Demelza Sutherland
Console Connect · FIELD RESEARCH · 2026
Anyone could see the complexity.
But what was the impact?
The internal administration platform had accumulated a disparate collection of management tools and workflows over years of product growth. We travelled to Manila to understand how operational teams navigated that complexity in their everyday work.
FIELD OBSERVATION · SYNTHESIS · PRIORITISATION · PRODUCT OPPORTUNITIES
At a glance...
THE CHALLENGE
Understand how years of product growth was affecting the teams responsible for operating and supporting the platform.
THE WORK
Field research with support teams, synthesis, opportunity mapping and prioritisation — turning operational friction into actionable product opportunities.
MY ROLE
Conducted research with members of the product team and led the synthesis of insights, then worked with the product owner and technical lead to define and prioritise our focus.
What we already knew...
The internal administration platform had a fragmented structure that was difficult to navigate, hard to maintain and increasingly inconsistent.
15
NAVIGATION SECTIONS
84
SUBMENU LINKS
19
DASHBOARD CARDS
INCONSISTENT NAVIGATION
Products appeared in different ways across the navigation. Some had one link, some several, some their own section.
DASHBOARD WITHOUT HIERARCHY
No clear information architecture or prioritisation. Cards had accumulated with no consistent logic.
UNCERTAIN USAGE
We suspected some pages were obsolete, but we didn’t know how often (or if) they were still used.
ONGOING PRODUCT MIGRATION
Major product migration was in process, bring more screens and workflows into the platform.
LIMITED DISCOVERABILITY
Global search was being implemented, and we didn’t yet know what people would need to find.
To understand the problem, we had to get closer to the work.
We travelled to Manila to sit alongside the operational teams. Over five days, we combined contextual observation with workshops to understand how they used the platform in their everyday work, observe points of friction and hear directly about their frustrations.
SIX OPERATIONAL TEAMS
FRONTLINE SUPPORT · APPLICATION SUPPORT · TECHNICAL SUPPORT · CUSTOMER SUCCESS · PROVISIONING · ORDER MANAGEMENT
Finding structure in the noise.
We returned with more than 200 observations across six operational teams. We organised the evidence by team, then used affinity mapping to look across those boundaries for recurring behaviours, frustrations and needs.
OBSERVATIONS ORGANISED BY TEAM
AFFINITY MAPPING — SYNTHESISING ACROSS TEAMS
FROM THEMES TO OPPORTUNITIES
The themes revealed by the affinity mapping weren’t opportunities just yet.
We worked through them again — combining related themes, unpacking broad collections and reframing the evidence into actionable opportunity areas.
Searching & filtering
Consolidated service view
Missing IDs
COMBINE
FINDABILITY
Reporting and audit logs
UNPACK
CONTEXT & HISTORY
ERRORS & RECOVERY
WORKFLOW EFFICIENCY
Communication & training
REFRAME
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
SELECTED EXAMPLES
The research gave us plenty to work on.
That process resulted in 18 interconnected opportunities for improving the platform and the way operational teams worked together.
Lots of opportunitiesfor improvement
Prioritising the opportunity space.
Over several sessions, I worked with the product owner and technical lead to prioritise the opportunities and agree on our first focus.
18
opportunities identified
7
strong candidates
PRIORITISATION CRITERIA
User impact
Implementation effort
Strategic value
Dependencies
Feasibility
Roadmap alignment
Strong candidates
7
High user impact, actionable in the short term.
01
FINDABILITY
02
RELATIONSHIPS
03
CONTEXT & HISTORY
04
SERVICE NOTES
05
MISSING INFORMATION*
06
COMMUNICATION
07
MIGRATION
Needs more discovery
6
Valuable opportunities that need further research to define the right solution.
08
CONFIGURATION
09
MODIFICATION
10
ERRORS & RECOVERY
11
DATA RELIABILITY
12
WORKFLOW
13
EXTERNAL TOOLS
Lower priority
4
Important, but lower impact or longer term.
14
NAVIGATION
15
PERMISSIONS
16
TICKETING
17
ESCALATION
Process improvements
2
Can be improved by education, training or operational process improvements.
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
MISSING INFORMATION*
Process improvement opportunities weredocumented and sentto Operations to action
*Missing information was considered both a platform and process opportunity.
One problem kept appearing.
Finding things!
Findability emerged as a significant friction point across every support team. Difficulty locating the right information slowed everyday work and led to repeated workarounds.
