Partnered with Product to shape the vision for Clari Align’s account planning experience and led the design direction that helped enterprise teams map influence, strengthen relationships, and close strategic deals.
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As Clari’s platform matured into a comprehensive revenue and sales engagement suite, it became clear that one critical area of enterprise selling remained underserved: account planning and relationship management.
Clari Align is Clari’s mutual action planning product, designed to help sellers and customers align around shared goals, milestones, and next steps. With this work, Align was extended beyond execution planning to support account planning and relationship mapping—making it possible for sales teams to understand complex buying groups, influence, and opportunity directly within the platform.
Rather than addressing a friction in existing Clari workflows, this effort expanded the platform into a new, adjacent product area where teams were already compensating with point solutions, spreadsheets, and slide decks. The initial release was intentionally MVP in scope, but grounded in enterprise-first needs and informed by multiple enterprise customers. It positioned Clari to compete credibly in the account planning space while creating a foundation that could evolve into deeper intelligence and tighter platform integration over time. I led this work as a player-coach, combining hands-on design contribution with system-level leadership to ensure quality, scalability, and long-term leverage.
Clari Align was originally built as a mutual action planning product—helping sellers and customers align around shared objectives, milestones, and commitments once a deal was already in motion. While effective for execution, it did not address an earlier and equally critical phase of enterprise selling: account planning.
Account planning is the ongoing practice of understanding a customer organization well enough to guide long-term strategy—who influences decisions, how buying committees are structured, where risk exists, and where future opportunity may lie. In enterprise sales, this work happens long before and well beyond a single deal cycle.
Rather than being unsupported entirely, account planning was already happening—just not inside Clari.
Enterprise teams relied on a combination of:
These tools solved pieces of the problem, but they lived outside the core sales workflow. Relationship context was static, difficult to keep current, and rarely connected to execution data. Insights were often rebuilt repeatedly and shared inconsistently across teams.
This opportunity became especially concrete through a design partnership with a Fortune 500–scale enterprise customer, whose sales teams treated account planning as a formal discipline. For each strategic account, they created extensive slide decks—often dozens of pages long—that documented:
While this partnership provided rich, real-world grounding, it was not treated as a one-off requirement. Similar patterns surfaced across other enterprise customers, reinforcing that this was a category-level need, not a bespoke request.
The stakes were strategic:
This work was not about fixing a broken experience. It was about expanding the platform into a new domain in a way only an integrated system could—starting with enterprise complexity and designing forward toward a more complete, connected model of strategic selling.
The mandate for this work was not framed as a narrow usability problem or a request to replicate an existing point solution. Instead, it emerged from a broader strategic question: how Clari should evolve as a revenue and sales engagement platform to better support enterprise selling.
At a high level, the ask was to extend Clari Align beyond mutual action planning to support account planning and relationship mapping. But it quickly became clear that success would depend less on feature completeness and more on whether the platform could credibly enter a new domain without fragmenting the overall experience.
Account planning already had an ecosystem of solutions. Enterprise teams were using standalone tools, CRM extensions, spreadsheets, and slide decks to reason about relationships, influence, and opportunity. Competing directly on depth alone would have required building a specialized tool disconnected from Clari’s core strengths. The real opportunity—and the risk—was determining how account planning could live inside an integrated revenue platform in a way that other solutions could not.
This reframed the mandate:
At the same time, scope discipline mattered. The initial release needed to be focused enough to ship, while still establishing the right foundations.
Explicit non-goals for the first release:
Instead, the goal was to define the core relationship model and interaction patterns that could support enterprise account planning while remaining extensible.
Success was evaluated along three dimensions:
This was not measured by short-term adoption or feature parity. The success test was whether Clari could credibly expand into account planning as a product area, using Align as the foundation, and do so in a way that competitors focused on single-purpose tools could not easily replicate.
This work began in a deliberately small, senior configuration before expanding into a focused delivery model as scope and confidence increased.
At the outset, the effort was driven by the Product Manager for Clari Align and me, working closely together to explore whether account planning and relationship mapping represented a viable extension of the product. At this stage, the work was primarily strategic—framing the problem space, pressure-testing assumptions, and sketching early experience models in close partnership with a Fortune 500–scale enterprise customer acting as a design partner.
In parallel, the Product Manager coordinated with the customer’s account team to formalize a commercial engagement that allowed us to build and validate an initial MVP. While the commercial details were handled outside design, this context shaped how we approached the work: we needed to move quickly, demonstrate credibility at enterprise scale, and ensure the solution was not narrowly tailored to a single customer’s needs.
As part of this collaboration, I regularly represented design in leadership-level conversations with the design partner—asking targeted questions, validating assumptions, and using real-world scenarios to refine how account planning and relationship mapping needed to function in practice. These discussions helped ensure the experience reflected enterprise reality rather than theoretical workflows.
As the work moved toward formal execution, I expanded the team intentionally and briefly, bringing in two additional product designers to accelerate exploration. Their focus was to extend early concepts, explore alternative approaches, and move the work rapidly from low-fidelity thinking into high-fidelity concepts for review with the design partner and a small set of other enterprise customers. During this phase, I remained hands-on—contributing to early designs, guiding structure and hierarchy, and ensuring alignment with the broader platform direction.
Once the contract was executed and the core direction validated, I transitioned the work into a more durable delivery model. I assigned a single product designer to own the day-to-day design execution, with me operating as a player-coach throughout the remainder of the project.
In this phase:
While I did not contribute designs directly in Figma during this stage, I stayed close to the work—pressure-testing decisions, resolving trade-offs, and ensuring the solution continued to serve enterprise needs while remaining extensible over time.
This operating model persisted through launch. It allowed us to move quickly early, then shift toward sustainable execution without creating dependency or bottlenecks. Most importantly, it ensured the work benefited from senior judgment at critical moments while enabling a product designer to fully own and grow with a complex, high-stakes product area.
