SMS Sales, Responses
Postscript
Background & Objectives
Postscript made a strategic bet on conversational selling: using human sales associates to engage subscribers over SMS and drive revenue. This initiative, later called SMS Sales, had the potential to become a major pillar of the business.
I joined as the sole designer to help define what this product could be, starting from an experience that wasn’t built for this use case at all.
Challenge
The existing messaging experience (“Responses”) was designed for lightweight, reactive conversations—not for:
High-volume outbound messaging
Sales-driven workflows
Context-rich interactions
Sales associates needed to move quickly, personalize outreach, and manage multiple conversations at once, but the product lacked the structure and context to support this.
The core question became:
What does a workspace for conversational selling actually look like?
Role
I was the sole designer across discovery and definition, and partnered with Product, Engineering, and Sales leadership to further define the problem space and validate design direction. I also led research with internal sales associates and managers and translated sales workflows into product direction.
Context is key
I spent time with in-house sales associates to understand how they were working in practice. My goal was to find out:
What slowed them down
How they managed conversations
What information they needed to sell effectively
A consistent theme emerged:
Context was the difference between a generic message and a successful sale.
At the same time, I drew on my experience in shared inbox systems (Help Scout) and explored adjacent tools like CRMs to understand how other products handled high-volume communication, routing and ownership, and contextual data.
Design Direction: Context-Driven Selling
As I began to put pen to paper, I focused on a core idea to guide my direction:
Give sales associates the context they need, where and when they need it.
This meant rethinking the inbox as more than a message thread, and instead as a workspace for decision-making.
Key directions included:
Surfacing relevant subscriber data directly in the conversation
Supporting faster replies through saved responses and macros
Exploring routing and ownership models for scaling conversations across a sales team
Designing for both speed (high volume) and personalization
Exploration & Prototyping
Because the product was still being defined, much of my work focused on making ideas tangible quickly to get feedback and drive the conversation forward. Some motions that helped with this phase:
Creating visual wireframes to communicate direction across teams
Building prototypes to explore different interaction patterns
Using these artifacts to align stakeholders and drive product decisions
For example, I explored a mobile-first version of the sales inbox, testing patterns for:
Saved replies and macros
Conversation routing
Managing conversations on the go
These prototypes helped clarify tradeoffs and shape the direction of the product.
Outcome & Reflection
This work helped define the foundation for what became SMS Sales and influenced how Postscript approached conversational selling as a product space.
While SMS Sales as a product is being sunset, the project remains a strong example of:
Designing in ambiguous, 0→1 spaces
Translating real-world workflows into product systems
Introducing structure and context into underpowered tools
Using design artifacts to align teams and shape strategy
The project also helped inform Postscript’s AI selling solution, Shopper, which employs some of the same strategies that were successful in SMS Sales.