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 Scope
Cross-functional collaboration
—Coordinated a cross-functional team of 20 across backend, frontend, and product management, as the sole designer
—Drove alignment through wireframes first, before a single screen was built
—Kept a solo design voice from becoming a bottleneck on a 20-person build
—Owned the redesign end to end, from strategy through final handoff
Critical Product Decisions
01
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.
02
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.
03
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
Every screen - dashboard, rules, targets, games, achievements - mapped on paper before Figma.
before · zoho motivator
The original dashboard - fixed dark cards, hardcoded point values, nothing a manager could configure.
after · sales motivator dashboard
The redesigned dashboard - rules, targets, and live games surfaced together, all configurable.
the rules engine
The rule builder itself - AND/OR criteria, and a choice between flat points or record-fields-as-points.
achievements & leaderboards
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 over 3 months, then built by a 20-person cross-functional team over 6 - 9 months end to end.
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 users can define their own rules, you're not just designing screens - you're designing a logic system 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