Project Overview
This foundational research focused on the quote-to-cash journey for Premier One, VESTA, and MV products. The work was designed to uncover why customers were experiencing long-standing friction across contracting, ordering, deployment, and billing, then translate those findings into clear priorities for product and operational improvement.
Mapped the quote-to-cash journey from pre-sales through renewal and expansion.
Specific recommendations generated to improve workflow clarity, handoffs, and customer experience.
Priority opportunity areas identified to guide roadmap and operational alignment.
Customers had been reporting dissatisfaction across the quote-to-cash process for years, but the organization lacked a shared view of where the breakdowns were happening and why. Contracting, invoicing, order changes, deployment handoffs, and renewal workflows were all contributing to friction, yet the experience had never been mapped holistically.
I used a mixed-methods approach so the team could understand not only what was happening in the workflow, but how those breakdowns were showing up in customer experience.
The Process
The research was structured to build clarity in layers, starting with the problem framing and operational evidence, then expanding into direct user input, synthesis, and strategic recommendations.
The research made it clear that dissatisfaction was not tied to a single product issue. It came from accumulated friction across the quote-to-cash workflow, especially where systems, teams, and billing structures failed to align.
A one-to-many relationship between contracts and invoices created confusion, administrative burden, and ongoing dissatisfaction for customers managing multiple active agreements.
Customers consistently rated invoicing and billing as the least satisfactory part of the experience, especially around accuracy, timeliness, and interpretability.
Difficult quoting systems, manual workarounds, and siloed product teams created instability between ordering and deployment, often forcing change orders or rework.
The duration data showed that implementation was frequently the slowest and most painful stage, making delays more visible to customers and more expensive for the business.
Business Impact
The project created a shared, evidence-backed understanding of where the quote-to-cash experience was breaking down, helping product and operational leaders align around improvements that could reduce dissatisfaction and improve business efficiency.
Visibility into the full quote-to-cash journey across pre-sales, ordering, deployment, billing, and renewal.
Specific recommendations generated to improve product workflow, handoffs, and communication.
Key opportunity areas identified for roadmap alignment and cross-functional ownership.
Stronger direction for where operational, billing, and deployment improvements could have the biggest customer impact.
The final research package was designed to support roadmap conversations, operational alignment, and long-term experience improvements across the enterprise workflow. Redacted to keep confidentiality.
This project reinforced how important it is to frame enterprise workflow research at the right level of abstraction. The quote-to-cash journey touched so many teams, systems, and business rules that the real challenge was not just collecting data. It was creating a structure that made those interdependencies understandable.
Looking back, I would scope the journey content even more selectively from the start, especially around the duration metric and how it should be visualized. I would also think more critically about whether focus groups were the best fit, since they introduced additional complexity during analysis.
The work also underscored how valuable it is to bring quantitative partners in earlier. Tying the operational signals to the qualitative experience was one of the most useful parts of the project, and even more alignment up front would have made that synthesis stronger and faster.