“Project Voltron” unified multiple acquired data protection tools into a net-new platform for mid-market customers. It was my first project spanning product strategy and design strategy: defining repeatable components, patterns, and interaction “DNA” that could scale across future platforms.
The work required organizational alignment as much as product design: transparent planning rituals, validated core flows, and a lightweight design system that could scale across teams and releases.
Challenges
- Define a single mid-market enterprise platform that could absorb current and future acquisitions.
- Design a multi-tenant customer and access model in parallel with the UI.
- Keep a high‑visibility project on track amid post‑layoff capacity and trust issues.
Approach
- Established inventory of use cases as the persistent “unit of currency”
- Created a public board that tracked use cases by level of fidelity to keep teams and leadership aligned.
- Introduced a lightweight design system for the mid-market platform
Outcomes
- Evolved the platform purpose from “collection of tools” to a unified multi‑tenant data protection product for the mid‑market.
- Built a nimble design system with good defaults that anyone in the team could use.
- Improved transparency and confidence through consistent progress reporting to senior leadership.
Lesson 1: “Zero-to-one” is a totally different animal
Net-new products are abstract, and enterprise scale only amplifies the uncertainty. Teams are tempted to re-litigate every assumption. Changing an existing flow can be precise; helping a group imagine something that does not exist yet requires trust, co-creation, and momentum.
Lesson 2: Establish the “unit of currency”
We needed one trackable unit with clear states.
Low-fidelity diagramming allowed disciplines with different needs — like engineering and sales — to have productive conversations earlier.
The use-case inventory made the work visible across the company.
Lesson 3: Simple reporting, shared confidence
We tracked use cases through the full lifecycle using simple fidelity labels: low, mid, and high.
Weekly leadership updates linked to every active prototype, making progress and remaining work easy to understand.
Lesson 4: The ROI of low fidelity
Low-fidelity planning was vital.
We could address long-standing issues in both the user experience and platform architecture.
The core design group worked in parallel on workstreams that are usually sequential: information architecture, customer model, product design, and key use cases.
Lesson 5: Cultivate the lofi bias
Weeks of low- and mid-fidelity work helped us align on the platform’s purpose and adapt as it changed.
Lesson 6: Reduce reliance on high fidelity
We aimed to build a lightweight, nimble UI that minimized front-end complexity and relied on good defaults and well-vetted interaction patterns wherever possible.
A shared symbol library let high-fidelity prototypes evolve alongside low- and mid-fidelity work.
Lesson 7: Look at the big picture
This approach made it possible to design and build a completely net-new enterprise platform in two quarters — pre-AI.
More importantly, it showed how design decisions compound over the course of a project.
