ScopeStack | A Revolution in Services CPQ
About My Role
My time at ScopeStack was the UX Researcher's dream. The clients were crazy about the product and always willing to give feedback. Leadership valued the research and utilized the output of that research. Both rare traits in the product design world.
I met ScopeStack’s CTO at a local dog park. As it turns out, I had known their family for over a decade. We instantly connected over my having attended the same high school as his children. He shared about his fledgling start-up seeking to serve the I.T. Services vertical.
As of January 2022, precious few tools (none of them good) existed allowing I.T. service providers to configure, price, or quote (CPQ) their services. Many of these providers were spending hours in Excel to quote even the simplest of projects.
ScopeStack hired me to help streamline their process, even more. The relationship began with interviews of current customers that led to a period of generative research, the results of which would leave even the most seasoned UX Researcher green with envy. Read on and peruse our findings.
Job Title
Product Design Consultant
Tools Used
Pen and Paper, Miro, Figma, Zeplin
Big Win(s)
Eliminated the need for complex Excel spreadsheets as a services scoping tool.
Reduced time to scope delivery from days to minutes, in ~90% of cases.
Phase 1: Discovery, Interviews, and Findings
During the research process, the most important task at had was to understand the target customer. In I.T. service provider organizations, this target customer as known as the Pre-Sales Engineer.
Their task is to collaborate with the Sales Executive to assemble client requirements, generate a scoping document, seek stakeholder approval, and, finally, obtain a signed contract. Hence, the majority of my research was focused on this individual, their needs, pain points, and opportunities for quality-of-life improvements.
Phase 2: Personas and Customer Journey Map
Once the product and user were understood, I found it needful to share more in-depth discovery in the form of 2 personas and a user flow. These research artifacts were needful to elevate empathy and further understand our customer’s day-to-day life, within ScopeStack and within their own organizational structures.
Phase 3: Action Items and Prioritized Backlog
At this point, both I and my stakeholders gleaned the information required to synthesize a go-forward plan. This plan included tackling major user needs like navigation, guidance, services, search/sort/filter, and document delivery. These were prioritized into a backlog along with the effort required and the potential feature impact.
Phase 4: A New Way to Scope
ScopeStack founder, Jon, already envisioned a new way to scope through a tool called Surveys. Our research informed every step of the Survey creation process. I.T. services could would design the layout for a questionnaire tailored to a typical customer need; e.g. a wireless network install. Service providers would then apply logic to the inputs of this questionnaire. This logic drove instantaneous service recommendations.
T questionnaire would then be sent to the customer who would complete the form according to the needs of their project requirements. This completed questionnaire would, then, automatically calculate the services required allowing services to be recommended automatically and the scope document to be generated with almost no Pre-Sales input.
