HUB by ECS
A product success story finally after three years!
In December 2021, an opportunity came to us with the requirement for a Customer Portal that had functionality not offered by any of our legacy customer portals. In an effort to try and win the opportunity, the business opted to create a proof of concept Customer Portal that could demonstrate to the potential customer what we could accomplish. I was then brought on to support the initial proof of concept. I created the initial mockups and wireframes for basic experiences such as the login and account pages, and in less than two weeks we had a web app online that was demoed for the potential customer.
This being a success story four years in the making, unfortunately things do not end here…
We did not win that opportunity, but the Sales and Marketing executives felt that this is something we should continue as it would certainly be a requirement for similar opportunities in the future. It then become an approved project for 2022 for us to create a full Customer Portal that would become the secret sauce for the business. My involvement was also minimal in 2022 as the product management responsibility shifted to one of our other product managers who focused primarily on customer-facing products.
Why did we need a new Customer Portal?
Before returning to my involvement in this product, thinking critically what did we want to accomplish with a new Customer Portal, beyond specific features?
Headless suite of applications built as an API Network (Process, System)
Modern, responsively designed “head” that would work on tablets, desktop and mobile (Experience)
API Gateway to give customers direct access to their own information
Realtime or near realtime access to source system data
Give customers control over their own account
The creation of an MVP.
My knowledge of how things progressed after the proof of concept is limited, but an offshore development team was put together expanding on the team that built the proof of concept application. MERN stack was chosen and the Sales and Marketing lead put together a basic list of features. The development created most of the user stories and by end of Q1 an MVP application was presented back to the leadership team.
But there was no real plan for how adoption would happen. No personas or customers in mind and things risked dying on the vine. Work continued throughout Q2. Finally, an account manager was voluntold to be the guinea pig and bring one of their customers, who had worked primarily via email, into the portal. In June of 2022, they were onboarded and logged in for the first time. Without burying the lede, they logged for the second time in September of 2024.
The customer and account manager each provided at least some feedback, and the development team began work on those requests. This work spread through the rest of 2022.
A change in management.
In December of 2022, things were in an odd state for the Customer Portal. No customers were actively using it, the CEO, Sales and Marketing leads of the business unit all had exited, and the product manager was about to go on parental leave and did not return. Somehow our CTO succeeded in getting budget for 2023 for continued development of the portal and it was identified as a 2023 to get at least five accounts actively engaged. We had a product without a roadmap, an entirely new leadership team and no users. It was then given to me to fix it.
I did an assessment and what I saw was a post order support portal with the following features:
Order Status & History
Assets & Install Base
Case & RMA
Account Summary, Invoices & Credit Memos
This to me seemed like it should be useful to at least some customers. To better understand the failure of adoption, I led a workshop with the sales & leadership teams and asked them what their customers needed from a portal. They were tasked with identifying ten accounts to be used as personas, as well as five internal users. The results of the workshop were fascinating, we ended picking 15 features and prioritizing them. Of those features, ten already existed in the portal at least in an MVP capacity, and four were really features for the sales team. What they wanted was a CPQ and a fulfillment portal.
So what to do with this conundrum? The sales team had clearly never engaged with the portal, or thought about how it would might improve the experience of their customers, and they refused to engage with it until it was useful to them. With Quoting being identified as the highest priority feature for a customer portal… I decided the best thing to do would be to lean in. Thus we began work on creating an Employee Portal.
The first step was getting buy-in for the 2023 roadmap from leadership. While some of the leadership team had been involved in the workshop, not all were, and those that were not, were surprised to see that a quoting tool had been identified as the top priority for a customer portal. After many discussions and meetings I got buy-in from the leadership team to being the process of creating a quoting tool with the future intent of expanding our customer portal into a fulfillment portal.
A tiger team was formed to understand the quoting process. It turned out nearly everything was powered by Excel. By early Q2, we had an MVP quoting tool in place and all demos
Then disaster struck.
Maybe not so dramatic, but again in Q2 of 2023 there was a second shakeup in the business unit. Another new CEO was brought on, and with him a new sales and marketing team. The new leadership team felt it was not appropriate to take any more time from the sales or marketing teams until things had settled. This meant again development was rudderless. I squeezed every ounce of value out of times meeting with stakeholders, but the new leadership team seemed very skeptical about our efforts.
I then received some questions about whether we could re-enable the quoting module in our CRM. This has undergone a failed implementation four years prior and had been entirely abandoned. I had mentioned we had a quoting feature in our customer (and employee) portal that was in an MVP state and really was really only in need of some TLC and direction from the business to get going. I was asked to put together time to demo this to the sales team. I onboarded all the sales users, gave them a write up of the features and documentation for how quoting worked. I asked them to come prepared to our meeting having at least logged in previously and ideally tried to make a quote. I did not expect the ambush that happened.
