Manasa B RSenior UX Designer
Redesigning the experience for a remote sales workforce cover

Redesigning the experience for a remote sales workforce

Squadstack — SquadIQ mobile app overhaul

The problem
Scaling a remote, crowdsourced sales workforce
My role
Senior Product Designer · research + onboarding & screening
Timeline
6 phases · 5 months
Team
Product, Design, Supply & Ops

How it started

My first project at Squadstack

SquadIQ is Squadstack's mobile sales app — it helps brands reach and convert customers through a crowdsourced workforce of remote experts: homemakers, part-timers, freshers, and students. The product had outgrown the system supporting that workforce, and scaling was getting harder. The overhaul had one job: build a clear way to screen, grow, and keep that talent.

I owned the user research end-to-end and led design through the onboarding and screening journeys, working alongside product, design, and supply & ops.

The plan

Six phases across two quarters

  1. 01

    Research and discovery

    Understanding the remote workforce and the existing system.

  2. 02

    Ideate and assemble

    Co-sketching the future model with every team in the room.

  3. 03

    Review

    Pressure-testing direction with senior stakeholders.

  4. 04

    Stitch

    Joining the pieces into one coherent experience.

  5. 05

    Test and partial deploy

    Releasing parts of the new flow to real users.

  6. 06

    Full steam deployment

    Rolling out the complete experience to the workforce.

Research at a glance

How the research was set up

6
Sales experts interviewed
20 days
Of user research
Userbit
Research & notes tool
Panel
Format per interview

Beyond the numbers

What the research actually involved

  • 01

    Interviews with sales experts

    Each session had a panel of interviewers, note takers, and observers — focused on real pain points and which ones mattered most.

  • 02

    Competitive analysis across 6–7 products

    We audited six to seven competing CDPs and segmentation tools — Segment, Salesforce CDP, Adobe Experience Platform, and others — mapping how each handled audience creation, rule logic, and marketer onboarding. This gave us a clear benchmark for what "good" looked like and where the category had room to move.

  • 03

    Mapping how the system worked today

    Sessions with operations and data science teams helped us chart the current user journey — where it stalled, where manual work piled up, and where the gaps between what the platform could do and what marketers could actually do were hiding.

Synthesis and ideation

From scattered pain points to a shared direction

  • 01

    An affinity map across four streams

    We grouped pain points across onboarding, core jobs, compensation, and support — so patterns showed up instead of one-off complaints.

  • 02

    Design charrettes — a 5-day workshop

    Cross-functional workshop with design, product, engineering, and SMEs. Each day started with a problem statement. The team sketched low-fidelity solutions independently, then presented them. Ideas were voted on, pros and cons debated openly, and one direction chosen per problem. The outputs were basic user flows — not finished designs, but clear enough to review with primary stakeholders and get a go/no-go before any pixels were pushed.

  • 03

    From sketches to a shared direction

    The chosen ideas were turned into low-fidelity sketches, then refined through review cycles with stakeholders before moving into design.

Research and synthesis

Phase 1: Research & Discovery — stakeholder pain points mapped across themes with personas: Sales Expert, SIQ Internal, Customer.
Click to zoom

Design and validation

Wireframes first, then a coherent visual language

  • 01

    Medium-fidelity wireframes in Figma

    Designed to be reviewed by stakeholders, supply teams, and expert users — and to give engineering a head start on building components.

  • 02

    Validated by senior management and expert users

    Catching gaps and edge cases before we moved into high fidelity.

  • 03

    A professional, corporate visual language

    We moved away from a playful look toward something that felt trustworthy. The system was built on Material Design, since the app shipped on Android.

  • 04

    Component-based, ready for the web

    The UI framework was structured to support progressive web apps as the product expanded beyond mobile.

Design charrettes & final screens

SquadIQ Sign Up and Login — full user flow from splash screen through OTP verification across sign-up value propositions.
Click to zoom

Sign-up & login flow — splash screen, value props, OTP verification.

What I learned

A first project that turned into a crash course

This was a new company, a new team, and a new set of tools — all of it learned through remote collaboration. I wore multiple hats: user researcher, designer, charrette moderator, and presenter, often in the same week.

The biggest takeaway was understanding the nature of a distributed workforce, and how to design for a system where the people using your product are also the supply you are trying to scale.

[Placeholder quote — paste a real one from Squadstack leadership or a pilot expert when you have it.]
Squadstack · SquadIQ overhaul