Bringing a product from 0 to 1
Summary
Spover is a venture-backed technology startup focused on making it easier to administer Revenue Operations (RevOps) processes and gather data-driven insights for B2B SaaS companies.
Role
Product Designer
Date
December 2022 - current
I joined Spover in December 2022 as their first and only designer. I designed all the initial versions of the platform and successfully launched the MVP to their first few customers.
PROBLEM
Sales insights: a big problem for small companies
Business data and logic are siloed in multiple SaaS and internal tools— because of this, Sales Reps and Operators can’t easily access and maintain their own data, processes, and tools. Without these, companies cannot get an accurate read on the efficacy of their sales strategy.
SOLUTION
From vision to product
The vision for Spover’s V1 is to provide Salesforce CRM initialization with industry best practices for B2B SaaS (data models, opportunity stages, validation rules, integrations) and a centralized no-code/low-code logic layer that allows Operators to create and maintain RevOps logic and data.
Or for the people not living and breathing sales, Spover wants to empower early-stage companies with three vital tools—centralized access to their sales and marketing data, clear and traceable analysis of that data, and simple tools to rethink and communicate their overall sales strategy. What giant corporations do with massive, dedicated go-to-market (GTM) teams, a smaller company can do with Spover.
As the only product designer in a small team of 4, I utilized my visual, interaction, and research skills to lead the team in bringing this solution to reality. I then focused my attention on constantly iterating those initial designs into a fully-fledged product.
Spover’s drag-and-drop feature for metrics dashboard organization
RESEARCH
Hit the ground running by leading with design
Focused the team around solving the right problems
Dug for the root cause
Feedback loop of manually getting to business metric is long and error-prone
Poorly set-up processes lead to complex queries and manual cleanup work
Without an end goal in mind to work toward (metrics), it’s hard to prioritize all the systems’ work and justify the effort
Identified the ideal customer: RevOps at smaller companies
I led meetings, brainstorming, and product jam exercises at our off-sites to achieve alignment between the entire team. When I joined the team, there was no clarity of thought. Solutions and features were introduced and discarded based on abstract feelings, not on the common user experience.
Using my voice as a designer, I was able to focus the team on true user frustrations and needs. This simple act of realigning conversation around a shared problem was vital in identifying the features of the product that best served our ideal customer. Our off-sites became more productive and we were able to align on the needs of our MVP.
I also engaged with dozens of SaaS founders and operators and led product ideation meetings with our Advisors and Design Partners. By synthesizing all of these insights, we were able to determine the root causes of many recurring issues:
Lack of transparency and collaboration between silos of expertise
The main barrier is between Systems Admin (those setting up data collection) and RevOps (those trying to use that data)
Bad data
Salesforce and other systems, while able to gather data, do not verify the accuracy or utility of that data
Without a holistic view of the process from start to finish, RevOps is forced to solve immediate problems that may have negative downstream effects
In many cases, this results in a lot of guesswork
Our ICP is a 1-3 person RevOps team at a small, but quickly growing company. They need to focus on GTM efficiency and designing methods to hit repeatable revenue targets that get larger and larger. Their goal is to align GTM teams (Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service) toward predictable revenue outcomes. However, they do not have the expertise or resources to build the data stack or team so their ability to achieve this goal is limited.
tl;dr The sales process is long and involves many teams. RevOps need a simple and clean way to provide sales insights to stakeholders, especially at smaller companies
Sketches and ideation for the user problem analysis solution
We determined Spover should allow users to
Make sure their Salesforce systems are set up in a way in which the necessary data is being gathered
Prevent and diagnose when problems arise through analysis of their metrics
Early wireframe explorations of the opportunity stage view
Whiteboard sketches for the opportunity stage visualization
Easily pull metrics out of the data they are gathering in order to show other people in their org
Crazy 8 ideation exercise of the opportunity stage view
FEATURES
What does Spover do?
Metrics: Easy setup, easy iteration
High-fidelity metrics setup flow
Insights: Now, when you need them
One of RevOps’ biggest challenges at a small company is being able to report metrics to various stakeholders that accurately capture how well their company’s GTM function is performing. Even at big public companies like Amplitude, creating “reporting decks” takes a lot of manual effort. Finding and synthesizing necessary data can be a time-consuming challenge, and often, the necessary metrics are different depending on who is asking (C-suite executive, revenue leader, etc). Smaller companies lack the capacity and teams required to create these decks. But setting up systems to gather and monitor metrics is a pivotal task. Many early RevOps hires at scaling companies are fired or leveled due to failing at setting up these metrics.
Spover makes it easy for RevOps to set up metrics. Further, a huge value proposition is that these metrics are easy for RevOps to self-service. Our goal is to motivate them to make changes in their process and GTM systems to make this data more accurate and usable.
Most B2B SaaS organizations operate on a quarterly period of performance with metrics typically reported every three months. It can be useful to look back at a three-month period and evaluate how things went, but there’s one big problem with this approach: It’s too late to fix anything that was going wrong within that quarter.
Our hypothesis is that if RevOps can track the current quarter’s performance with increased granularity (day-over-day and eventually minute-by-minute), they will be able to take action to improve revenue now. Instead of waiting months for a report, business leaders can react to metrics in real-time.
At a growing company, one bad quarter can be the difference between success and failure. Spover’s 90-day view feature represents performance within the current quarter and spurs action to fix and improve what is occurring today before it is too late. Real-time insights will allow GTM teams to act with the nimbleness and flexibility that expanding business depends upon.
High-fidelity metrics setup flow
Brand guidelines
The visual directions I explored had a large impact on the final creative direction. My first design accomplishment when I joined was defining the logo, color, typography, art direction, illustration, voice and tone.
