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Turning a fixed dashboard into a rules engine sales teams could configure

Sales Motivator ran on hardcoded point values and a dashboard nobody could customize. I rebuilt it around a criteria-based rules engine — the same one that now powers games, targets, and leaderboards.

Product

Sales Motivator (formerly Zoho Motivator)

Role

Solo Designer — coordinated cross-functional build

Team

20 (Backend, Frontend, PM) — design was solo

Duration

~3 Months

Platform

Zoho CRM

Business Context

Sales Motivator turns sales activity into points, games, and leaderboards.

It's Zoho CRM's gamification layer — leads created, calls made, deals won all feed into targets, games, and team leaderboards. It runs on top of Zoho CRM, the same platform running for 250,000+ businesses worldwide.

The Problem

The original dashboard was fixed. Nobody could configure it.

Point values, KPIs, and rules were hardcoded into the old product. If a sales manager's incentive structure didn't match what shipped, there was no way to shape it — you were stuck with whatever the product assumed your team looked like.

Constraints

—Rule logic needed arbitrary AND/OR conditions without turning into a coding interface for non-technical sales managers

—Games, Targets, Achievements, and Contests all needed to plug into the same logic — not four separate one-off systems

—Any redesign had to carry forward whatever rules customers had already configured in the old dashboard

My Leadership Role

I was the only designer. I still had to drive alignment across 20 people.

I initiated the redesign myself, starting from paper wireframes across every screen, and was the sole product designer on it — right from strategy through to final handoff. But shipping it meant coordinating a cross-functional team of 20 across backend, frontend, and product management, driving the project with enough clarity that a solo design voice didn't become a bottleneck.

Leadership

Initiated the redesign Solo design ownership Coordinated 20-person build team Cross-functional (backend, frontend, PM) Wireframe-first process

Key Product Decisions

Built a criteria-based rule builder

Replaced hardcoded point values with a rule builder combining module + action + AND/OR conditions, so any team's incentive logic could be modeled without engineering involvement.

Two ways to compute points

A flat value per record for simple cases, or the record's own fields — like deal amount — as the point value, for teams that wanted revenue-weighted incentives.

One rules engine, four consumers

Games, Targets, Achievements, and Contests all read from the same rule engine instead of duplicating logic per module — change a rule once, it updates everywhere it's used.

Execution

Every screen was paper-wireframed first — dashboard, rule builder, targets, games, achievements — before any of it reached Figma. The redesign moved the product from a fixed, dark dashboard to a modular, configurable interface built around the rules engine underneath.

Evidence

process · paper wireframes

Hand-drawn paper wireframes for Sales Motivator — dashboard, rules, targets, games, achievements

Every screen — dashboard, rules, targets, games, achievements — mapped on paper before Figma.

before · zoho motivator

The old Zoho Motivator dashboard — fixed, hardcoded KPI cards

The original dashboard — fixed dark cards, hardcoded point values, nothing a manager could configure.

after · sales motivator dashboard

The redesigned Sales Motivator dashboard — rules, targets, and ongoing games in one view

The redesigned dashboard — rules, targets, and live games surfaced together, all configurable.

the rules engine

Create New Rule — criteria-based points computation with AND conditions

The rule builder itself — AND/OR criteria, and a choice between flat points or record-fields-as-points.

achievements & leaderboards

Achievements and leaderboards, powered by the same rule engine

Achievements and leaderboards — same underlying rules, surfaced as recognition instead of raw numbers.

Outcome

Scope

Shipped as the redesigned Sales Motivator experience within Zoho CRM — the rules engine now powers Games, Targets, Achievements, and Contests from one place instead of four. Designed solo, built by a 20-person cross-functional team, in roughly 3 months.

Third-party, not self-reported

★★★★

"Keeping the Sales Team trucking toward monthly goals is a breeze!"

Khashi Rahmani — Territory Manager in Sales, EasyRx

★★★★

"Motivation is equal to Productivity which is gained by Zoho Motivator."

Verified user

★★★★

"New way of starting professional work."

Jaynesh Sindhu — Google Adwords Expert in Marketing, ShowMeLeads Inc

★★★★★

"More than just badges."

Verified user — Administrative Assistant in Sales

Real Trustpilot reviews of Zoho Motivator — unedited, star ratings approximate.

Reflection

Configurability is its own kind of complexity. The moment you let users define their own rules, you're not just designing screens anymore — you're designing a small logic system that non-engineers need to reason about without breaking it.

Other Contributions at Zoho

Sales Motivator wasn't the only thing I owned there.

—Managed a team of 3 designers, separate from the Sales Motivator work

—Solo-designed the Zoho CPQ builder, and a separate automation rule engine for it

—Identified and initiated the overhaul of Zoho CRM's design system — a 10-year-old system nobody had touched

Turning a fixed dashboard into a rules engine sales teams could configure

Sales Motivator turns sales activity into points, games, and leaderboards.

The original dashboard was fixed. Nobody could configure it.

I was the only designer. I still had to drive alignment across 20 people.

Happy to walk through how we scoped the rule-engine change — it's a good one for a longer conversation.