D&B Hoovers: a cleaner, accessible sales tool, with AI where it helps
I cleaned up a cluttered sales-intelligence platform, made it accessible, and got a lot of teams to agree on it.
The context
D&B Hoovers is a business-intelligence platform sales and marketing teams use worldwide. Years of growth had layered on complexity: dense screens, deep navigation, and accessibility gaps that no one owned. The tool meant to speed reps up was slowing them down.
The people using it spend most of their day prospecting: building lists, scoring accounts, chasing intent signals under quota pressure. They did not need more features. They needed the features they had to get out of the way.
What I owned
I led design on the redesign, but the larger job was getting an organization to agree on what better meant, then holding the line on it.
Accessibility program, from nothing
No owner, no standard, no measurement when I started. I set the WCAG standard across products, stood up the working group, and produced VPATs for top-tier offerings. 8 to 10 product teams adopted it.
Full design-system adoption
Every product used pieces of the system; none had fully adopted it. I drove the prospecting platform to ingest it completely. Once it was fully on the system, we could enforce consistency and accessibility.
Design Governance Board
Redesign decisions had to survive review against the shared design system and the needs of other product lines. I sat on the board making and defending those calls.
AI integration, co-lead
Co-led AI in the prospecting workflow with the Sr. Director of Product. Mostly that meant saying no to AI where it didn't help.
"Time and again, Mike has shown he is someone willing to take charge and lead initiatives, especially the effort to overhaul our accessibility compliance process. Always willing to provide counsel and a great partner in brainstorming."Edward Garaña · Manager, Dun & Bradstreet
The constraints
An established design system and a governance board to align with. A legacy architecture that could not be rebuilt overnight. Accessibility that, until I made it a priority, had no owner driving it.
The decisions
Three calls made this redesign. I had to defend every one.
Removal over addition. Research said reps were overwhelmed. They had the features they needed. The hard part was holding that position when product wanted more data per screen. I cut the default view from hundreds of fields down to the 8 most users actually relied on, and let anyone who needed a different set build their own. Density that stakeholders were attached to had to go, and I made the case with footage of reps using it.
AI only where it fit the flow. The pressure was to add AI broadly because it was a company priority. I scoped it to the places it measurably helped, search and time-to-insight, and argued against putting agents on small tasks where they only added noise to a workflow that was already too noisy. AI earning its place was a decision I had to win more than once.
Accessibility in the components. I pushed to make conformance a property of the components and the governance review, so it could never be a cleanup pass at the end. That meant slowing some work down early to avoid rework later, which I had to justify to product management, who always pushed for more features.
The solution
The redesign pulled years of accumulated density out of the core prospecting workflow. Fewer choices per screen, a clearer hierarchy, and the most common actions always within reach. Four clicks to a buried action became one. AI search sat right inside that flow, so reps got answers without leaving what they were doing.
The outcome
The redesign and the accessibility program landed together. The task-speed numbers come from moderated user tests on a Figma prototype I built, around 10 participants per test. I set the baseline through my own timed runs and a competitive analysis, then re-ran the tests after each feature was designed and launched.
What I'd carry forward
The biggest wins came from removal. Reps wanted a calmer tool, and AI earned its place only where it fit the existing flow. If I ran it again I'd put the accessibility program and the redesign on one timeline from day one, so accessibility is built in from the start.
The other lesson was organizational. The design was the easy part. The harder work was alignment: sign-off from the Sr. Director of Product who owned it, five product managers, a VP of Engineering, and a Sr. Director of Engineering, each with their own priorities.