Peter Sharp — Experience Strategist · Service Design & Research

Corteva · Agriculture platform

Too busy running a business for our tools

I was asked how to get more data out of the sales agents already on the platform. I changed the question to why most of them weren’t there, and found they were too busy running their businesses to use it. The roadmap turned toward helping them run those businesses, and I redesigned how the organization decides what to fund.

Role
Staff Product Designer(Service Design and Design Strategy)
Scope
Across business units and functions of a ~250-person product org, from field research with sales agents to portfolio-level investment strategy
Team
Solo IC who built a working team for each initiative: head of design, senior UX researcher, senior product designer, staff product manager, head of engineering
Industry
Agriculture
$50Ma year, allocated through the planning process I redesigned around sales agents’ jobs
~10projects a year funded through that process
Conceptual print illustration of an agricultural sales agent amid competing demands across an agency and its territory.

As I sat watching the video tiles fill, I wondered whether this would be the meeting where the engagement number finally got the attention it deserved. The slide came, and just as quickly we moved on. Engagement sat in the low 30s percent, and the conversation turned to data collection.

A remote attendee notices a persistently low engagement signal while meeting tiles fill the screen; a tiny elephant sits near the overlooked number.

Our sales agents are independent businesspeople who sell our seed to farmers. The platform kept asking them for more on-farm data, and why most of them weren’t using it got far less attention. We were designing more work for people who barely had time for their customers.

A narrow view of a few engaged sales agents opens to a larger group and the businesses they run.

I spent months mapping sales agents’ journeys before accepting there was no repeatable path: weather, disease and prices turned into farmer calls that couldn’t wait. One agent, working 80 to 100 hours a week at peak season, told me he takes those calls standing in his kitchen in the middle of the night, because a missed call can mean a lost sale. I switched to jobs-to-be-done, betting that designing for the outcomes agents were trying to reach would serve them better than forcing their days into a flow. It cost us familiarity, because people knew journey maps.

Before: nine journey maps of the sales agent’s world, each on its own clock, broken by weather, disease and prices. After: one job map, three job areas, eight stages, about 170 steps, that held all year.

See the original journey maps

Diagram redrawn from my journey boards · originals shown at a size where no note can be read

My research kept pointing past the field work. Agents were running independent agencies, and we weren’t helping with that side at all. When I read our commercial team’s push to consolidate agencies, I could see the administrative load coming, and I started steering our work toward the business each agent was running.

A sales agent faces administrative work while looking toward the customers and fields beyond it.

Planning ran on documents passed around, and its lens stopped at the edge of our software. I founded a Design Strategy Center of Excellence, helped build a shared list linking our features and capabilities to agents’ jobs, and redesigned annual planning around those jobs.

I mentored my manager, a senior designer and a senior researcher so they could carry the work into rooms I wasn’t in. Then I took the process to the senior leadership team. They approved it, and I facilitated it: two days inside a sales agent’s world before anyone argued for a technology. I designed it as a first step rather than a dramatic shift, so the organization could start thinking in jobs without rejecting an approach that didn’t match how it already worked. I’d planned a survey to find which jobs had the biggest unmet needs, so the day could focus there. We ran out of time, and the room brainstormed more broadly than I’d hoped, so afterwards I synthesized its output with customer data to see which investments would have the biggest impact.

The planning work as a system

The planning work as a system Inside the business goals of three organizations, which Peter brought together, two lanes: technology (our capabilities and applications) and customer (the sales agent’s jobs). In the technology lane, a taxonomy of business processes, capabilities, jobs and applications, which later scaled across two organizations. In the customer lane, job maps from research, checked with subject matter experts and sales-agent surveys, which were also used in other work. Peter brought the two together into a map of capabilities on job steps, where technology meets customer. The two-day workshop was built on it, wrapped in framing that taught jobs to be done. Day 1 found where needs went unmet; day 2 turned ideas from the agent’s problems into themes. The workshop produced the white papers’ new lens, the agency as a business, which decided where $50M a year went, about ten funded projects. Afterwards a framework tying features to the agency’s goals emerged and improved the next workshop. Business the goals of three organizations, which I brought together Technology our capabilities and applications Customer the sales agent’s jobs Taxonomy process → capability → job → application Lived on: scaled across two organizations Job maps from research; checked with subject matter experts and agent surveys Lived on: used in other work Capabilities on jobs my idea: bring the two together for this workshop; each capability under the job steps it supports THE TWO-DAY WORKSHOP Framing both days: jobs to be done, outside-in Day 1 our capabilities against the agent’s jobs; unmet needs Day 2 ideas from the agent’s problems, into themes OUTCOME White papers a new lens: the agency as a business $50M a year decided this way, ~10 funded projects EMERGED AFTER A framework features tied to the agency’s goals ← improved the next workshop
34
people
4
cross-functional groups
6
working boards
3
job areas, 5 main jobs
8
stages per job
~170
job steps mapped
~300
ideas

See the workspaces

Redrawn and simplified from the planning boards · anonymised

The white papers from that cycle widened the roadmap to the agent’s whole territory and agency. I followed with research into which parts of running an agency needed the most help, and built a framework that tied our features to the goals of the agency, to sharpen the next year’s planning. From then on, the process decided where $50M a year went, about ten funded projects. Engagement later closed at 44% against a goal of 35%. With our UX research manager and analytics lead, I reshaped measurement around jobs. The following year, the quarterly survey (about 1,400 respondents) showed perceived success up 13%, trust up 11% and satisfaction up 6%.

An operating system for data-driven innovation, the framework I built: six levels from the agency objective (why), through core jobs and agency decisions with their outcome definitions (what), to rep journeys (how), workflows and features (do). Each level has the question that tests it, from whether agency-level outcomes are improving down to whether features are adopted and effective, with inputs flowing up and outputs flowing down.
The framework I built after the white papers, tying features to agency goals · one slice, not the whole operating model

People move through the world in messy, nonlinear ways, and software tends to solve problems as if they don’t. Part of the work is making that mess comfortable to adopt.

A rigid plan gives way to a view that can hold a complex, changing territory.

Illustrations made with AI, and an exhaustive amount of art direction by Peter Sharp.

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