Designing a first-of-its-kind SaaS tool for CSR consultants

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the idea that a business has a responsibility to the society that exists around it.
Since end of 2024, Good Steps has been acquired by Sami, the leading decarbonization and environmental reporting platform, and is now integrated into their suite of offerings.
Everything has been designed in French.

Good Steps has significantly evolved since I began working with them in 2021. Initially conceived as a platform for displaying CSR diagnosis results to companies, it has transformed into a tool for CSR consultants. It now enables them to create a comprehensive CSR diagnosis using dedicated tools within the platform and share their findings with clients.

CSR consultants typically rely on generic tools like Google Sheets, Excel, pen and paper, Typeform, Google Forms, and PowerPoint to create their diagnoses, which can be cumbersome and inefficient.

I worked closely with the small team at Good Steps to shape the product’s vision and design direction, ensuring it met the unique needs of CSR professionals. From October 2021 to mid-2024, I led the design process and collaborated with the team one day per week to refine and enhance the platform.

What we did

Our goal was to streamline this process by allowing them to do the same within the GoodSteps platform.

They can now:

• Create a project for a client

• Choose which referential they want to use (based on European regulations for instance)

• Consult clients with specific questionnaires based on well-thought templates

• Analyse all the consultation answers, manually or with AI

• Build a global analysis depending on the client’s goals

• Share reports, actions and more.

This project has challenged me to find solutions for highly specific problems within this niche business. I had to gain a lot of knowledge of this industry, talk to clients, look at how they work today to find the best solutions.

Outcomes

Project management

Consultants can create a project within the platform where they can follow the project process, create tasks, based on templates.

Consultation tool

The platform enables users to create and distribute surveys to company employees and stakeholders, using official templates. It then provides tools to analyze the collected data, offering valuable insights for CSR assessments.

Analysis tool

Based on the results from the questionnaires, we created a lot of features that will help consultants analyse these results, by themes and keywords. The ultimate goal was for AI to choose to create and assign the right tags automatically to deliver the best results while letting consultants focus on more important matter.

Results visualization

Once everything has been analyzed, it's time to share the learnings to clients with various indicators.

Design for impact

The user experience improvements played a key role in validating the product and supporting its growth. After launching the MVP, the company raised €700k, saw a 44% increase in daily active users over four months, and was eventually acquired by SAMI, a leading ESG and decarbonization platform. The intuitive design and tailored workflows helped position the product as both credible and easy to adopt.