Service Model Workflow - Multi-Stakeholder Systems Design

Constraints

• No existing template or prior workflow to reference
• Multiple legacy systems requiring integration (mobile app, Odoo CRM for billing, email and SMS communications)
• Varied technical capabilities among contractors
• Phased delivery requirement - business needed to operate before full automation
• Complex eligibility rules for downstream offers had to be enforced at system level

Problem

The business established a new commercial model requiring a distinct operational and product workflow with no equivalent process to draw from. The model involved a unique financial arrangement between the business, external service contractors, and end users - each with different roles, responsibilities, and information needs. Multiple existing systems needed to interact to support the new model, none of which were designed to work together in this configuration.

Design Challenge

• Design a complete end-to-end workflow for a new commercial model with no existing template, covering every touchpoint from account setup through to multi-year billing
• Serve multiple user types - internal Customer Success team, external contractors, agencies, and end users - each with different needs, permissions, and actions at different stages
• Determine which parts of the workflow could be automated immediately, which needed to remain manual in early phases, and how to make manual steps as safe and consistent as possible
• Design a communication architecture that correctly identified who should receive what, when, and under what conditions
• Build a data import mechanism that met contractors where their existing behaviour was, rather than requiring them to adopt a new way of working
• Handle non-trivial date-based edge cases in job creation logic that would directly affect contractor scheduling
• Decouple eligibility-based downstream offer logic from the core workflow
• Deliver across three phases, with each phase needing to be operationally viable on its own

Process

• Mapped the full stakeholder landscape before designing anything - identifying every user type, their role in the process, and specific actions needed at each stage (Understand)
• Conducted working sessions with Customer Success team to understand manual steps already being performed and where pain and risk was concentrated (Understand)
• Worked with operations and engineering to understand constraints and capabilities of existing systems requiring integration (Understand)
• Mapped all existing communication templates and identified which applied, which needed suppression, and which needed creation from scratch (Understand)
• Documented every manual handoff point and assessed risk of each - distinguishing between temporarily manual steps and those manual due to lack of tooling (Define)
• Surfaced date-based edge cases in job creation logic that would have produced incorrect due dates if not explicitly handled (Define)
• Mapped eligibility logic for downstream offers and identified it needed system-level enforcement (Define)
• Validated phased delivery structure by mapping which workflow steps were dependencies of others (Decide)
• Made deliberate trade-off to repurpose existing CSV import function rather than build new import UI - prioritising speed to market (Decide)
• Created explicit handling for all date-based edge cases with documented decision matrix for engineering (Design)
• Built communication suppression framework with explicit rules per stakeholder type and workflow stage (Design)
• Designed job auto-acceptance behaviour to remove manual bottleneck (Design)
• Designed billing trigger as polling mechanism for multi-year invoicing (Design)
• Delivered phase 1 with functional Customer Success workflow and automated job creation (Validate)
• Incorporated Customer Success feedback from phase 1 before shipping phase 2 (Validate)
• Held team retrospective after each phase to capture learnings and improve subsequent phases (Reflect)

Learn more about my UX process →

Stakeholder Management

I led cross-functional working sessions with Customer Success, operations, and engineering teams to map the complete workflow from business intent to technical implementation. When the repurposed CSV import created friction for contractors during phase 1 rollout, I worked directly with the Customer Success team to document the support burden and advocate for a purpose-built solution in the roadmap. By presenting usage data and Customer Success overhead metrics to senior management, I successfully secured commitment for an automated contractor-specific import mechanism in a future phase.

Design Decisions

Outcomes

Reflection

Tools