Vision & Execution
Salesforce NEXT
As co-founder and design lead of Salesforce Essentials, I championed NEXT—a North Star initiative built on a modern React front-end stack. NEXT served as a proof of concept for AI-driven, conversational CRM workflows and established UX patterns that have since become foundational across Salesforce products.
Challenge & Goal
0 to 1 Build: Launch a lightweight CRM tailored for small and midsize businesses.
Modernization: Legacy Sales and Service Clouds were siloed, cumbersome, and slow to iterate.
Unified Experience: Small-business users required a seamless flow that blended sales, service, and light project management without context-switching.
Executive Alignment: Secure buy-in from key stakeholders—Brett Taylor (Co-CEO) and Justin (Chief Design Officer)—to validate a future-facing UI vision.
Objective: Deliver Essentials to market and use NEXT to guide the next generation of CRM experiences.
Approach & Leadership
North Star Vision: Defined NEXT’s product narrative, blending strategic objectives, user needs, and design principles to win endorsement from Brett and Justin.
Iterative Prototyping: Ran hands-on design-engineering workshops to demo conversational UI sketches, gather executive feedback, and refine component prototypes.
Conversational Design Leadership: Authored chat-style interaction flows that guided users through core CRM tasks, demonstrating how AI could simplify data entry and onboarding.
Technical Partnership: Partnered with platform engineering to pilot a React-based component library, ensuring performance improvements and a scalable architecture with minimal technical debt.
Solution & Impact
AI-Powered Workflow Prototype: Delivered a working conversational interface that streamlined lead management and case tracking, showcasing clear efficiency gains for SMB reps.
Unified Sales & Service Motions: Illustrated a single, behavior-driven UI that let users move fluidly between sales, service, and task management—eliminating siloed experiences.
Built-In SMB Toolkit: Demonstrated embedded project management modules (task boards, shared calendars) that addressed SMB pain points without relying on third-party apps.
Foundational UX Patterns: Although NEXT itself never launched as a standalone product, its design system and front-end patterns were adopted in multiple subsequent Salesforce releases—reshaping the company’s approach to modern CRM interfaces.