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 PoC application. MERN stack was chosen and the Sales and Marketing lead put together a basic list of features. The development team 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 volunteered to bring on one of their customers. This customer worked with the account manager primarily via email, so this seemed like a good candidate that would benefit from self-service access to their information. 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 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 the organization into new roles, and the product manager was about to go on parental leave without the intention to return. Somehow, our CTO succeeded in getting budget for 2023 for continued development of the portal and it was identified as a 2023 priority 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.

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 not yet engaged with the portal, and did not want 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.

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 begin 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 were met with great reviews and feedback. Around this time, we also expanded the team and brought on a talented Product Owner to really help drive the roadmap forward.

Another change of winds.

In Q2 of 2023 there was a second shakeup in the business unit. We had another new CEO, and with them a new sales and marketing team. Some of the new leaders felt it was not appropriate to take any more time from the stakeholders until things had settled. While understandable, this meant again development was rudderless. We squeezed every ounce of value out of the few times we could meet with stakeholders, but many in the new leadership team seemed skeptical about the product.

Now in retrospect, this makes a lot of sense. The new leaders were at least two degrees separated from the original MVP. They did not know the history of the organization or what the broader need was that led to the creation of this product. They also came with prior experiences with different commercial software solutions, both good and bad, and wanted to simply use what they knew would work. Were I to go back and do something differently at this time, I would have fought tooth and nail to get more face time with the new leaders as they got the lay of the land, and work to rebuild those relationships from square 1.

I then started to receive 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 and deactivated. I had mentioned we had a quoting feature in our customer portal that was in an MVP state and really was really only in need of some TLC and re-engagement from the business unit to get going. I was asked to put together time to demo this to the sales team. I on-boarded 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 and ideally tried to make a quote. I did not expect what came next.

The sales team was not there for a demo or training for the quoting tool. They were there to make a decision on what would be the quoting tool going forward - the previously abandoned CRM quoting tool or our fledgling quoting tool. After a brief conversation the stakeholders said they would make a decision and get back to me.

Now to say this was devastating is an understatement. On the one hand, this product was not my baby - I had a baby at the time and did not need a second one. On the other hand, I knew for a fact this quoting tool was made bespokely for the business unit and I also 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 verbatim 20 years from now, 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 quoting processes this varied. That development also had a very real sunk cost. I escalated this to the CEO of the business unit and our CTO immediately.

A lifeline is thrown.

The reality is that software development is expensive, and when you are nearly two years of development into a product, 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 someone 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, the Product Owner correctly observed that what we had was really two portals - a customer and an employee portal. We then set about simplifying this and creating an Employee Portal for employees and Customer Portal for customers, all on the same platform. By the end of the quarter, we had the basics of an employee portal completed with an MVP CPQ and quote-to-order process. The configurator at this time was a “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 completely, and the account managers were to move into the new portal along with their accounts. To say they were excited about the prospect would be a lie… Until they used it.

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 and lacks many QoL features, but it works. Replacing this with even like-for-like capabilities 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 new configurator. Then in Q3 we began building. Last September, we demoed 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 on-boarded by the end of Q1 this year. Now with quarter not yet completed at time of writing this least half of the business units 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.

Feature Set