A Focus on Growth
I was leading the growth design team within Outshift, Cisco's internal incubation organization. Motific, an early enterprise GenAI chatbot platform, started gaining internal traction, so my team was brought in to answer a critical question: are the right users finding value, and fast enough to convert?
To start, I ran through the existing experience myself and noted the broken paths, plot holes and inconsistencies and sketched the full journey end-to-end. I separated each step into functional groups from marketing to the auth team to product and the sandbox dev team. Since I was chatting with marketing and I had a UX writer on my team, I also ended up writing up rough notes on an email drip campaign.
Mapping the User's Path.
Before designing anything, I needed a shared picture of how someone moved through the product. I built a refined flow showing each stage of the user's journey across the distinct experiences they'd touch. This wasn't a design artifact — it was an alignment tool. Getting every stakeholder to agree on the shape of the journey was the prerequisite for everything else.
Aligning Across Teams
I moved into Miro to build a more detailed map showing the different paths, states, and handoffs between teams. This became a live working artifact — used in cross-functional sessions to surface gaps, assign ownership, and move quickly without waiting for formal documentation. The whiteboard format was intentional: it let people edit in the room rather than react to something finished.
Prototyping to Force Decisions
Flow diagrams get you structural alignment. Prototypes force behavioral ones. I built Figma screens and organized them by functional group — marketing, auth, sandbox, trial — so each team could see exactly what they owned and how it connected. The layouts surfaced questions that diagrams couldn't: what happens when someone skips a step, who owns an edge state, where the experience breaks across handoffs.
Three Interventions, One Home Screen.
The research pointed to three targeted additions to the Motific home screen rather than a full redesign. A Free Trial banner lowered the commitment bar. A Sandbox test drive let users explore without any configuration required. A "Choose Your Own Adventure" path selector directed different user types toward the right experience from the start. Each one addressed a specific research finding about where and why users were dropping off.
Discovery to understand the user. Experiments to refine the experience.
I directed a two-week research sprint (12 user interviews, synthesis in Dovetail, and integration with agency-led secondary research) to sharpen our picture of who this product was actually for, and how enterprise buyers make decisions, specifically in the AI space.
With that foundation, I led my team to redesign the first-time experience, targeting the drop-off that was happening before users ever reached setup. We launched two concurrent experiments: a 30-day free trial and a sandbox mode, a pre-loaded demo environment with guided tasks that let users explore without any configuration required.
The Finding That Changed the Strategy.
The persona analysis — conducted with an external design agency and our internal researcher — combined primary research (direct user interviews) and secondary research (market data and published sources). The conclusion was uncomfortable: we had been designing for the wrong user. The persona we were optimizing for was not the one who held purchasing power. That finding reframed the entire growth strategy and led directly to the recommendation to stop further investment until the product could be repositioned around the right buyer.