Enterprise eProcurement Initiative — Major Home Improvement Retailer
Overview & Challenge
I was the sole UX designer responsible for an enterprise eProcurement initiative focused on improving a complex procurement experience for business customers and internal stakeholders.
The work involved customer discovery, workflow definition, journey mapping, cross-functional alignment, product strategy, and executive-level visibility within a large-scale enterprise environment.
Because this project involved internal systems, proprietary business processes, and strategic product work, I am not able to share product screens, detailed flows, or confidential artifacts. This case study focuses on my role, approach, process, and the type of impact I contributed.
The eProcurement initiative involved a complex workflow with multiple user needs, business rules, technical dependencies, stakeholder priorities, and customer expectations.
The team needed to better understand what customers expected from an eProcurement provider, where existing workflows created friction, and how the product experience could support both customer needs and business goals.
The challenge was not simply to design screens. It was to help the team understand the problem space, define the experience direction, align cross-functional stakeholders, and create a more coherent product vision for a large enterprise initiative.
My Role
I served as the primary UX designer for the initiative, partnering closely with product, engineering, technology, design, leadership, business stakeholders, and external consulting partners.
My responsibilities included:
Translating ambiguous business needs into clearer user experience direction
Participating in customer discovery conversations with prospective eProcurement customers
Interviewing potential users and customers about their needs, expectations, and decision criteria when evaluating providers
Creating sentiment maps to capture user pain points, friction, confidence, and uncertainty across the experience
Mapping customer and user journeys across multiple levels of detail, including L1, L2, and L3 journey views
Mapping current-state and future-state workflows
Identifying areas of friction, complexity, and decision-making burden
Creating design concepts and interaction approaches for the procurement experience
Participating in cross-functional alignment meetings with engineering, product, technology, design, and leadership
Partnering with product and engineering to align on feasibility, sequencing, priorities, and product direction
Supporting product strategy by helping define and draft OKRs
Preparing the work for executive-level visibility and review
Approach
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I partnered with consulting partners and internal stakeholders to meet with prospective eProcurement customers and better understand what they needed from a provider.
These conversations helped clarify:
What customers expected from an eProcurement experience
What factors influenced their provider decisions
Where they experienced friction in existing procurement workflows
What information, support, and functionality they needed to feel confident
How the product experience could better support real-world procurement needs
This discovery work helped ground the initiative in actual customer input rather than assumptions.
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To help the team understand the experience more clearly, I created sentiment maps and multi-level journey maps that captured the customer and user experience at different levels of detail.
This included mapping the experience across multiple layers:
L1: High-level journey stages and major phases of the procurement experience
L2: Key user actions, decision points, and workflow moments within each stage
L3: More detailed task-level steps, pain points, dependencies, and opportunities for improvement
The sentiment mapping helped identify where users were likely to experience confusion, friction, uncertainty, or confidence throughout the journey.
This gave the team a clearer way to discuss not only what users needed to do, but how the experience felt at different points in the workflow.
These artifacts helped support cross-functional alignment by giving product, engineering, technology, design, and leadership a shared view of the experience, the pain points, and the areas where design could create the most value.
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After learning more about the customer needs and business context, I helped translate the complexity into clearer workflows, design direction, and product considerations.
My focus was on making a complex procurement process easier to understand, easier to navigate, and more scalable as the initiative evolved.
This helped move the team from a broad, ambiguous opportunity space toward a more structured product direction.
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A major part of the work involved alignment across engineering, product, technology, design, business stakeholders, and leadership.
I participated in cross-functional meetings to discuss:
Product direction
User and customer needs
Workflow complexity
Technical feasibility
Sequencing and dependencies
Prioritization
Design tradeoffs
Leadership alignment
I also helped my product partner define OKRs, which gave the team a clearer way to frame success, communicate priorities, and connect the experience work to broader business goals.
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The initiative gained senior leadership visibility and was presented to executive leadership.
My work contributed to the product story by helping communicate:
The user and customer needs behind the initiative
The complexity of the procurement experience
The experience direction
The value of continued investment
The strategic importance of creating a clearer, more scalable eProcurement experience
This project helped create clarity around a complex enterprise procurement experience and gave the team a stronger foundation for product direction, stakeholder alignment, and executive-level communication.
Key contributions included:
Helped ground product direction in prospective customer needs
Contributed to customer discovery and interview efforts
Created sentiment maps to identify friction, uncertainty, and confidence across the journey
Created L1, L2, and L3 journey maps to clarify the experience at multiple levels of detail
Clarified a complex enterprise procurement workflow
Helped define the experience direction for an enterprise product initiative
Created alignment across product, engineering, technology, design, and leadership
Supported strategic product framing through OKR development
Contributed to work that reached executive-level visibility
