Sellers were drowning in low-value work
Enterprise sellers were losing strategic selling time to manual prospecting — sifting through leads, writing cold outreach, and guessing which accounts deserved attention. Senior reps who needed healthy pipeline to hit revenue targets were stuck doing the same spray-and-pray work as junior reps.
Salesforce needed to reimagine this with AI, but it had to be more than automation — it needed to be a tool senior sellers would actually trust and use daily.
From concept pitch to shipped product
Northstar concepts that secured executive investment
I designed two vision prototypes — an AI-guided buyer experience and an AI prospecting assistant for sellers — for Salesforce's annual CKO, the executive review led by Marc Benioff. These secured funding and were later reviewed favorably by Gartner, accelerating the project's priority.
A recommendation engine built around trust
I collaborated with data science to define the AI scoring framework using two dimensions: "Fit" (company characteristics predicting purchase likelihood) and "Intent" (behavioral buying signals). A key design principle was transparency — making it clear to sellers what the system knew versus what it didn't, so recommendations felt like useful signal rather than a black box. For an AI tool to earn adoption, it needed to empower sellers with information, not make them question the logic.
MVP scoped for adoption, not management reporting
Under pressure to design for organizational complexity (attribution, dashboards, pipeline tracking), I made a deliberate call to optimize exclusively for individual seller value. The hypothesis: if account executives find it genuinely useful, adoption follows. We could add the organizational layer after validation.
Compressed design cycle with maintained rigor
With no time for traditional discovery, I designed a rapid process: leveraging Salesforce's existing seller research, studying recommendation patterns from adjacent domains, establishing twice-weekly cross-functional syncs, and validating a single chosen concept through rapid user testing rather than testing all four directions.
Concept to launch in under a year
Executive investment secured
Northstar prototypes I designed secured funding at Salesforce's annual CKO — the company-wide executive review led by Marc Benioff that determines the year's strategic bets.
Full lifecycle delivery
Took the initiative from concept pitch through MVP to publicly announced product in under a year, validating both the product direction and the compressed design process.
Gartner recognition and market impact
Early prototypes received strong positive feedback during a Gartner evaluation of Sales Cloud, directly contributing to the decision to invest in the vision. That same year, Salesforce was recognized as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute.
Dreamforce product demo