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Challenge:

Sage is a software company formed through a number of acquisitions. Because of this, we had the issue of having many different knowledge base platforms. We had over a dozen knowledge platforms worldwide, spanning various countries, languages, and products. We needed to envision a unified global knowledge base platform—one that accommodated for all of our products and would scale to complexity.

Complicating things, the company was also undergoing a downsize. Our usual UX team was impacted and this left us short on resources to develop a prototype or vision.

Assignment:

We needed a comprehensive vision for the future: a prototype to rally our teams around before engaging a vendor. Existing platforms only supported one type of content: knowledge articles. Product documentation, training, and community forums lived in their own respective sites. We sought a vision that would unify these sources for our customers into one site, under one search bar.

Solution:

I proposed spearheading the creation of a prototype. I aimed to save costs and expedite progress by taking the initiative to gather teams, identify their needs, and construct the prototype on my own.

We ultimately made the best of our resources and landed on a deeper understanding of our needs.

The Action I Took:

To realize this vision, I immersed myself in learning. I studied "User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development" by Mike Cohn, adopted user story techniques, and honed my skills with prototyping tools like Figma and Webflow. Leveraging the company's brand assets and Design System, I crafted a responsive high-fidelity prototype and engaged stakeholders throughout the process.

Result:

After several iterations, we made a prototype that we liked, and it represented every content source. The hi-fi prototype is still available to explore.

The prototype helped us narrow-down potential vendors and saved us a lot of back-and-forth to describe what we needed.

Conclusion:

Despite facing challenges from external factors, the groundwork I laid positioned the company to achieve its goal of establishing a globally functional knowledge base tailored to diverse customer needs.

Leading this project enabled me to demonstrate proactive problem-solving, leadership, and adaptability. By spearheading the creation of an in-house prototype, I honed my skills in user stories, prototyping tools, and stakeholder engagement.

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