Application Support
“We want to search and filter by IDs.”
Frontline Support
“Across the platform we us Ctrl F.”
Technical Support
“Can take up to an hour to locate the correct service.”
Provisioning
“I bookmark specific connections... [so] I can find them easily.”
Customer Success
“I want to find invoices within a particular date range.”
The research changed what we were building.
Digging deeper into the Findability problem revealed a mismatch between the global search functionality already in development and how support teams actually searched.
WE ASSUMED
“I know the name. Help me find it.”
Global search was being implemented around primarily searching for the record names.
WE OBSERVED
“I have an identifier. Help me work out what it belongs to.”
Support teams frequently start with an ID and need to locate the service, customer or related content.
Finding had immediateimpact
IMMEDIATE IMPACT
8 key IDs added to global search scope.
Global search is currently under development, and we were able to incorporate the IDs support teams actually need to search for.
And Search was just the start.
Beyond search, support teams needed different ways to get to the right record — depending on what they already knew and where they were starting from.
HOW MIGHT WE
Help support agents find a record using the information they already have
HOW MIGHT WE
Help support agents identify the right record when information is incomplete?
HOW MIGHT WE
Make services easier to discover from the customer context?
HOW MIGHT WE
Help agents narrow results and get to the right record faster?
THE OUTCOME
We understood there was complexity.
Now we know the impact.
By getting closer to the people doing the work, we uncovered real friction, identified opportunities with potential and gave the team a clear place to start improving the administrative experience.
18
PRODUCT OPPORTUNITIES IDENTIFIED
7
STRONG CANDIDATES PRIORITISED
1
PRIORITISED OPPORTUNITY WITH IMMEDIATE IMPACT
The research changed work already underway, expanding global search to suppor the identifiers operational teams actually use.
One problem down... Plenty more to solve.
THIS WORK IS ONGOING
Findability is now moving from discovery into exploration, while the wider opportunity landscape provides a foundation for future product decisions.
Demelza Sutherland
Brisbane, Australia
© 2026
Demelza Sutherland
Work
ABOUT
Console Connect · FIELD RESEARCH & PRODUCT DISCOVERY · 2026
Anyone could see the complexity.
But what was the impact?
The internal administration platform had accumulated a disparate collection of management tools and workflows over years of product growth. We travelled to Manila to understand how operational teams navigated that complexity in their everyday work.
FIELD OBSERVATION · SYNTHESIS · PRIORITISATION · PRODUCT OPPORTUNITIES
At a glance...
THE CHALLENGE
Understand how years of product growth was affecting the teams responsible for operating and supporting the platform.
THE WORK
Field research with support teams, synthesis, opportunity mapping and prioritisation — turning operational friction into actionable product opportunities.
MY ROLE
Conducted research with members of the product team and led the synthesis of insights, then worked with the product owner and technical lead to define and prioritise our focus.
What we already knew...
The internal administration platform had a fragmented structure that was difficult to navigate, hard to maintain and increasingly inconsistent.
15
NAVIGATION SECTIONS
84
SUBMENU LINKS
19
DASHBOARD CARDS
INCONSISTENT NAVIGATION
Products appeared in different ways across the navigation. Some had one link, some several, some their own section.
DASHBOARD WITHOUT HIERARCHY
No clear information architecture or prioritisation. Cards had accumulated with no consistent logic.
UNCERTAIN USAGE
We suspected some pages were obsolete, but we didn’t know how often (or if) they were still used.
ONGOING PRODUCT MIGRATION
Major product migration was in process, bring more screens and workflows into the platform.
LIMITED DISCOVERABILITY
Global search was being implemented, and we didn’t yet know what people would need to find.
To understand the problem, we had to get closer to the work.
We travelled to Manila to sit alongside the operational teams. Over five days, we combined contextual observation with workshops to understand how they used the platform in their everyday work, observe points of friction and hear directly about their frustrations.
SIX OPERATIONAL TEAMS
FRONTLINE SUPPORT · APPLICATION SUPPORT · TECHNICAL SUPPORT · CUSTOMER SUCCESS · PROVISIONING · ORDER MANAGEMENT
Finding structure in the noise.
We returned with more than 200 observations across six operational teams. We organised the evidence by team, then used affinity mapping to look across those boundaries for recurring behaviours, frustrations and needs.
OBSERVATIONS ORGANISED BY TEAM
AFFINITY MAPPING — SYNTHESISING ACROSS TEAMS
FROM THEMES TO OPPORTUNITIES
The themes revealed by the affinity mapping weren’t opportunities just yet.
