LUMEN MARKETPLACE CASE STUDY

Transforming Enterprise Sales into a Self-Service Marketplace

  • Lumen Marketplace: From a custom hard-coded mess to a clean, fast, and design system-based solution.
  • Simon says 'No': Sales reps named the wait spinner ‘Simon’ because it forced them to just sit and wait. And wait. And wait...
  • User Task Alignment: I flipped the experience to be service-based, leveraged Salesforce Lightning, and cut quoting time by 70%. Sales finally had a tool that worked the way they worked.
  • North Star Vision: I turned research into click-through prototypes in XD. Stakeholders aligned instantly, and momentum skyrocketed.
  • Fighting for Simplicity (DIA): I challenged teams to hide 80% of unused attributes. Instead, the product would be focused on the ‘most of the time’ case without losing power.
  • Lumen Marketplace Today: Still live in 2025. Still matches my original mockups. Now powering 1,000+ NaaS customers.

Act I – Streamlining Digital Quoting to Boost Sales Speed-to-Quote by 70%

I was embedded with the Scenario Manager team to address critical usability issues with their quoting tool. The existing system was a major pain point for the enterprise sales team, plagued by a cluttered UI and a slow, backwards workflow.

The system was so painfully slow that sales reps nicknamed the persistent loading spinner "Simon" as a joke. The workflow was equally frustrating, requiring reps to start with location before service, which was completely backwards from their sales process and demanded tribal knowledge to navigate. As the lead for the redesign, I focused on fixing the core problems with the tool.

Goals:

  1. Kill Simon – dev pivoted to use asynchronous backend calls + refactoring that made the system feel much more responsive.
  2. Service-first flow – mirrored how reps actually sell, flipping from feature-based to service-oriented configuration.
  3. Simplify complex products – expose only what matters for the “most of the time” use case, while tucking edge-case features into advanced options.

The result: 70% faster time-to-task. Sales finally had a tool that worked the way they worked. I was recognized at a multiple all-hands meetings, and soon after I got the call:

👉 “We want you to define the North Star for an all-new customer self-service Marketplace.”

ROLE

Lead Product Designer
(UX team of 12)

RESPONSIBILITIES

End-to-End UX & UI Design Process, Design System

COLLABORATORS

10+ teams around the world: UX Design, Customer Experience (CX), Product, Marketing, Legal, QA, Engineering, Design Systems, and Senior Leadership

TOOLS

Axure RP, UXPin, Adobe XD, Figma, Jira, Confluence

Lumen Marketplace PI Planning session.

Act II – The Marketplace North Star

At first, the Marketplace ask was exploratory: show leadership what a self-service future could look like. The plan:

  1. Partner with CX + UX researchers to gather data.
  2. Streamlined journey maps, personas, etc, ("too long, didn't read!") by interpreting research into full-fidelity XD prototypes.
  3. Leverage UserTesting.com for fast validation.

Suddenly, boring diagrams, data, and spreadsheets transformed into something stakeholders could see and click through. That alignment gave the project momentum, and it became a formal PI initiative.

PI planning kicked off with a series of workshops to define the vision, goals, and success metrics for the Lumen Marketplace. We determined:

BUSINESS NEED

“We need to reduce sales friction, scale revenue through self-service, and position Lumen as a modern digital-first provider competing with AWS and Azure marketplaces.”

USER NEED

“I want to buy and configure enterprise internet services as easily as shopping online, without needing a sales rep or insider telecom knowledge.”


My user experience principles for the project:

  1. Speed is the experience – faster than sales-led, always quick, and responsive.
  2. Mirror the sales conversation – service-oriented configuration in the order that the customer expects.
  3. Design systems are vital, little-to-no custom code – strict adherence to the Lumen Chi design system (for consumer-facing) and Salesforce Lightning (for internal sales).
  4. Prototype to prove it – every debate tested visually in Adobe XD.
  5. Use plain customer language – not telco-speak, or "industry" acronyms / jargon.
Lumen Marketplace PI Planning session. PI planning affinity mapping.
PROBLEM TO SOLVE 🤔

Lumen’s sales process was stuck in the past: complex quoting tools, slow back-end systems, and workflows that made sense only to insiders. Sales reps wasted time wrestling with configuration screens, and customers had no way to buy directly without engaging a rep.

