183 - Part II: Designing with the Flow of Work: Accelerating Sales in B2B Analytics and AI Products by Minimizing Behavior Change

About this episode

This episode explores how designing for user workflows can accelerate sales in B2B analytics and AI products by improving user experience outcomes.

In this second part of my three-part series (catch Part I via episode 182), I dig deeper into the key idea that sales in commercial data products can be accelerated by designing for actual user workflows—vs. going wide with a “many-purpose” AI and analytics solution that “does more,” but is misaligned with how users’ most important work actually gets done. To explain this, I will explain the concept of user experience (UX) outcomes, and how building your solution to enable these outcomes may be a dependency for you to get sales traction, and for your customer to see the value of your solution. I also share practical steps to improve UX outcomes in commercial data products, from establishing a baseline definition of UX quality to mapping out users’ current workflows (and future ones, when agentic AI changes their job). Finally, I talk about how approaching product development as small “bets” helps you build small, and learn fast so you can accelerate value creation. Highlights/ Skip to: Continuing the journey: designing for users, workflows, and tasks (00:32) How UX impacts sales—not just usage and adoption(02:16) Understanding how you can leverage users’ frustrations and…

People in this episode

Host: Brian T. O’Neill

Topics covered

• B2B sales
• user experience
• analytics
• AI products
• workflow design
• UX outcomes

Keywords

• sales acceleration
• user workflows
• UX quality
• commercial data products
• product development

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Designing for Analytics

More episodes of Experiencing Data w/ Brian T. O’Neill

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• 195 - Buyers Block: Why Your B2B Analytics or AI Product's POC Didn't Close · May 26, 2026 · 27 min
• 194 - AI for BI: Juan Sequeda on Preparing Your Analytics to Work With LLMs · May 12, 2026 · 50 min
• 193 - Faster…or Better? Creating Value with Blue Ocean Thinking and AI-Powered Product Development · April 28, 2026 · 24 min
• 192 – Product Usage Does Not = Value: Why “Adoption” Metrics Are Misleading You · April 15, 2026 · 47 min
• 191 - Turning Agents into Software that Sells [Smarter!] with Zig.ai CEO Steve Ancheta · April 1, 2026 · 43 min