Cockpit — Harsha Andukuri

Cockpit: Redesigning the task management tool

A complete overhaul of Gainsight's primary workspace — reducing friction for 20K customer success managers and transforming a cluttered task list into a focused, actionable hub.

End-to-End Product Design User Research Usability Testing Interaction Design Design Systems

Role

Lead Product Designer

Timeline

6 months · 2023

Company

Gainsight

Platform

Web App (B2B SaaS)

01 · Problem

Context

CSMs were losing hours to a broken workspace

Cockpit is the heart of Gainsight — the central hub where Customer Success Managers manage their entire book of business. Every customer interaction, renewal task, and escalation flows through it. With over 20,000 weekly active users, it's the most-used surface in the product. But it had barely changed since its original launch — what was once a manageable task list had become a wall of noise with no clear signal about what actually needed attention.

The core tension: Cockpit was designed for a world where CSMs had 20 accounts. In 2023, many were managing 100+. The same interface was expected to scale — and it couldn't.

02 · Research

Who Uses Cockpit

User Personas

Primary User · 80%

Customer Success Manager

Works on Tasks
Creates New Tasks
Sends Emails from a task
Assigns tasks to others

Manager

CSM's Manager

Monitors Task Progress
Creates and Assigns tasks
Manages team workload
Monitors quality

Extended Roles

Other Roles

Renewal Manager
Implementation Team
Sales Representatives
Support Team
Professional Services

User Interviews

Learning and mapping the pain points

We conducted a series of interviews with our internal and external users to understand the negative sentiment around our product. We then mapped the pain points with our existing features.

Customer Advisory Board meetings

Group of 10 users from different customers — structured discussion sessions to surface shared pain points across organisations.

Individual and group user interviews

One-on-one and small group sessions with users from the same customer — uncovering workflow-specific frustrations and workarounds.

Internal users

Sessions with Gainsight's own CS team who use Cockpit daily — providing high-frequency feedback grounded in real operational context.

Customer Advisory Board 1:1 User Interviews Group Sessions Internal Users Pain Point Mapping

Usage Analysis

The data confirmed what users told us

Three months of behavioral analytics across 20K active users revealed consistent patterns — and consistent drop-off points — that mapped directly to the qualitative pain points.

User Navigation Trails

Key Findings

Four friction points that defined the redesign

Synthesizing 24 interviews and behavioral analytics surfaced four specific, addressable friction points. These became our north star for every design decision.

"I open Cockpit every morning and I feel overwhelmed before I've even started." — CSM, Enterprise segment, 22 accounts

No minimum viable landing state

The default view surfaced everything at once — hundreds of tasks with no indication of which actually required action today. CSMs had to manually scan to construct their own priority order.

Every edit required a page hop

Updating a task's due date, adding a note, or logging an outcome required navigating to a separate detail page — and then finding your way back. No inline editing existed anywhere in Cockpit.

Task detail lacked account context

The task detail view showed the task in isolation — no health score, no recent interactions, no renewal timeline. CSMs had to open three other tabs to understand what "call Marcus" actually meant.

Rigid list — no configurability

The Cockpit view couldn't be filtered, grouped, or sorted by anything meaningful. Every CSM saw the same interface regardless of their segment, workflow, or team structure.

Cluttered — Pain Points & Proposals

Unintuitive — Pain Points & Proposals

Three concepts before committing to one direction

We ran a two-week sprint exploring three distinct interaction models for the new Cockpit. Each was tested with 8 CSMs in moderated concept testing sessions before narrowing to a single direction.

Priority Hub

A two-zone layout with a smart "Today" summary card above the fold — surfacing only overdue and due-today tasks, with health indicators. The full queue lives below.

What tested well: CSMs immediately understood the "focus zone" concept. The separation felt meaningful.

What didn't land: The fold felt arbitrary — users wanted to control what appeared at the top, not rely on algorithmic curation.

Split Panel

A master-detail layout — the task list on the left, a persistent detail + context panel on the right. Clicking any task loaded full account context without a page change.

What tested well: Enterprise CSMs loved the rich context. The Strategist archetype responded strongly — "finally I can see why I'm supposed to call someone."

What didn't land: High-volume CSMs (The Processor) found the panel too heavy — they wanted to batch complete, not read context for each task.

Kanban View

A configurable board — tasks organized in swimlanes by status, risk tier, or custom saved groupings. Drag to complete, drag to reassign.

What tested well: The Coordinator archetype (CS Ops Leads) loved the team visibility. The board made workload distribution immediately legible.

What didn't land: Most CSMs found the board too abstract — they think in lists, not lanes. Heavy cognitive overhead for the core workflow.

Decision: We moved forward with a hybrid of Concepts A and B — a priority-aware list (Concept A's signal) with an optional slide-in detail panel (Concept B's context depth). The panel would be opt-in, not always-on, preserving speed for The Processor.

Four changes that transformed the experience

Solution 01

Minimum tasks on landing

The new Cockpit defaults to a curated "Focus" view — only tasks that are overdue, due today, or manually flagged as priority. The full queue is one click away, but the default state is calm and decisive. CSMs start their day with a manageable list that demands action, not a wall that causes decision paralysis.

The "full list" is still accessible — we didn't hide anything. We just changed what you see first. This distinction was critical in stakeholder alignment.

Solution 02

Inline editing

Every editable field — due date, assignee, status, outcome — is now editable directly in the list row. Click once to select, edit in place, Tab to the next field. A complete task interaction that previously required 4 page loads now happens without leaving the list.

Due Date Assignee Status Outcome Notes

Solution 03

Task detail view with account context

For tasks that need deeper context, a slide-in detail panel surfaces everything the CSM needs: health score trend, recent timeline entries, renewal date, and ARR — all without leaving Cockpit. The panel closes back to the list position, preserving scroll state.

Key insight from testing: CSMs didn't need the full account page — they needed 5 specific signals. The panel was designed around exactly those 5 fields, nothing more.

Solution 03 — Task detail slide-in panel

Solution 04

Custom task views

CSMs can now filter by segment, risk tier, task type, due date range, and assignee — and save any combination as a named view. Views are persistent across sessions and can be shared with teammates. The Coordinator archetype gained the team visibility they'd been maintaining in spreadsheets for years.

Segment Filter Risk Tier Task Type Saved Views Team Sharing