Case Study

ZS had built decades of expertise in pharmaceutical sales compensation — an undisputed market leadership position. Despite that institutional depth, the tool reps used to check their compensation was an Excel scorecard: difficult to generate, time-consuming to QA, and poorly suited to a field workforce that had moved to iPads.

See also: A blog post about Javelin Sales Compensation Reports

Company & Position

ZS Associates, Associate Principal / Partner (2011–2017)

Details

This was the first significant opportunity to demonstrate UX value on ZS software — and a rare chance to build a new enterprise solution without legacy constraints. Pharmaceutical data presents specific challenges: significant lags between rep activity and reflected compensation, complex territory structures, and compensation plans that vary considerably across clients. Any solution had to make those complexities navigable without overwhelming users.

Actions

• Led end-to-end UX-driven product development. Analyzed sanitized scorecards from active client engagements; found that 80% shared common elements — a pattern that became the foundation for product requirements.
• Developed and iterated concepts with an internal advisory team of consulting practitioners. Validated designs with sales reps and managers in structured testing sessions.
• Built mobile-first with sub-second response time as a hard performance target — consumer-grade speed in an enterprise context.

Outcome & Impact

• Launched Javelin Sales Compensation Reports (JSCR) in early 2015 with thousands of users from day one, scaling to additional clients.
• First ZS product shipped with meaningful UX involvement end-to-end — responsive, performant, built around how reps consume compensation data.
• Clients saw immediate operational savings; generating, QA-ing, and distributing reports was faster and less error-prone than the Excel process it replaced.
• Research and design insights directly informed subsequent products in the suite.