2020 — 2024
HP 1CPQ Product Design Team
Building a global high-performance team from scratch
Context
In 2020 I joined HP Inc. as the sole UX designer on the 1CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) team inside the Commercial organisation. The workload was manageable at first. But as CPQ set out to deliver more products and more features for HP partners, the need for more designers stopped being a matter of opinion.
The team serves external users — HP resellers and distributors — and internal ones, HP sales representatives among them. The objective is that every market adopts the tools successfully, with a shorter turnaround time behind them, so business runs smoother for HP partners.
This study is about the part that was never drawn in Figma: making the case for a design team with the evidence to carry it, and then building one from the ground up — global, and remote.
Outcome & Impact
1 → 7
Designers on the team
From one in 2020 to seven by 2024, across Config, Price, Quote and Sales Experience.
2,856 hrs
Clocked in six months
By two designers, against the 1,440 hours a healthy six months holds.
4,545.5 hrs
Forecast, the eight after
59% more than the six months behind it. This is the number the headcount case rested on.
14 of 28
Epics deployed
Shipped to production across PI 5 and PI 6, March to November 2021.
Measuring workload
In 2020 the CPQ team moved product development onto agile. Each stream runs on a Product Increment as its release train, and every PI carries many projects at many scopes — a feature improvement in one, a whole new product for a new business in the next.
So I started counting. From September 2020 to February 2021 I logged the hours my design partner — who joined two months after me — and I actually spent, project by project, as the foundation for forecasting the PIs ahead. What came back was not a matter of feeling stretched: two designers were carrying a headcount ratio of 3.97 against HP’s own healthy ceiling of 3.0.
Projects breakdown
To forecast the next six months — two PIs — from the six behind us, every project first had to be sized. I sorted them into three tiers by the hours they take over a six-month window.
Two designers should ideally clock 1,440 hours over that window: 120 hours a month, each, for six months. We clocked 2,856. The team was over-utilised by 1,416 hours — a second team’s worth of work, absorbed by the two people already there.
Large scale
501 hrs +
Over six months — more than two Product Increments of a single stream.
Medium scale
251 – 500 hrs
Over the same six months.
Small scale
Up to 250 hrs
Over the same six months, averaging 80.
Healthy load, 2 designers · Any six months
1,440 hrs
Clocked · Sep 2020 – Feb 2021
2,856 hrs
Forecast · Mar – Oct 2021
4,545.5 hrs
Large scale
501 hrs and above
- Opportunity creation
- 744 hrs
- cMPS
- 96 hrs
- Supplies (SBD)
- 168 hrs
- One Config
- 204 hrs
- Product Finder integration
- 456 hrs
- HP CPQ design system
- 456 hrs
Medium scale
251 – 500 hrs
- Business justification form
- 60 hrs
- IQ Deals
- 264 hrs
Small scale
Up to 250 hrs
- IQ Leasing
- 156 hrs
- Smart FYA email
- 84 hrs
- Pre-OPG sync-back
- 12 hrs
- Quoter page, channel & direct
- 12 hrs
- Direct design improvements, APJ & AMS
- 144 hrs
Total, two designers
2,856 hrs
Forecast
Pricing each project at the floor of its tier — the minimum for large and medium scale, the 80-hour average for small — the same two designers were on course to clock 4,545.5 hours between March and October 2021. That is 59% more than the six months behind us had already cost, and those six months were the ones that broke the ratio.
The forecast is what turned the ask into arithmetic: two more designers, needed for large-scale work like the Quoter landing page redesign and UI/UX governance, neither of which had anyone to give it to.
Large scale
7 x 501 hrs
- Opportunity creation
- PI 5
- cMPS
- PI 5, PI 6
- Supplies
- PI 6
- One Config
- PI 5, PI 6
- Product Finder integration
- PI 5
- UI/UX governance
- Not on a PI
- Quoter landing page redesign
- PI 6
Medium scale
3.5 x 251 hrs
- Business justification form
- PI 5
- EUV automisation
- PI 5, PI 6
- IQ Deals
- PI 5
Small scale
2 x 80 hrs
- IQ Leasing
- PI 5, PI 6
- Smart FYA
- PI 5, PI 6
Forecast, March – October 2021
4,545.5 hrs
Result
Management approved the headcount, and chose to grow the team step by step rather than all at once. Here is where March to November 2021 landed.
Grow
By 2024 the CPQ design team had gone from one designer to seven, with each workstream — Config, Price and Quote — served by name, and Sales Experience (MyCRM) added as a fourth focus. The map below is how we kept that legible: every program in the ecosystem, and the designers standing behind it.
