The operating system for Presales
PreSkale was building for a function that sits in the middle of some of the most important enterprise deals, but historically has not had much software built specifically around it: Presales. Solution consultants, sales engineers, and technical specialists often determine whether a complex B2B product actually gets through evaluation and into a customer’s hands.
But their work is fragmented. Customer requirements live in one place. Opportunity information lives in the CRM. Technical questions happen in Slack. Product gaps get discussed somewhere else. Demos, evaluations, and internal conversations create another layer of information. And once a deal closes, much of what the Presales team learned disappears into notes, documents, and individual memory.
PreSkale was trying to change that. The company was building an all-in-one Presales intelligence platform that connected Presales with Sales, Product, Customer Success, and the wider GTM organization. Its product covered activity management, resource allocation, playbooks, performance intelligence, and product-gap identification. It had previously raised $500K in pre-seed funding. When we joined, the opportunity was already interesting. But the way PreSkale looked and the way the product worked had not caught up with the ambition behind it. That is where we started.
We entered through the website
Our first problem was not the product. It was the company’s public story. PreSkale was operating inside a category many buyers still did not fully understand. Sales had Salesforce. Marketing had an enormous technology stack. Customer Success had dedicated platforms. Presales was still often operating between all of them.
So before touching the dashboard, we worked on how PreSkale explained itself. We rethought the website, content architecture, and design language. The goal was not simply to make the company look more polished. It was to make the category understandable. What is Presales intelligence? Who is the product for? Why isn’t a CRM enough? What information is Presales generating that the rest of the business is currently losing? And how could that information improve not just technical evaluations, but Sales, Product, and the wider GTM organization? Those questions shaped the new website.
A language that could survive beyond the marketing site
We updated the visual system around PreSkale and created a more coherent design language for the company. That mattered because we already knew the website would not be the end of the engagement. The brand needed to work inside the product — across dashboards, tables, opportunity views, analytics, new AI features, presentations, and future product modules.
Instead of treating the website and application as two separate design projects, we wanted them to feel like they belonged to the same company. That became particularly important when we moved into the product itself.
Then we opened the dashboard
The product was powerful. It was also dense. PreSkale was trying to represent an enormous amount of information around enterprise opportunities: deals, accounts, technical requirements, tasks, Presales activity, product gaps, stakeholders, evaluations, performance information, and increasingly, AI-generated intelligence.
Over time, features had accumulated. But there was not a sufficiently strong design system underneath them. The result was a dashboard that could do a lot but required too much cognitive work from the people using it. So we started rebuilding the experience from the system up.
We introduced a proper design system
Rather than redesigning screens individually, we created the foundations first. Components, patterns, typography, spacing, interaction states, tables, navigation, information hierarchy, and reusable structures for the different objects inside PreSkale.
That gave the product something it had not really had before: a visual and interaction grammar. New features no longer needed to invent their own interface every time. Design decisions became reusable. The product could expand without every expansion making the dashboard harder to understand. Once that foundation existed, we started redesigning the wider application around it.
The hardest problem was not visual
The deeper we went into the dashboard, the more interesting problem became obvious. Presales work is deeply nested. You start at an opportunity. Then you want to understand a requirement. That requirement might connect to a technical evaluation. That might expose a product gap. The product gap might connect to another piece of information. Very quickly, you have travelled several layers away from the deal you originally opened.
Traditional enterprise software handles this by navigating the user from page to page. Technically, that works. There were breadcrumbs. There was navigation. The user could always go backwards. But that was not really solving the problem. The issue was not “how do I go back?” It was “how do I go deeper without forgetting where I came from?”
We borrowed an interaction idea from Notion
We proposed a different model. Instead of treating every object as another destination, we treated deeper information as layers of context. A user could click into a Presales deal and open it in a side panel. Then click something inside that deal. Another layer could open. Then another. The interface could keep moving deeper without destroying the context underneath it.
It was inspired by the way tools like Notion allow information to open in overlays and side-peeks rather than constantly forcing users into entirely new pages. For PreSkale, that interaction was particularly useful. Presales is not linear. A solution engineer is constantly moving between the deal, the customer’s requirement, technical information, product feedback, and internal context. The interface needed to behave more like the way they actually think.
Then AI started becoming part of the product
While we were redesigning the platform, PreSkale was also beginning to introduce a new AI layer. This was not a separate chatbot bolted onto the product. The more interesting opportunity was using the information already being captured across Presales activity to generate useful intelligence.
