation cycles
"I spend more time reconciling CRM than talking to buyers."
"I need to know which deals to save this week — not last quarter's report."
How the study actually ran — four frames from field to evidence.
A day on the floor
Shadowed reps from first enquiry to end-of-day handover, timing every context switch.
What breaks trust
Interviews surfaced the habit of re-checking CRM fields by hand before every call.
One deal state
Mapped the deal lifecycle with engineering so screens and data told the same story.
Weekly think-alouds
Each module was tested live; anything that needed explaining got redesigned.
- Insight 01
Data trust is broken
Reps double-check every CRM field manually. If the workspace can't be trusted, it will be worked around.
- Insight 02
Managers scan, reps focus
Two mental models in one product — glance vs deep-dive — needed distinct surfaces.
- Insight 03
Next-best-action beats dashboards
Reps wanted a queue, not analytics. We turned insights into recommended moves.
How it came together.
- 01
Shadowed seven reps across three regions to map the real shape of a sales day.
- 02
Co-designed a deal-state model with engineering so the UI mirrored a single source of truth.
- 03
Built a token-driven component library that scaled to 40+ screens without redesign churn.
- 04
Validated each module with weekly think-alouds — every flow earned its place.