Ryan Scott
Product Designer
Pulse AI
Replacing an overwhelming flood of case-update emails with an AI-summarized, role-aware digest — now CommandLink's top-selling and most-used Pro feature.
CommandLink
Quick read
3 min
Full story
8+ min
DURATION
10 Months -> July 2025 - May 2026
ROLE
Product Designer
TEAM
10 Engineers · 1 PM · 1 EM
STAKEHOLDERS
COO, CRO, CFO, VP of Sales, VP of Serivce Delivery + VP of Customer Success
00 – PROJECT OVERVIEW
Too many emails, not enough signal
Whitecap's team got 300 to 1,500 emails over a weekend, mostly status updates. Express found roughly 85% of their alerts were outside their area of responsibility. Same complaint, different causes.
Project Goal
Give every account a way to define what "important" means for their team · Summarize, don't suppress — cut volume without hiding information · Keep AI's data access bounded and explainable · Ship inside the Pro tier as a premium differentiator, not a bolt-on setting
53%
Customer adoption rate
38
New Pro accounts since launch
6+ min
Save per user, per login
03 – OPPORTUNITY
This wasn't a frequency problem
Letting users pick hourly, daily, or weekly emails would have cut volume, not noise. The real problem was who was getting alerts that had nothing to do with their role, so the opportunity was to let AI decide what mattered to each person.
04 – PROCESS + KEY DECISIONS
The moments that shaped it
Renaming the feature changed the design brief
"User Notification Preferences" invited a settings screen. "Pulse AI" invited a dashboard with its own metrics, so I redesigned around a Pro Menu destination instead of another row in account settings.
Drawing the line on what AI could see
The AI summary reads only public comments and notes visible to the customer, never internal-only conversation. Customers had to trust what lands in their inbox, so I designed that boundary in from the start.
One filter, two completely different jobs
I'd designed one account-wide frequency setting. Customer conversations showed leadership and the NOC needed the same data filtered in opposite directions, so I rebuilt policies around per-user, per-role assignment.
Breaking the PRD into a handoff engineering could actually build against
With 10 engineers building at once, I helped turn the PRD into 175 engineering cases, each with its own acceptance criteria and dependencies.
Configure once, receive an AI-summarized digest grouped by location — not a raw feed of every case update.
07 – FINAL DESIGN
A dashboard that explains itself, not just alerts
Pulse AI ships as a new Pro Menu destination: a dashboard with account-level metrics, a Configure tab for creating policies, a Summary History, and a case summary email grouped by location with an AI summary of what changed.
08 – OUTCOMES + IMPACT
The numbers stakeholders actually track
The top-selling and most-used Pro feature every month since April 2026, with email volume down sharply as customers tune what they subscribe to.
$143K
PRO MRC
Monthly recurring revenue tied to Pro accounts signed since Pulse AI's release.
$+23K
PRO MRC
Incremental MRC added in a single month from new Pro
sign-ups.
EMAIL VOLUME
Sharp drop as users self-customize how much they subscribe to — the intended outcome from day one.
#1
TOP PRO FEATURE
Best-selling and most-used Pro feature every month since April 2026.
09 – TAKEAWAYS
What I'm taking forward
Renaming a feature can reframe the entire design problem.
One filter can't serve two different jobs.
AI trust boundaries have to be designed before the AI ships.
Pulse AI
Replacing an overwhelming flood of case-update emails with an AI-summarized, role-aware digest — now CommandLink's top-selling and most-used Pro feature.
CommandLink
Quick read
3 min
Full story
8+ min
Project Goal
Give every account a way to define what "important" means for their team · Summarize, don't suppress — cut volume without hiding information · Keep AI's data access bounded and explainable · Ship inside the Pro tier as a premium differentiator, not a bolt-on setting
DURATION
10 Months -> July 2025 - May 2026
ROLE
Product Designer
TEAM
10 Engineers · 1 PM · 1 EM
STAKEHOLDERS
COO, CRO, CFO, VP of Sales, VP of Serivce Delivery + VP of Customer Success
00 – PROJECT OVERVIEW
Too many emails, not
enough signal
Whitecap's team got 300 to 1,500 emails over a weekend, mostly status updates. Express found roughly 85% of their alerts were outside their area of responsibility. Same complaint, different causes.
53%
Customer adoption rate
38
New Pro accounts since launch
6+ min
Save per user, per login
04 – PROCESS + KEY DECISIONS
The moments that shaped it
Renaming the feature changed the design brief
"User Notification Preferences" invited a settings screen. "Pulse AI" invited a dashboard with its own metrics, so I redesigned around a Pro Menu destination instead of another row in account settings.
Drawing the line on what AI could see
The AI summary reads only public comments and notes visible to the customer, never internal-only conversation. Customers had to trust what lands in their inbox, so I designed that boundary in from the start.
One filter, two completely different jobs
I'd designed one account-wide frequency setting. Customer conversations showed leadership and the NOC needed the same data filtered in opposite directions, so I rebuilt policies around per-user, per-role assignment.
Breaking the PRD into a handoff engineering could actually build against
With 10 engineers building at once, I helped turn the PRD into 175 engineering cases, each with its own acceptance criteria and dependencies.
Configure once, receive an AI-summarized digest grouped by location — not a raw feed of every case update.
03 – OPPORTUNITY
This wasn't a frequency problem
Letting users pick hourly, daily, or weekly emails would have cut volume, not noise. The real problem was who was getting alerts that had nothing to do with their role, so the opportunity was to let AI decide what mattered to each person.
07 – FINAL DESIGN
A dashboard that explains
itself, not just alerts
Pulse AI ships as a new Pro Menu destination: a dashboard with account-level metrics, a Configure tab for creating policies, a Summary History, and a case summary email grouped by location with an AI summary of what changed.
08 – OUTCOMES + IMPACT
The numbers stakeholders actually track
The top-selling and most-used Pro feature every month since April 2026, with email volume down sharply as customers tune what they subscribe to.
$143K
PRO MRC
Monthly recurring revenue tied to Pro accounts signed since Pulse AI's release.
$23K
AUGUST GROWTH
Incremental MRC added in a single month from new Pro sign-ups.
#1
TOP PRO FEATURE
Best-selling and most-used Pro feature every month since April 2026.
EMAIL DROP
Sharp drop as users self-customize how much they subscribe to — the intended outcome from day one.
NOTE
38 new Pro accounts have signed since release, with existing non pro customers increasingly asking about the feature's capabilities.