Collaborating across teams to integrate SAP Companion
Problem Statement: Citizen Developers, who rely on SAP Build Process Automation to streamline their workflows, often struggle to find timely and accurate information on features. At the time, information was fragmented across external tools, forcing users to leave their workflow to find answers. This disrupted productivity and made onboarding especially difficult.
Business Needs: To improve adoption and reduce friction, SAP Build Process Automation needed integrated in-app support. By bringing SAP Companion directly into the workflow, the goal was to lower support ticket volumes, shorten onboarding time, and provide users with contextual help at the moment of need.
My Role: I led cross-team coordination across UX, product, development, and user assistance: driving research synthesis, workflow mapping, and the integration strategy that brought SAP Companion into the product.
Timeline: 6 months
Discovery Phase
Leveraging SAP Companion: We started by mapping what already existed: tooltips, external documentation, community forums: all outside the product. After evaluating these against user need and maintenance cost, SAP Companion was the only option that could be embedded, context-sensitive, and sustained by an existing content team. I drove the cross-team alignment to make the integration viable.
Evaluating Current Solutions: The workshop revealed something teams hadn't seen before: each team knew their piece was broken, but the full scope of fragmentation only became visible when we put it on one map. That shared picture is what aligned everyone on the integration direction.
Workshop and Strategy
Problem Shaping Workshop: During an internal quality sprint, we mapped the full help landscape with stakeholders. Early on, the development team proposed scoping this as a simple external link: faster to ship, no content pipeline needed. The mapping exercise made the case against it: external links would have reproduced the exact fragmentation we were trying to solve.
User Journey: The analysis highlighted opportunities to reduce redundant help offerings and centralize support within SAP Companion. By refining user flows and aligning solutions, we developed a focused strategy for integrating SAP Companion as the primary help feature.
Evaluative Study and Handover
User Testing: We tested with internal subject matter experts: a constraint given the timeline, not the ideal audience. All participants completed tasks, but the sessions surfaced real gaps: missing content for several key scenarios and help panel placement that caused confusion in two flows. Those findings shaped the handover brief to the SAP Companion UX team.
Handover: With testing insights incorporated, SAP Companion was successfully launched. The User Assistance team took ownership of content delivery, establishing a continuous cycle of release notes and in-app help.
Learnings: The biggest insight was how much the fragmentation problem was invisible until mapped: teams were aware of individual gaps but hadn't seen the full picture until the journey mapping workshop. It also reinforced that integration work lives or dies on alignment: without cross-team buy-in early, the feature would have shipped without the content pipeline needed to make it useful.
Credits
Initial explorations in collaboration with: Jonas Placzek and Jaroslav Bauer
Disclaimer: All images shown use mock data.
Next project
Redesigning process modeling for efficiency and adoption