Autodesk, 2019
Unifying qualitative data at scale
The Problem
Business Problem
- Qualitative customer data was scattered across seven platforms — Salesforce, Qualtrics, PowerBI, Lithium, and others — each requiring per‑user licenses that made broad access prohibitively expensive.
- None of these sources could be combined into a single view, leaving the organization with a fractured picture of customer issues that made it difficult to prioritize projects with confidence.
User Problem
- Because access was so limited, teams that needed qualitative insight had to request specific queries from user researchers, a process that extended every project cycle.
- Without a unified view of all customer comments, anyone could cherry‑pick a handful of quotes to reinforce their own priorities — anecdotes carried the same weight as patterns.
Impact
What I Did
Our existing customer journey taxonomy was only being used for support cases. I recognized it could segment any qualitative data source. I proved it at the 2019 Autodesk hackathon by running several data sets through the taxonomy and demonstrating that any qualitative data could be organized and filtered using the same framework.
The win earned executive sponsorship to build it into a full product. I led it as both designer and product owner across a 12‑person team across design, engineering, and data science. I designed the data framework with taxonomy classification and sentiment tagging across all seven sources, including site surveys, forum posts, community threads, and support cases. Anyone could then slice the data by journey phase, product, sentiment, and time without needing a data analyst.
The dashboard democratized access to qualitative data across Autodesk, eliminating the need for individual platform licenses and giving data analysts time back for complex work. It was used by hundreds of employees monthly across Autodesk’s 10,000‑person organization and changed how teams made evidence‑based decisions.
Try It
This is a functional rebuild of the production tool. Real architecture, real interactions, dummy data. Mathematical accuracy not guaranteed.
Interactive data visualization
View on a larger screen to interact with the full Journey Explorer demo.