A story of Mariam, a buyer drowning in low-value requests and the radical rethink her company needed.
The Problem: Meet Mariam
Mariam is a procurement professional at a Fortune 500 company, but her typical Tuesday doesn’t look like strategic sourcing or high-stakes supplier negotiations. Instead, she’s drowning in a sea of mundane requests: HDMI cables for the marketing team, coffee pods for the executive floor, USB drives for an upcoming conference, replacement office chairs, and branded water bottles for a client event.
Her inbox overflows with emails and spreadsheet attachments. Each seemingly simple request requires review, approval, sourcing, and processing. The irony? Her company invested heavily in an internal marketplace—a sophisticated B2B procurement platform designed to eliminate exactly this bottleneck. The vision was clear: empower employees to “self-procure” routine, low-value items and free up buyers like Mariam for strategic work.
But the reality is starkly different. The platform sits largely unused while Mariam remains the go-to person for everything from staplers to software licenses.
The feedback from employees is consistent and frustrating:
- “The prices are too high compared to what I can find online”
- “The selection is limited and outdated”
- “It’s honestly just easier to email Mariam directly”
So despite millions invested in procurement technology, Mariam finds herself right back where she started—as the human bottleneck in an increasingly automated world.
The Lightbulb Moment: An Unlikely Source of Inspiration
One evening after another exhausting day of processing routine purchase requests, Mariam finds herself unwinding with TikTok. As she scrolls through her feed, something strikes her about the experience. The content feels effortless—15-second videos that somehow capture exactly what she needs to see. She’s not actively searching for anything specific, yet the algorithm serves up content that feels personally curated. The discovery is seamless, the consumption is instant, and the engagement feels natural rather than forced.
Then it hits her: “Why can’t our procurement marketplace work like this?”
The question seems almost absurd at first. What could a social media platform possibly teach a multinational corporation about enterprise procurement? But as Mariam thinks deeper, the parallels become impossible to ignore.
The Revelation: Rethinking Enterprise Procurement
The breakthrough wasn’t about technology—it was about user experience design. Mariam’s company had been approaching their procurement challenge with traditional enterprise thinking: build comprehensive features, establish governance processes, and train users to adapt to the system.
But TikTok’s success offered a different paradigm: design the system to adapt to users’ natural behaviors and preferences.
Here’s how they began to transform their approach:
1. From Static Catalogs to Intelligent Discovery
Traditional procurement platforms function like digital catalogs—vast inventories organized by categories that users must navigate through search and filters. But what if the platform could anticipate needs instead of waiting for explicit requests?
Inspired by TikTok’s “For You” algorithm, the team reimagined their marketplace with predictive intelligence. The new system analyzed patterns: which departments typically needed supplies during budget season, what items were commonly reordered, how location and seasonality affected purchasing behavior, and even which products complemented each other.
Instead of opening the platform to a generic homepage, users now encountered a personalized dashboard showcasing relevant items before they even knew they needed them. The marketing team might see promotional materials ahead of campaign seasons, while facilities management would surface maintenance supplies based on historical patterns.
2. Micro-Interactions for Macro Results
TikTok’s genius lies in making complex recommendation algorithms feel effortless through simple, engaging interactions. The procurement team applied this principle by redesigning their buying journeys as “procurement stories”—bite-sized, actionable content that eliminated friction.
Rather than navigating multi-step forms and buried supplier information, employees encountered streamlined experiences:
- “Need a new ergonomic office chair? Here are three pre-approved options under your budget, available for next-day delivery”
- “Planning a team event this week? These pre-negotiated catering packages can be ordered with two clicks”
- “Your usual monitor setup, reordered based on your last purchase, with updated pricing and faster shipping”
Each interaction was designed to feel as intuitive as engaging with a TikTok video—immediate, relevant, and satisfying.
3. Leveraging Internal Social Proof
TikTok thrives on user-generated content that builds trust through peer recommendations. The procurement team recognized they could harness similar dynamics internally by encouraging employees to share their purchasing experiences.
They created space for quick reviews and tips:
- “The facilities team has been using this monitor stand for six months—excellent value and durability”
- “Here’s how I streamlined snack ordering for our monthly all-hands meetings”
- “Pro tip: This supplier consistently delivers faster than their estimated timeline”
These authentic endorsements from colleagues carried more weight than any vendor marketing material, driving both trust and adoption organically.
4. Continuous Optimization Through Behavioral Data
Perhaps most importantly, the team embraced TikTok’s model of constant iteration based on user behavior. Every click, view, purchase, and abandonment became data points feeding back into the system’s intelligence.
They implemented continuous A/B testing for product placements, pricing displays, and bundling options. The platform evolved from a static catalog into a dynamic, learning system that improved with every interaction. Seasonal patterns, departmental preferences, and individual buying behaviors all contributed to increasingly personalized and effective experiences.
The Transformation: When Technology Meets Human Nature
Three months after implementing these changes, the results spoke for themselves. Mariam’s inbox, once flooded with routine procurement requests, began to quiet. More significantly, employee feedback shifted dramatically. Instead of reluctantly using the platform when required, people began preferring it because it genuinely made their work easier.
The transformation freed Mariam to focus on work that truly leveraged her expertise: developing strategic supplier relationships, implementing sustainability initiatives, and negotiating enterprise-wide contracts that delivered real value to the organization.
Usage metrics told the story: platform engagement increased by 400%, average time-to-purchase decreased by 60%, and employee satisfaction scores for procurement services reached all-time highs.
The Broader Lesson: Design for Humans, Not Hierarchies
This transformation reveals a fundamental truth about enterprise technology adoption: the problem often isn’t technical capability, but human experience design. Mariam’s company had built a functionally robust procurement platform, but they had designed it for organizational processes rather than individual needs.
The TikTok inspiration wasn’t about gamification or adding social features to enterprise software. It was about understanding that successful platforms—whether for entertainment or procurement—succeed by making complex underlying systems feel simple and intuitive to users.
Instead of training employees to use their tools, forward-thinking organizations are learning to design tools that employees naturally want to use. This shift from change management to experience design represents a fundamental evolution in how we think about enterprise technology.
The lesson extends beyond procurement to any internal system where adoption challenges persist. When employees consistently find workarounds or continue using legacy processes despite new technology investments, the solution rarely lies in more training or stronger enforcement. Instead, it requires stepping back and asking: “How can we design this experience to work the way people naturally think and behave?”
Mariam’s story demonstrates that sometimes the most valuable insights come from the most unexpected sources. In an age where consumer technology sets ever-higher expectations for user experience, enterprise systems that ignore these lessons do so at their own peril.
What procurement challenges is your organization facing? Sometimes the solution lies not in more sophisticated technology, but in fundamentally rethinking how that technology serves the humans who use it.
On Becoming An I(M)perfectionist 