PreSkale was sitting on valuable signals: what customers were asking for, why deals were slowing down, which product gaps appeared repeatedly, what happened in successful technical evaluations and in lost ones, which activities correlated with progress, and where Presales resources were being consumed. The product was evolving from simply organizing Presales work toward helping teams understand the patterns inside that work.
Our design system and redesigned information architecture needed to make room for that transition. AI could not simply become another box on an already crowded dashboard. It needed to fit naturally into the workflows where the underlying information already existed.
More than a Presales workspace
At first glance, it looked like software for managing Presales teams. The more we worked on it, the clearer the larger opportunity became. Presales sits in a unique position inside a B2B company. It hears customer requirements before Product does. It sees technical objections before Customer Success does. It knows which gaps are blocking revenue. It sees which evaluation patterns repeatedly lead to wins. And it participates in some of the richest customer conversations in the entire sales cycle.
PreSkale was trying to turn that activity into organizational intelligence. Public descriptions of the product reflected the same ambition: activity tracking, resource assignment, playbooks derived from won and lost deals, skill-based performance analytics, and product-gap identification that could feed insights back into Sales, Product, and GTM teams. That made our design problem much larger than making dashboards cleaner. We were helping create the interface through which that intelligence could become usable.
Six months later, the company was acquired
We worked with PreSkale for roughly six months. During that period, our involvement moved from website, to brand and content architecture, to design language, to product design, to design system, to interaction architecture, to new AI-driven product experiences. Then acquisition conversations began.
On December 17, 2024, Storylane announced its acquisition of PreSkale as part of its expansion into Presales. Storylane had built its business around interactive demo automation and was seeing growing demand from Presales teams. The acquisition gave it a way to move further into the function PreSkale had been building for. PreSkale founder Ajay Jayagopal joined Storylane following the deal. The acquisition price was not publicly disclosed.
We do not claim our redesign caused the acquisition. Companies are not acquired because someone made better side panels. But the timing mattered to us. We had spent six months helping PreSkale sharpen how the company presented itself, systematize its product design, and rethink how increasingly complex Presales intelligence should work inside the platform. Then the company entered its next chapter.
Why Storylane was a natural home
The strategic fit makes sense. Storylane helps companies create interactive product demos across the GTM journey. Presales teams are among the people who need those demos most. PreSkale understood the operational layer surrounding those teams: the opportunities they are supporting, the evaluations they are running, the requirements they are collecting, the product gaps they are discovering, and the patterns behind technical wins and losses.
Storylane publicly said the acquisition was part of its move deeper into the Presales market. So PreSkale’s destination also validated something about the category it had been building. Presales was not just a support function anymore. It was becoming software territory of its own.
Coherence between the story and the product
Over the engagement, we worked across brand refresh, website strategy and redesign, content architecture, visual design language, product UX, enterprise dashboard redesign, design-system architecture, navigation and information hierarchy, context-preserving side-panel interactions, Presales opportunity workflows, AI feature experiences, product intelligence surfaces, cross-functional workflows, and design foundations for future product expansion.
The most valuable part was not any single screen. It was creating more coherence between what PreSkale said it was becoming and what using PreSkale actually felt like.
What PreSkale changed for us
PreSkale reinforced something that has become increasingly important in the way we work. Complexity does not always need to be removed. Sometimes it cannot be. Presales is complex because enterprise deals are complex. There are genuinely many stakeholders, many requirements, many decisions, many dependencies. Trying to make the product “simple” by hiding all of that would have made it less useful.
The better problem was: how do we let someone move through complexity without losing their mental model? The side-panel system was one answer. The design system was another. The information architecture was another. And the emerging AI layer created an entirely new one. We did not make PreSkale smaller. We made the complexity easier to navigate.
Six months later, Storylane acquired the company. We entered through the website. We ended up inside the product. And by the time the company’s next chapter arrived, we had helped reshape both how PreSkale presented itself to the market and how its users experienced the intelligence inside it.
Questions
Did you only redesign the PreSkale website?
No. We entered through the website and ended up inside the product: brand, content architecture, enterprise dashboard, design system, Presales workflows, and AI feature experiences. Six months later, Storylane acquired the company.
Why not simplify the product?
Presales is complex because enterprise deals are complex. Hiding that complexity would have made the product less useful. The job was to let someone move through it without losing their mental model.
