Celonis
Celonis is the leader in Process Intelligence, empowering enterprise customers to uncover and optimize their business processes. As a Staff Product Designer, I led multiple initiatives with a primary focus on Insight Explorer: an AI/ML-powered tool designed to accelerate time-to-insight and surface high-impact opportunities for cost reduction.
Accelerating a core user journey with AI-powered insights
Context
Customers use Celonis to drive process improvements for their organization. To do so, they search for and then apply those insights to drive organizational efficiencies. Typically, their workflow was incredibly manual and required product expertise (i.e., using Celonis to build analytics dashboards and “mining” through data). Insight Explorer was a new initiative applying AI/ML solutions focused on accelerating discovery for this core journey.
Role
My cross-functional team sat within the broader AI organization at Celonis, aptly named “CeloAI”, and served as a horizontal team that powered intelligence across the platform. I led the end-to-end design process from zero to one for Insight Explorer, shaping both the product vision and execution in close collaboration with engineering, product, and AI stakeholders. This included conducting and synthesizing user research to uncover and socialize customer pain points, prototyping potential solutions, and delivering high-fidelity design work to support implementation. Beyond launching the initial product, I drove vision work to define the future state of the experience and contributed to a longterm roadmap aimed at scaling AI/ML-powered insights across the Celonis platform. I also led the design of Transformation Hub, a surface where realized opportunities were documented, tracked, and communicated to stakeholders.
Business impact
Reduced setup time from 2 days to under 30 minutes
Reduced insight discovery time by over 50%
Scaled weekly-average-users by over 20X between Beta and GA phases
Unlocked significant financial value in customer-reported efficiency gains
Driving continuous improvement with customer co-Innovation
I partnered closely with the Product Manager to build out a scrappy co-innovation program around our core persona, the Celonis Lead. Throughout the project, we facilitated weekly or bi-weekly conversations with these personas to understand their pain points and gather feedback on design artifacts. This consistent partnership ultimately shaped our product offering and vision.
The Celonis Lead represented the primary Celonis point-of-contact within our customers’ organization. Celonis Leads are tasked with identifying process improvement opportunities, but existing workflows are manual, time-consuming, and often took days to uncover actionable insights. This was particularly difficult for new users at smaller companies without dedicated support; these customers likely reported not discovering value within their first year of usage and churned at a high rate.
Exploring what’s possible with our Data Intelligence Models
I began exploring “The Art of the Possible” with our Data Intelligence Models by designing concepts grounded in the types of analysis our backend could support. Using divergent thinking, I mapped a range of customer use cases to potential AI/ML-powered insights aimed to solving core user problems.
Delivering an impactful solution
As we approached GA, I converged the design into a scaleable, user-centered solution. I developed a flexible UI template for the “insight” object, enabling teams to implement a wide range of insight types. Each insight was tied to a metric, correlated data filters, a value of change the insight could drive, and supporting language or visuals to aid comprehension. I also introduced an “Inbox” concept that allowed users to prioritize insights by starring and hiding, helping streamline conversations when Celonis Leads shared insights with their stakeholders.
Upon clicking into an insight, users were guided into an auto-generated dashboard designed to support key Jobs-To-Be-Done: validating the accuracy of the insight, further scoping parameters of the process improvement opportunity, and exporting the analysis to support downstream workflows. For the Celonis Leads, this enabled more confident conversations with business stakeholders which ultimately accelerated organizational alignment around process improvements.
The setup experience was designed to be minimal to lower barrier to entry, while still offering flexibility for advanced users. By simply selecting the metrics they want to explore, users could trigger Insight Explorer to automatically analyze their data and surface relevant insights. Power features were enabled by default but remained easily customizable. Ultimately, this allowed Celonis Leads to discover insights in minutes instead of days and made this previously complex, technical workflow accessible to a broader range of users.
Reflection
Following GA, Insight Explorer launched with multiple customer success stories and measurable business impact: reducing setup time from two days to under 30 minutes, cutting insight discovery time by over 50%, and unlocking meaningful financial value from reported customer efficiency gains. This project also gave me a valuable learning opportunity to deepen my experience designing for AI-powered outputs and emerging interaction patterns.
