TL;DR
Shaped UX strategy for Salesforce Essentials, the SMB entry point into the Salesforce ecosystem. Decided which Einstein AI capabilities belonged in front of a five-person team and which did not, then rebuilt onboarding as a product instead of a stack of tooltips. Helped move Essentials toward a standalone business unit for teams of ten or fewer.
Role: Senior Product Designer, SMB and Salesforce Essentials, Salesforce. 2017-04 to 2020-06.
Context and mandate
Salesforce had the most powerful CRM on the market and the steepest learning curve to match. SMB customers wanted the value without the implementation cost. Essentials was the bet that there was a way in: a focused product for teams of ten or fewer that still preserved a growth path into the broader ecosystem.
The real problem was not the interface. It was the packaging. SMB customers did not need a smaller Salesforce. They needed a different shape of Salesforce, framed around the few jobs they actually had to get done on day one.
I shaped UX strategy across product framing, packaging, onboarding, and the right level of AI to put in front of someone setting up a CRM for the first time. I worked across design, research, marketing, sales, product, and engineering on the SMB surface, so the work sat as much in packaging decisions and AI bundling conversations as in the screens.
Key decisions
Pick which Einstein features belonged in Essentials, not which ones were ready. Engineering kept asking which AI capabilities were buildable. Design kept asking which ones actually helped a five-person team make better decisions faster. Different question. We kept the bets that earned their place in a real workflow: automatic data capture, email parsing, smart suggestions. We held back more sophisticated predictive scoring that asked too much of SMB mental models.
Treat the adoption journey as a product, not a tooltip tour. SMB onboarding at Salesforce had drifted into per-feature modals. I rebuilt onboarding as a product with its own users, its own success states, its own design problem. Then I co-led the work to align learning experiences across the Salesforce ecosystem around that frame.
Selected SMB surfaces
Packaging by sequence, not by feature.
- 01 / 04Onboarding intent
What do you want to do? Six illustrated tiles (Support, Sales, Fundraising, Marketing, Project Management, HR) replace a feature checklist. The shape of the product reorganizes around the answer. - 02 / 04Trailhead in-context
Learning lives inside the app, not next to it. Trailhead modules surface against the workflows they are about to enable. - 03 / 04Conversational tasks
A task list with an assignee popover and a related-contacts rail. The CRM primitives stay first-class, the chrome gets out of the way. - 04 / 04Omnichannel messages
Customer conversations with an Einstein-suggested cross-sell as a side panel. The recommendation is a suggestion, not a forced step.
Outcomes
- Essentials grew into a standalone business unit for SMB customers.
- The Einstein capabilities we kept inside Essentials shaped how the company thought about AI for SMB later.
- Adoption and learning work shifted from fragmented per-feature tutorials into coherent cross-product journeys.
- The cross-company work produced durable process change, not a one-time deliverable.
"He's been a trusted colleague through the creation, iteration, and development of Salesforce Essentials. Without his visionary work driving the product forward, the user wouldn't have the tailored onboarding and in-app experience they have today."
Source: LinkedIn recommendation.
One-line reflection
Simplifying an enterprise product is not a UI exercise. It is a product strategy exercise that lives in packaging, sequencing, and the few jobs a customer actually needs done in the first hour. Saying "this capability is real, and it is not right for this user at this moment" is harder than it sounds inside a company that wants to ship everything.