Sage

I took a leading role in the design of Sage’s flagship product, Financials, which was built on the Salesforce platform.

My role was to assert a set of design standards whilst pushing the capabilities of the platform. Notably, I led design sprints with VISA and UPS to explore payment and shipping integrations.

For CFOs with growing businesses

Sage Financials was designed to improve the efficiency and performance of medium-sized businesses by offering unparalleled accounting insight to Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and Accountants.

Leveraging the reporting capabilities of the Salesforce platform, Financials was able to offer real-time analytics of business performance.

Forging partnerships

As well as designing and validating many key parts of the product, I worked alongside their integrations team to collaborate with companies such as VISA, UPS and American Express. I worked particularly closely with VISA at their Innovation Centre in London to explore new cash flow forecasting tools and payment methods including VR, touchless fingerprint ID and Alexa.

Doing the hard work to make it simple

Our vision for an accounting tool with minimal data entry still meant that we had to get data entry right. Our Ledger needed to be keyboard-first, offering all the cues and capabilities of comparable software (namely Excel) whilst being super performative.

This was challenging from both an experiential and engineering point of view, requiring us to repurpose and stretch the Salesforce platform beyond its original scope. This was one instance in my career where aspiring design gratefully met daring development.

Making accounting less painful

Accounting doesn’t have to be painful. During my time at Sage, I asked a lot of questions, and I mean - a lot. I have no formal accounting or finance training and relied heavily on subject matter experts. However, Artists and Designers are trained rigorously in understanding context and revealing opportunities.

It was courtesy of these skills that I was able to understand some of the biggest pain points for Sage’s users and to iteratively test design solutions alongside them. For example, standardising onboarding patterns whilst getting the software to do the heavy lifting transformed company configuration.

Growing guilds

The Salesforce component library was built to be programatically accessible. However, as anyone who has ever used a third party design system will know, this wasn’t something we could come to rely on as we repurposed and reordered components.

I identified a pressing need to unify Sage’s practices with regard to inclusive design, and as such, established the Sage Accessibility Guild. I was able to acquire a small budget to procure specialist training.

Throughout my time at Sage, I worked extensively to evaluate their organisational practices and capabilities with regard to accessibility and carried out audits and surveys of Sage Financials, People and Accounting products.