Celonis
CASE STUDY: INSIGHT EXPLORER
OVERVIEW
Role
Drove user research by conducting interviews, extracting key insights, and shaping product direction.
Led product design by concepting proposals, prototyping solutions, and delivering final designs.
Aligned product strategy by collaborating with Product and ENG Leads to define future bets.
Impact
Reduced insight-discovery time from 2+ days to under 30 minutes.
Unlocked significant financial value in customer-reported efficiency gains.
Scaled weekly-average-users by over 20X between Beta and GA phases.
Discovery and Definition
Uncovering the core persona's time consuming workflow
I led user interviews with the core persona (the "Celonis Lead") to uncover that identifying process improvement opportunities was a manual, time-consuming workflow, often taking days to yield actionable insights. This challenge was especially acute for new users at smaller companies without dedicated support, who frequently failed to realize value within their first year and churned at a high rate.
Defining a user journey to augment and accelerate
After interviews and gathering insights, I partnered with the Product Manager to map the Celonis Lead's current end-to-end user journey, aligning it to the persona's goals. After validating with users and stakeholders, we focused the core product experience on surfacing meaningful, actionable insights while identifying opportunities to support peripheral moments across the broader journey.
Understanding Intelligence Models to explore the “Art of the Possible”
I began exploring what we could potentially output with our Data Intelligence Models by designing concepts grounded in the types of analysis our backend could support. Using divergent thinking, I mapped a range of customer use cases to potential AI/ML-powered insights aimed to solving core user problems.
Templatizing the insight object for scalability
To enable teams to scale a wide range of insight types, I developed a flexible UI template for the “insight” object. Each insight was tied to a metric, correlated data filters, a value of change the insight could drive, and supporting language or visuals to aid comprehension. To ensure comprehension, I validated various iterations with internal SMEs and customer users.
Design and Delivery
Simplifying the modular Configuration Experience
I intentionally designed the setup experience to be minimal to lower the barrier to entry while still offering flexibility for advanced users. By simply selecting the metrics they want to explore, users could trigger Insight Explorer to automatically analyze their data and surface relevant insights. Power features were enabled by default but remained easily customizable. Ultimately, this allowed Celonis Leads to discover insights in minutes instead of days and made this previously complex, technical workflow accessible to a broader range of users.
Guiding existing workflows with an "Insights Feed"
To help streamline an existing part of Celonis Lead's user journey, I introduced an “Inbox” concept that allowed our ENG team to produce a feed of insights and for our users to prioritize insights by starring and hiding them. This supported conversations Celonis Leads were having as they shared insights with their stakeholders.
Empowering users to explore and validate insights
Upon clicking into an insight, users were guided into an auto-generated dashboard designed to support key Jobs-To-Be-Done: validating the accuracy of the insight, further scoping parameters of the process improvement opportunity, and exporting the analysis to support downstream workflows. For the Celonis Leads, this enabled more confident conversations with business stakeholders which ultimately accelerated organizational alignment around process improvements.
Impact on Customer Success
Defining future roadmap initiatives with "Insight Everywhere"
As part of shaping the vision for Insight Explorer, I worked across teams to align on a shared definition of what constitutes an “insight” within Celonis. I socialized this concept with platform team members, helping them understand how insights could serve as a unifying thread across different product areas. By defining how insights should be generated, surfaced, and acted upon, I helped lay the foundation for how these insights could be propagated horizontally across the platform—ultimately informing future roadmap initiatives and creating a more cohesive, insight-driven experience for users.
Earning customer testimonials and surpassing success metrics
Following GA, Insight Explorer launched with multiple customer success stories and measurable business impact: reducing setup time from two days to under 30 and unlocking meaningful financial value from reported customer efficiency gains. This project also gave me a valuable learning opportunity to deepen my experience designing for AI-powered outputs and emerging interaction patterns.
