Work item card appearance

What it does

Each entry in the sales accelerator work list is a card, and admins control what those cards show per record type — which icon, which fields, on which rows, and which actions appear in the item's More options menu. It's the difference between a list a seller can triage at a glance and a list of names.

Key facts

Reached from the workspace itself: Sales accelerator > More options > Settings > Work item appearance.
Switch to admin mode has to be turned on before any of the customisation controls do anything. Without it you're editing your own view, not the organisation's.
Lock customization stops sellers overriding the admin card design. Leave it off and every seller can rearrange their own cards.
Hard limits per card: up to 4 rows, up to 3 fields per row, and up to 3 icons per row.
The card icon can be Record image, Record initials, Record type or Activity type. Record image only helps if the client actually populates images.
Defaults differ by table. Leads show name with follow indicator and predictive score, then job title and company, then the up next activity. Opportunities add a row for topic and estimated revenue.
Accounts default to account name, primary contact name and job title, then up next activity. Contacts default to full name, job title and company, then up next activity.
Custom tables default to a single row containing the record name and follow indicator. If you add a custom table and don't design its card, that's all sellers get.
The More options actions on the card are configurable, so you can remove actions the client doesn't want sellers using.
Card customisations made in focused view carry across and affect the work list card display too — the two share configuration.

When to use / skip

Always do this for any custom table in the accelerator, because the default card is effectively useless. A one-line card showing only a record name gives the seller no reason to pick that item over the one below it.

For the four standard tables the defaults are reasonable and you can usually leave them alone on a first release. Revisit them when the client's qualification criteria don't match what's on the card — a business that triages leads by source and estimated budget is being shown job title and company, which doesn't help.

The one case for holding off entirely is an early pilot where you don't yet know how sellers triage. Let them use the defaults for a few weeks, watch what they open first, then design the card around that. Guessing produces cards full of fields nobody reads.

Configuration decisions

Which fields a seller genuinely triages on, per record type. Three rows of the wrong data is worse than one row of the right data.
Whether to lock the card design or let sellers personalise. Locking gives consistency and makes support easier; leaving it open suits mature teams with strong opinions.
Which icon style to use, which in practice means deciding whether record images are populated well enough to be worth it.
Whether predictive score belongs on the card, which depends on whether scoring is licensed and trained. An empty score slot looks broken.
Which More options actions to keep. Removing Skip is a common ask where the client wants steps completed or reassigned rather than dropped.
What the custom table card looks like, since there is no sensible default to fall back on.

Gotchas

Forgetting Switch to admin mode is the classic one. Changes appear to save, apply only to you, and the client reports that nothing happened.
The row and field limits are firm. A requirement for five fields across two lines is not deliverable, and it's better to say so during design than during UAT.
Custom table cards being a single line is not obvious until someone adds the table and looks at the list. Build the card in the same change as adding the table.
Card configuration is shared with focused view, so a change made there for a different reason will alter the work list. Two teams editing independently will surprise each other.
Long field values truncate rather than wrap. Company names and opportunity topics are the usual casualties.
Lock customization applied after go-live wipes out seller personalisations they may have come to rely on. Decide the lock position before release, not after.

Consultant notes

Show the card design side by side with the client's current triage spreadsheet. The columns they built themselves are the fields that belong on the card.
Push back on requests to cram in a fourth field per row — the limit is three and there's no workaround worth building.
Demo the difference between a default custom-table card and a designed one. It's a thirty-second demo that reliably gets the configuration time approved.
Check the cards on a narrow window before sign-off, because truncation is much more aggressive than it looks on a demo screen.
Note the focused-view coupling in the handover documentation so the next person doesn't change it by accident.

Worth revisiting if the row and field limits change, or if card configuration ever becomes role-scoped.