From first call to signed client: designing Menaia's CRM flow
I designed the lead-to-client lifecycle that became the front door of Menaia's sales cycle: captured leads (manual and automatic), embedded call logging, and a unified Client Summary that follows one person from first contact all the way to a job.
Field-service businesses run on a patchwork of systems and home-made spreadsheets. Client records and conversations get lost, or walk out the door when an employee leaves.
Menaia needed one foundational system to track the whole lifecycle, from a lead, to a client, to the projects they turn into.
As product lead I owned the definition and design of that lead-to-client-to-project flow, from the data model to the screens.
The hard part wasn't the lead form. It was the lifecycle. A lead, a client, and a project are the same person at different stages, and the design had to make that continuity feel obvious instead of stitched together.
Discovery & Research
I leaned on competitive analysis to see what was working and where we could differentiate. Then I met real users across admin, sales, and operations to learn their daily frustrations and pain points.
I also pinned down the language to anchor the model: Lead, Client, and Project.
Ideation
I mapped the flow across departments, from contact center to sales to operations, and pinned down the conversion points.
We started with a job summary. I had to define how a lead becomes a client, then how to house a client with multiple projects, so a company can find information across all its historical work.
Launch
We shipped the client and project experience modularly, starting with the bare minimum: lead and project information.
Then we built on that foundation, adding sections to track everything on a project: proposals and their statuses, scheduled events, job plans, completed forms, sent invoices, and project comments so teams can collaborate and tag each other in context.
A lead pipeline that doubles as the entry point to the whole platform, designed so a contact is never re-created as it moves toward becoming real work.
We were building Menaia from scratch, so fundamental user flows and data models simply didn't exist yet.
This was the foundation. Defining the lead-to-client-to-project lifecycle gave every later feature a place to live, which let us ship each subsection fast instead of redesigning the model each time.
Coming soon:
- Project expenses, with gross-profit tracking per project.
- A custom form builder, so teams can create their own forms.
- Timeline audit trails across all the work on a project.