Internal tooling · Systems thinking · Prototyping
The Right Tool for the Job
Helping internal users do their job 8x more efficiently
My role
I led the design from concept to execution
3 Engineers
Engineering Team
The feature successfully launched in August 2022 after development from April to July.
The Problem
Operations was spending countless hours in spreadsheets
While Premise had ops tooling including a form builder and campaign manager, they had started using spreadsheets to manage more complex use cases that the system could not support. However these spreadsheets made it easy to make consequential mistakes.
Where do we start?
I created a survey to get feedback from campaign mangers to understand where they spend the most time. Sentiment surveys required the most effort and they represented most of Premise's business so we started there.
Simplifying for surveys
We stripped down the campaign creation process to only the essential inputs for surveys, significantly simplifying the workflow.
Forms required constant rework
- • They spend a lot of time rewriting similar questions because they can't easily refer to previous surveys.
- • If a form requires templating they use Google Sheets.
- • Input groups cannot be nested in Input groups and this limitation leads to many work arounds.
Campaigns needed bulk operations
- • They spend a lot of time creating campaigns for surveys because they need 50-100 campaigns to collect representative samples across age and gender.
- • In order to reach representative targets they spend considerable time converting currencies and updating targets.
- • Campaign configuration settings for Tasks was confusing, but they got used to it once they read internal documentation.
Success Metric
Reduction in ops time spent managing surveys
About 10 hours per week savings per person
The Solutions
Purpose-built tools for campaigns and forms
Campaign updates
We started with making updates to existing campaigns easier because it was impactful and inexpensive. Increasing payment or collection targets required currency conversions and extensive calculations just to make a 10% increase across all campaigns.
Bulk campaign creation for surveys
Next we tackled bulk campaign creation for surveys. The use case for surveys was the need to collection representative samples primarily across age and gender.
Form creation
Integrating form creation into our customer product positions us to scale effectively, enabling customers to utilize self-service tools.
Form creation workflow demonstration.
Collaborating with customers
Form creation involved significant back and forth with customers. We gave customers view-only access to the form builder, turning it into a shared collaboration space with mobile preview and localization support.
View-only form builder enabling collaboration between internal teams and customers.
Learnings
Surveys and tasks are fundamentally different problems
This project revealed a broader truth about product strategy: sometimes shared tooling creates more friction than it solves. What started as "fix the form builder" became "rethink how we serve two distinct use cases."
Here's what we learned about when workflows should diverge:
| Requirement | Surveys | Tasks |
|---|---|---|
| Representative sample | ✓ People | ✓ Places, Products |
| Audience targeting (e.g. Pet Owners) | ✓ | ✕ |
| Multi-language support | ✓ | ✕ |
| Dynamic form creation | ✕ | ✓ |
| Conditional & branching logic | ✓ | ✓ |
| Templated questions | ✓ | ✓ |
Want to see more?
Get in touch with me to see my in-depth case studies.
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