Enterprise CRM Platform

UX vision and end-to-end experience design for a Salesforce-based enterprise CRM serving 750+ client service teams at McKinsey & Company. As Principal Product Designer, defined the interaction patterns, information architecture, and design system that shapes how the firm manages client relationships at scale. The work spanned deep stakeholder research (1:1 interviews with 20+ Partners and Senior Partners, plus ongoing feedback from 128 colleagues), journey mapping, adoption barrier analysis, and iterative design across a multi-year engagement.

Client service teams across the firm lacked a unified, intuitive system for managing client relationships, tracking engagement history, and coordinating across teams — leading to fragmented workflows and missed opportunities. As one Partner put it: "The biggest pain point is getting a single source of truth on client executives and past client works."

The existing tools were built for data entry rather than relationship intelligence — forcing consultants to work around the system rather than with it. Partners managed critical client data through ad hoc methods: decade-old spreadsheets, Apple Notes, Microsoft Planner, and personal memory. As one Partner described: "Everyone has figured out their own methods for individual relationship management, but there is not an easy, readily-available way to understand cross-client collaboration without having to initiate a call or email." No standardization or consistency existed across the firm.

The firm's partnership culture created unique adoption challenges beyond typical enterprise software. Pipeline and opportunity tracking conceptually clashed with the firm's anti-sales ethos. Partners resisted tools that felt like surveillance or scorekeeping.

Conducted 1:1 interviews with 20 Partners and Senior Partners to understand how they form, progress, and strengthen client relationships — and what role technology can play. Research revealed that relationship management is a deeply personal endeavor: Partners keep track of college basketball teams because clients are fans, host dinners at home to facilitate introductions, and text clients to reduce friction. The tool had to respect this personal nature.

Mapped the complete Client Activation journey end-to-end: from identifying activation targets and understanding institution intelligence, through relationship strengthening and personalized campaigns, to engagement delivery and post-project reflection. Identified pain points at every stage — manual data gathering from 20+ sources, lack of visibility into pipeline progress, overwhelming internal communications, and missing the right moments to engage clients.

Mapped the Event journey lifecycle — before, during, and after — documenting how the platform transforms executive identification, targeted outreach, real-time prep with Contact 360 intelligence, and post-event follow-through. Each stage contrasted the current manual process against the platform-enabled future state.

Defined two parallel stakeholder lenses: what the tool must deliver for Partners (1:1 relationship building, personalized 2-4-8 client development funnels, institutional collaboration) and what it must deliver for Practices (pipeline management, global client view, cross-cell opportunity analysis). These requirements shaped the information architecture and feature prioritization.

Relationship-centric dashboard surfacing key client insights, upcoming touchpoints, and team activity — replacing the traditional record-based view with an intelligence-first approach. AI-powered nudges proactively recognize external triggers (executive transitions, news, content engagement) and recommend next best actions with suggested timing and topics.

Contact 360 and Institution 360 profiles consolidating executive background, relationship mapping, content engagement, news triggers, and firm capabilities into a single actionable view — eliminating the need to manually piece together information from scattered sources. Designed to feel like augmented memory, not surveillance: "I wish I had a simple tool to augment my memory — what personal information did they tell me last time? What did I say I would follow up on?"

Custom notification and nudging system addressing Partners' universal desire for tiered reminders — sort clients into tiers, set cadence-based check-ins, receive activity-based prompts. Three notification types emerged from research: pre-meeting personal/work context, follow-through reminders for promised actions, and cadence-based outreach prompts.

Campaign management with automated executive list generation, response tracking across waves, and effectiveness analysis — transforming the process from generic mass invites to tailored, always-on engagement sequences. Scalable design system built on Salesforce's Lightning platform, establishing reusable patterns for consistent experience across modules while allowing team-level customization.

Adopted by 750+ client service teams across McKinsey's global offices — becoming the firm's central platform for client relationship management.

Teams onboarded to the platform saw a 30%+ increase in pipeline activity compared to their pre-platform baseline.

Established product principles and scalable design system that continue to guide the platform's evolution as new capabilities are added.