To compete in a digital-first market against cloud giants like AWS and Azure, Lumen needed a self-service Marketplace that could simplify highly complex telecom products into fast, consumer-grade buying flows, while still supporting enterprise-scale flexibility.

Act II (cont.) – Fighting for Simplicity

One of the toughest battles was simplifying the Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) product. Historically, sales saw every feature exposed. As it turns out, about 80% of which were corner cases.

  1. THE OLD MINDSET

    “The DIA product offering is so powerful because of its features, we have to show everything.”


I reframed the flow around the “most of the time” use case, hiding edge-case configs. It took persistence, but prototypes proved we could simplify without losing flexibility. With the help of amazing partners across the Lumen organization, we managed to shorten the entire end-to-end DIA product delivery cycle to the customer.

  1. THE NEW MINDSET

    “Power through simplicity: default to what 80% of customers need.”

    “Design for the sales call, not the product catalog.”

    “Complexity belongs under the hood, not on the customer’s screen.”

Lumen Dedicated Internet Access simplified. Lumen Dedicated Internet Access simplified.

DIA SIMPLIFIED + 2025 USER FEEDBACK

The DIA Product Manager said it best:

“Paul has been instrumental in developing mockups for DIA… He has challenged the various teams to consider change to the DIA product itself while taking in stride challenges to himself to change the marketplace experience.”

Avatar for Owen Hawbaker Owen Hawbaker, Lead Product Manager (DIA)

Act III – Launch & Impact

The internal quoting redesign was so successful, I was asked to merge the internal Digital Quoting tool (Salesforce Lightning design system) with the external Marketplace buy flows (Lumen Chi design system). I made them close enough to feel seamless, even across two different design systems.

After a year-long North Star design effort, and then a seemingly impossible sub-six month release schedule, the Lumen Marketplace was launched. We acheieved:

A TRUE SELF-SERVE DIGITAL MARKETPLACE

For a company built on legacy telco processes, this was a seismic shift. Customers no longer needed insider knowledge or long sales cycles to get started: they could browse, configure, price, and purchase directly. For Lumen, it meant faster revenue recognition, reduced sales friction, and a modern customer experience that put them in the same conversation as digital-native competitors like AWS and Azure.

ONGOING SUCCESS & REVENUE

By 2025, Lumen publicly reported 1,000+ customers on its Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platform, a milestone that marked the shift from telco legacy to digital-first provider. The Lumen Marketplace wasn’t just another UX project; it became the visible proof point of Lumen’s transformation strategy. For me, it was validating to see the principles we fought for show up not just in design files and deliverables, but in corporate strategy and customer adoption at scale.

TRUE TO MY DESIGN

Years later, the Marketplace buy flows still mirror my original mockups almost pixel-for-pixel: a rare outcome in enterprise UX. It’s proof that the vision we set was strong enough to endure, guiding not just the launch but the platform’s ongoing evolution.

Handing over DIA mockups to development in Figma Lumen Marketplace live in 2025

DEV HANDOFF IN FIGMA + LUMEN MARKETPLACE LIVE

A series of five design iterations showing the evolution of the Gen AI summaries feature.

Handoff to development was often challenging and required a lot of detailed documentation and communication.

Act IV – Reflection: My Differentiator

I try to avoid UX theater, unnecessary deliverables, and general inefficiency. My strength is turning research into working flows fast, aligning cross-functional teams, and pushing products over the finish line.

  1. 1. Vision

    I set bold direction. I establish a North Star for my projects that cuts through complexity and gets teams aligned on what matters most.

  2. 2. Momentum

    By prototyping in real time, I bring research to life quickly. I co-design with teams so decisions happen in minutes, not weeks.

  3. 3. Simplicity

    I push to keep products usable. When complexity creeps in, I protect the customer experience by focusing on the “most of the time” cases and tucking edge cases away.

  4. 3. Scale

    I leverage existing design systems, and encourage avoiding custom solutions. I ground my work in proven design systems so they ship faster, stay consistent, and sustain over time.


That’s why the Lumen Marketplace became more than just a project. It became a flagship for Lumen’s digital transformation.

Product design isn’t about pretty deliverables. It’s about getting teams aligned, building real software, and shipping experiences that stick.

Paul in a design meeting Lumen Marketplace live in 2025
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