The sales team was not there for a demo or training of the quoting tool. They were there to make a decision on first blush for what would be the quoting tool going forward - the (abandoned) CRM quoting tool or our fledgling quoting tool. Despite meeting many of these stakeholders weekly earlier in the year, no one wanted to take any ownership in anything that was being presented. I still remember some of the quotes from the meeting, “I hope this wasn’t expensive.” The last thing said was, “We will review and let you know what tool we choose going forward.”
Now to say this was devastating is an understatement. On the one hand, this tool is not my baby - I had a baby and did not need a second one and I just wanted this quoting tool to provide value. On the other hand, I knew for a fact this quoting tool was made bespokely for the business and I knew for a fact that the CRM CPQ had been abandoned because it did not meet their needs. I was truly at a loss. I kept our CTO aware of what was happening, but the mood could not be lower amongst the product and development team.
Then in September of 2023 I got a message on Teams. I think I could quote this message in my sleep, but the request was made to pull the plug on the customer portal. This portal had been in development for at least 20 months, it had obvious value to customers and did the impossible task of modelling a business whose quoting process is actually five different contrary quoting processes. That development also had a very real sunk cost. I raised this message to the CEO of the business unit and our CTO.
A lifeline is thrown.
The reality nearly two years of development is expensive, and when you are contractually locked-in for the full two years it creates a significant write off if that work is simply going to be thrown away. After a review by the finance team and CEO, a person in the business was nominated to be our partner in business unit, and most importantly, they were made accountable for ensuring we delivered a product that met their needs.
Now with at least a person to partner with, we refined the edges of our quoting tool and continued on the path of making a fulfillment portal. In Q4 of 2023, we had the basics of an employee portal done with an MVP CPQ and quote-to-order process completed. The configurator at this time was “case based” configurator. That is, in this case this and in that case that. Each configured solution had to be built from scratch or copied and modified from another configuration, but it just so happened this perfectly replaced what one segment of the business was doing with a legacy portal.
Finally getting adoption.
The goal of getting five active accounts in the portal did not happen in 2023. In fact, we did not get any. However, we did get a plan in place for what to do in 2024. A legacy portal that had not been accessible to outside users for over a year was going to be turned off, and the reps were to move into HUB along with their accounts. To say they were excited about the prospect would be a lie… Until they used it. In what I think would be an attempt to sabotage the process, a rep tried to place an international express delivery order to Switzerland as their first order. And… it worked.
There was silence. It just worked.
After more than two years, we suddenly had users in production. Advocates even. By the end of Q1 2024, we went from no users to 15 active customers per week and hundreds of orders. All that was left was turning off our other customer portals…
A full fledged configurator.
The configurator the business primarily relied upon was built in the 90’s. It is a model based configurator. It is simple, lacks in many QoL features but it works. Replacing this with even like-for-like was going to be no small task. I set about in identifying leaders and stakeholders that could speak to different use cases and needs and in Q2 of 2024 we had documented the requirements for a configurator. Then in Q3 we began building. Last September, we demo’d the configurator for the business and continued refinement. The first customer onboarded in 2022, was even re-introduced in September of 2024. The active product assortment was setup in October of 2024 and now began the final struggle.
Change Management.
Moving a handful of reps representing a single segment of the overall business was one thing, but moving the entirety of the business was another. With the year finally being 2025, leadership drew a line in the sand. All customers will be onboarded by the end of Q1 this year. Now with quarter not yet completed at time of writing this least half of the business is exclusively using the new portal, and we went from 10-20 active weekly users to hundreds and soon-to-be thousands. My role was only a small portion in the effort, but I am proud to say the product is finally driving value for the business.
The Team
Product Manager
Product Owner
Development Manager
Senior / Lead Developer
Offshore Development Team (India / Taiwan)
Key Business Stakeholder / Customer Liaison
Business Leadership
Business Stakeholders
Feature Set
Customer Portal
Products (Engineered & Configurable)
Quote History
Cart & Checkout
Order History
Assets & Install Base
Inventory Management
Case & RMA (History, Creation & Communication)
Billing (Statement of Account, Invoices & Credit Memos)
Document Management (Contracts & Certification)
Employee Portal
Products (Engineered & Configurable)
Configurator Admin & CPQ
Cart & Checkout
Order Management & History
Assets & Install Base
Customer Inventory
Case & RMA (History, Creation & Communication)
Quote Templates
Free Freight Admin
Billing (Customer Statement of Account, Invoices & Credit Memos)
User Management
Install Base Management
