Case studies @ Expana
Building a global pricing and forecasting platform
My role
Director, Product Design
Sep 2023 — Current
My Team
4 designers · 2 researchers
Reporting to the CPO, I led design through a company-wide transformation — leading the design strategy for a new platform built to migrate high-value customers off a set of legacy tools, hiring and growing the design team, and later taking on leadership of Research as well.
Strategic objectives guiding my team's work over the first 2.5 years:
Migrate customers onto a unified platform
Outcome
58% of accounts migrated in 18 months.
Key accounts renewing with zero churn, versus significant churn on the legacy platforms.
Grow revenue per customer through cross-sell and premium upsell
Upgrade to view forecast
Outcome
Down 16% on pre-migration levels 18 months in, tracking to level by 24 months.
Growth challenged by increased competition and a trend toward smaller, leaner subscriptions
Grow the user base by solving problems for new roles and industries
Outcome
Work started in 2026 — design and research initiatives underway; happy to walk through the approach.
Work shown in the case studies below was produced by designers and researchers on my team, with my occasional hands-on input.
How we redesigned Cost Models to reduce friction and drive adoption
The opportunity (why Cost Models?)
Cost Models was one of Expana's most strategically important features* — customers who used our cost models tended to be more data-mature and showed stronger retention and lifetime value.
Delivering a world-class Cost Model experience served two of our strategic priorities: unblocking migration from our legacy product, and growing revenue by expanding access to users who didn't have it before.
*
Customer data maturity at Expana
Continuity vs innovation
With a small team rebuilding a mature product, I prioritised design and research effort by considering how well our legacy solutions solved the core problem.
Light refresh
We do a great job solving this problem today.
Our legacy solution is a pain point for users, or there is an opportunity to deliver greater impact by rethinking the approach.
Cost models were a clear candidate for radical overhaul.
The legacy solution was a known pain point, and the problem was complex enough that full discovery was needed before any design work could begin, requiring a sustained, cross-team effort rather than an incremental refresh.
Discovery
Understanding the problem space & our legacy solution
Our design and research-led discovery spanned a range of internal and external stakeholders, including:
1
Our Customers, both existing and prospective cost model users
2
The Commercial team responsible for selling the cost models tool
3
The Customer Success team, who deal with user pain points daily
4
The Data team, subject-matter experts in pricing and forecasting
Output from an 'ask-the-experts' review of our legacy cost model workflow — surfacing strengths, weaknesses, and shared domain knowledge across teams.
Among the findings in our legacy experience were two important themes:
Theme #1
Confusing Experience
The experience was so complicated that our Customer Success team often built models on behalf of our users.
Theme #2
Difficulty finding data
Users struggled to find and select the right data for their models, getting lost in the breadth of Expana's dataset.
Kicking off the design process
Design built directly on our discovery work and remained highly collaborative throughout, with several rounds of internal and user testing before first release.
We approached the new design with two overarching goals:
Ease of use: Enable non-technical users to build and manage cost models without support from the customer success team.
Migration readiness: Support the migration of customers' existing cost models from the legacy platform, requiring sufficient parity in capabilities and data structure.
We spent time with customers looking at how they built their own cost models in tools like Excel, giving us a direct window into their real workflows. We saw use cases ranging from basic ingredients, to complex models with indirect costs and supplier data and scenario modelling.
The design built up through close collaboration with our data science team, whose domain knowledge proved essential as each round of work surfaced new complexity and questions that shaped what came next.
Addressing Theme #1 // Confusing Experience
Design for new users
It became clear early on that designing for migration risked skewing us toward our most experienced existing customers — the ones who'd built up deep familiarity with the product over time. I wanted the team to design for the opposite end of that spectrum: whatever we built, a brand-new user should be able to create a cost model with no support at all.
Data entry
This needed to be intuitive enough to handle simple use cases while remaining robust enough for the complexity we knew was coming.
We tested two different approaches for data entry:
1
The first design placed data input in modal windows, aiming to reduce complexity by letting users focus on one task at a time.
2
The second design used inline editing with live calculations in the table.
Users consistently showed a preference for inline editing - both power-users and less technically users.
The Excel-like keyboard navigation supported fast data entry, and was easily discovered in the tests.
To ensure users could distinguish between their own entered values and those calculated automatically by the system, we introduced cell styling: white for user-entered values, grey for system-calculated ones.
A simple visualisation above the inputs table helped users track their progress as they built their model, with clear messaging when something wasn’t right.
Addressing Theme #2 // Difficulty finding data
Helping users find the right data
Finding data was a significant barrier to building a cost model. Much of the underlying problem sat with data structure, which would take time to resolve properly.
To start, we identified some quick wins we could implement in the search tool:
1
We updated the empty state of our commodity search to show ‘recents’, as we learned that user’s were often interested in series they had previously searched for or viewed.
2
We added a ‘series preview’ to the search tool, so that users could assess the suitability of the item (users could check if there were gaps in data, and see the performance of the item) before adding it to their model
Cost Model Outcomes
Version one of our new Cost Models feature was met with incredibly positive feedback from both customers and stakeholders.
We measured success with our cost model designs in a few different ways.
Commercial impact
The Cost Model tool became a core part of the sales process, directly contributing to prospect conversion and high-value customer retention - an important metric in Expana's sales-led growth model.
User feedback
In testing, users were able to build models and extract insights without assistance, and usability was a marked improvement on the legacy product.
Ongoing improvement
Since launch, the feature has undergone continuous iteration. For example, we’ve added depth through improved error handling, export functionality, and forecasting and the ability for customers to add their own contract data.