We worked through them again — combining related themes, unpacking broad collections and reframing the evidence into actionable opportunity areas.
Searching & filtering
Consolidated service view
Missing IDs
COMBINE
FINDABILITY
Reporting and audit logs
UNPACK
CONTEXT & HISTORY
ERRORS & RECOVERY
WORKFLOW EFFICIENCY
Communication & training
REFRAME
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
SELECTED EXAMPLES
The research gave us plenty to work on.
That process resulted in 18 interconnected opportunities for improving the platform and the way operational teams worked together.
Lots of opportunitiesfor improvement
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
COMMUNICATION
CONFIGURATION
CONTEXT & HISTORY
DATA RELIABILITY
ERRORS & RECOVERY
ESCALATION
EXTERNAL TOOLS
FINDABILITY
MISSING INFORMATION
MIGRATION
SERVICE MODIFICATION
NAVIGATION
SERVICE NOTES
PERMISSIONS
RELATIONSHIPS
TICKETING
WORKFLOW EFFICIENCY
Prioritising the opportunity space.
Over several sessions, I worked with the product owner and technical lead to prioritise the opportunities and agree on our first focus.
18
opportunities identified
7
strong candidates
PRIORITISATION CRITERIA
User impact
Implementation effort
Strategic value
Dependencies
Feasibility
Roadmap alignment
Strong candidates
7
High user impact, actionable in the short term.
01
FINDABILITY
02
RELATIONSHIPS
03
CONTEXT & HISTORY
04
SERVICE NOTES
05
MISSING INFORMATION*
06
COMMUNICATION
07
MIGRATION
Needs more discovery
6
Valuable opportunities that need further research to define the right solution.
08
CONFIGURATION
09
MODIFICATION
10
ERRORS & RECOVERY
11
DATA RELIABILITY
12
WORKFLOW
13
EXTERNAL TOOLS
Lower priority
4
Important, but lower impact or longer term.
14
NAVIGATION
15
PERMISSIONS
16
TICKETING
17
ESCALATION
Process improvements
2
Can be improved by education, training or operational process improvements.
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
MISSING INFORMATION*
Process improvement opportunities weredocumented and sentto Operations to action
*Missing information was considered both a platform and process opportunity.
One problem kept appearing.
Finding things!
Findability emerged as a significant friction point across every support team. Difficulty locating the right information slowed everyday work and led to repeated workarounds.
Application Support
“We want to search and filter by IDs.”
Frontline Support
“Across the platform we us Ctrl F.”
Technical Support
“Can take up to an hour to locate the correct service.”
Provisioning
“I bookmark specific connections... [so] I can find them easily.”
Customer Success
“I want to find invoices within a particular date range.”
The research changed what we were building.
Digging deeper into the Findability problem revealed a mismatch between the global search functionality already in development and how support teams actually searched.
WE ASSUMED
“I know the name. Help me find it.”
Global search was being implemented around primarily searching for the record names.
WE OBSERVED
“I have an identifier. Help me work out what it belongs to.”
Support teams frequently start with an ID and need to locate the service, customer or related content.
Finding had immediateimpact
IMMEDIATE IMPACT
8 key IDs added to global search scope.
Global search is currently under development, and we were able to incorporate the IDs support teams actually need to search for.
And Search was just the start.
Beyond search, support teams needed different ways to get to the right record — depending on what they already knew and where they were starting from.
HOW MIGHT WE
Help support agents find a record using the information they already have
HOW MIGHT WE
Help support agents identify the right record when information is incomplete?
HOW MIGHT WE
Make services easier to discover from the customer context?
HOW MIGHT WE
Help agents narrow results and get to the right record faster?
THE OUTCOME
We understood there was complexity.
Now we know the impact.
By getting closer to the people doing the work, we uncovered real friction, identified opportunities with potential and gave the team a clear place to start improving the administrative experience.
18
PRODUCT OPPORTUNITIES IDENTIFIED
7
STRONG CANDIDATES PRIORITISED
1
PRIORITISED OPPORTUNITY WITH IMMEDIATE IMPACT
The research changed work already underway, expanding global search to suppor the identifiers operational teams actually use.
One problem down... Plenty more to solve.
THIS WORK IS ONGOING
Findability is now moving from discovery into exploration, while the wider opportunity landscape provides a foundation for future product decisions.
Demelza Sutherland
Brisbane, Australia
© 2026