From MVP to AI Vision: Designing Sales Sequences at Pipedrive
Sales teams often struggle to qualify and nurture leads at scale, relying on manual, inconsistent follow-ups. To tackle this, we formed Pulse — a design task force of four senior designers exploring the end-to-end problem space of lead qualification and nurturing. Each designer led a stream; mine was Sales Sequences.
As a Product Designer, I balanced shipping an MVP with continuous discovery and long-term vision, ensuring Sales Sequences became both immediately valuable and strategically foundational for Pipedrive’s future AI-led nurturing.
Follow-ups are critical for sales reps, but inside Pipedrive there was no dedicated outreach tool. Reps were hacking together reminders in spreadsheets, juggling disconnected external tools, or bending our automations to do work they weren’t built for.
The result: missed opportunities, broken workflows, and a clear gap in Pipedrive’s offering.
Product strategy
User Research
User Interface
Experimentation
1 Product manager
1 Data analyst
5 Software engineers
1 UX Writer
63% |
|---|
Retention, still in BETA
50
UX/UI improvements shipped in 2 months
8
experiments ran in 4 weeks
Before jumping into solutions, our goal was twofold: close the gap between assumptions and real user needs, and get the whole team aligned on the problem space.
Benchmarking workshop (2 days)
We analyzed how competitors solved sequencing, identifying familiar mental models that could reduce adoption friction. Importantly, we ran this workshop with engineers and a new PM — it wasn’t just about features, but about building shared empathy for sales reps and clarity on our north star: a trustworthy, human-centered outreach tool.
User interviews (pre-MVP) (1 week)
We validated critical pain points with reps: lack of control, complex setup, limited autonomy, and low reliability. These conversations grounded the team’s understanding and sharpened the product’s purpose.
Low-fidelity prototypes (1 week)
We tested manual enrollment and editable email drafts that landed in the rep’s outbox. Early reactions confirmed our hunch: reps wanted structure and efficiency, but not at the cost of losing their personal touch.
👉 Outcome: The team walked away with a shared vision, validated assumptions, and clear design principles to guide the MVP.
Sales reps weren’t adopting Pipedrive’s automation tools for outreach. Through research, we uncovered why:
No control or visibility
sales reps didn’t trust comms being sent automatically.
Complexity
4–5 steps just to set up a simple 2-email cadence.
Lack of autonomy
salespeople wanted to personalize their comms, not feel robotic.
Reliability issues
triggers felt risky; reps feared losing control.
63%
Retention rate
1.5k
active companies out of 42k eligible companies, during BETA and silent release
7k+
deals added to sequence per week
With the goal of aligning the E2E experience in the lead qualification and nurturing space with the company vision - an experience centered in AI agents, we started drafting out plans and concepts to communicate how the pulse umbrella would converge into a seamless agentic experience for users
Mapping out AI functions for lead qualification and nurturing
Concepts for the E2E agentic experience for lead qualification and nurturing