Obligation Management
Status
Shipped–GA
Timeline
Jan 2020 – Aug 2020 (v1)
Type
Net-new feature
My Role
Design lead + Research partner
Prod-dev process
Agile
2 week sprints | 3-4 sprint deployment (internal release) bundled into 3 external annual releases
Deliverables
Desk research notes, Exploratory concepts, High-fidelity prototypes, Interaction guide for hand-off
Contributors
Jeff Caruso (Research)
Staci Black (PM)
Will Klibanow (Engineering Lead)
Robert Pfeiffle (IX+UI Copy)
Katie Lower (IX+UI Copy)
As DocuSign was planning to expand the revenue from its Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) product, it realized that it was trailing competitors in a very specific market. This market was firms or departments involved in procurement related activities, termed as the ‘Buy Side’. While DocuSign CLM sales had traditionally been good in the ‘Sell side’ market it wasn’t the choice of CLM solution for the Buy Side.
Obligation Management was a net-new core feature of the ‘Buy Side expansion project’ that I led the designs for. V1 of Obligation Management was shipped in the fall of 2021. Future iterations of obligation management are under development as the feature is being adopted by more and more customers.
Months after the Obligation Management went GA, we started seeing impact of the net-new feature through these wins:
Internally, the project was showcased and got attention of leadership:
Definition
Simply speaking, obligations are legally binding commitments made by one party to another. It can include completion of tasks, avoidance of certain acts, delivery of products/services, payment considerations etc.
Why is managing obligations important?
Missing obligatory commitments can lead to adverse financial and regulatory consequences, revenue leakage, and damaged business relationships. A McKinsey study estimated 2% revenue leakage for enterprises. For a $2B annual spend, that’s $40M!
Why does buy-side specifically care for obligations?
The #1 job of the procurement department of business is to get the most value of the dollars spent. They do this by staying on top of obligatory commitments of the counter-parties they buy from. As an example, if the selling party missed a delivery and they had agreed to provide a discount under their contract, the procurement department would like to hold them accountable for that and get more value for their dollar by making sure they get that discount.
As DocuSign was planning to expand revenue from its Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) product, it realized that it was trailing competitors in a very specific market. This market was firms or departments involved in procurement related activities, termed as the ‘Buy Side’. While DocuSign CLM sales had traditionally been flourishing in the sell side of the market, it was trailing competitors in the buy-side. With a tight Salesforce integration, the sell side was an organic sell but in the buy side, the story was different as DocuSign CLM lacked table stake features and obligation management was one of them.
Win-rate comparison of Buy side vs Sell side CLM prospects
CLM Customer Outlook
Among prospects looking for a CLM solution for their business, 63% have either a buy-side leaning business or have an in-house buy-side department which is a huge opportunity area for DocuSign CLM.
Gantt chart of buy and sell side distribution in potential CLM customers
Product :
“Archit, we need to build an obligation management solution to solve problems for our buy side customers. You’re on.”
Archit :
“Okay great!. What are these problems and before that what’s Obligation management?”
Product :
“We don’t know.”
All of the information presented in the preceding sections was slowly learned over time. When it all started there were unclear agendas and negligible knowledge about the matter. All I knew as a designer was that we had set ourselves to solve some problems for the ‘Buy side’ through obligation management. Having known nothing about procurement business and Obligation management, I was unsure where to begin? There were too many questions troubling me.
The buy side initiative had started with a workshop back in Feb 2020 with DocuSign’s customers, where we tried to collect user stories for CLM. Obligation Management had emerged as a theme during that workshop and had made its way into the larger buy-side project after catching leadership’s attention. User quotes from the workshop was the only information we had on obligations as a team. For me, it was critical understand obligations and their importance to our users to define the problem.
Understanding obligations
To start building an understanding of obligations in the context of CLM product, I used the following methods with my product partners:
Understanding users
We Identified that most buy side customer fell under the bucket of 3 personas:
1. CATHY CONTRACT
2. PETER PROCUREMENT
3. LYNDA LEGAL
Understanding product limitations and complications
As a B2B SaaS enterprise product, CLM has a lot of layers, variables, and dependencies that led to complications which impacted design decision making:
Product Complications: 3 different versions of Doc explorer (Previewer in CLM)
Putting it all together
Until this point, I had been diverging and collecting information from different ends. Having where were we gonna build the experience and what areas of CLM it was gonna impact, it was time to converge all the things learned until this point into a flow for one of the identified user. Our goal:
How might we make identifying and capturing key information and obligations in contracts more convenient for Larry Legal and Peter Procurement?
Now that we had a little direction around user pain-points, existing competition, and product complication in CLM, I felt comfortable tackling some UI solutions. But before that came planning and scoping to nail down the specifics of an MVP.
While a lot of scope was cut down in order to meeting shipping deadlines, we managed to have a baseline capture, edit, and delete functionality for obligations in the CLM Doc Preview. Captured obligations were also surfaced in other areas of CLM. Hand-off included 2 version – one for the legacy preview and another one for the new WIP preview that was supposed to replace the legacy one.
Below are the MVPs in action. v2 and other vision explorations produced during the time have been excluded for brevity.
Add, Edit, Delete an Obligation in Doc Preview
MVP Experience 1a: Obligation capture experience for legacy previewer
MVP Experience 1b: Obligation capture experience for new previewer
Obligations in other CLM areas
MVP Experience 2: Obligation surfacing on Parties space where contracts and documents relevant to a counter-party are reside and are organized by the CLM system
MVP Experience 3: Obligation surfacing on standard reports in CLM
During concept evaluation, we were able to run some of the MVP design work I had done by the customers to get their feedback on the usefulness of the obligation management feature in CLM. Below are some of the responses we received:
“Form looks good! Anything more than that and you’re trying to teach how to make the watch instead of telling the time.”
– Procurement and Vendor Delivery
“Would like to use this more like guidelines to remedies (what to do when you fall short of fulfilling an obligation)”
– Operations delivery & Supply Chain Management
“Don’t need to know both Parties but the Obligated Party and the Status of the Agreement”
– Operations delivery & Supply Chain Management
Next Steps
We used this user feedback and data collected from other research studies to inform future product decisions. As of writing this case study, we made the following updates in the concepts for the next version of Obligation management. A sneak peek of v2 is provided at the end:
v2 Experience 1: Re-structured obligation object
v2 Experience 2: Obligations in action with integrations
v2 Experience 2: Obligations capture assisted by AI