"I served as a product owner for a website that allowed external clients to search a large database of videos and other media products for download. I talked with several of my internal stakeholders responsible for customer interactions, and they described a common complaint about the usability of the search tool. Users reported missing results and a painful filtering experience. I began to develop a strategy to build something more user-friendly as a result.

The development team pushed back and suggested we could just better train the users to work with the current design. I helped the team understand the personas of the users who most frequently used this functionality. They were often junior team members, and their roles had a high turnover rate. Due to their demographic, they were used to search tools similar to those used in popular applications; making a more intuitive experience for them would add more value than continuous training on an outdated tool. I demonstrated how improvement would lead to increased sales that would quickly offer the ROI needed to justify the time and resources the effort would take.

We embedded a new search tool that followed the users throughout the site. It was more intuitive, it was faster, and the results were better. Our sales increased, the customer experience was improved, and our stakeholders responsible for customer support were thrilled with the results."