NIQ: INTERNAL OPS
MANAGING CUSTOMER SUBSCRIPTIONS AND AN EVOLVING COMMERCIALIZATION STRATEGY
Web based application
OVERVIEW
PROBLEM SPACE
Internal teams waste excessive time managing customer needs because information is scattered across multiple tools and manual data sheets. This fragmentation makes it difficult to get accurate customer package details and permissions—a problem that will worsen as more customers migrate to the flagship platform.
PRODUCT OBJECTIVE
Build a single scalable product that is comprehensive enough to be a trusted audit resource so they may effectively manage customer needs on a growing platform with a reduced number of support teams
MY ROLE
Lead Product Designer
1 of 2 Designers
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
User Interviews
Visualizing the Problem
Wireframing
Prototyping
Concept Testing
Handoff
OUTCOME
Piloting began after 9 months
Although we didn’t have any measurements before my departure, the feedback from our user groups was very positive and they were happy with the direction and excited about the evolution of the tool
UNDERSTANDING
KICKOFF
The first step in every project starts off with an alignment meeting with our Product team members. We focus on 5 major areas:
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The problem we are trying to solve and the impact on our users and business
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Users and their goals
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Complexities and risks that might exist
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Project goals and timelines
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Team members who will be involved
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
Every project is different—some are small and well-defined, others large and fluid. Early alignment on expectations and timelines determines where we focus and how much discovery we can invest.
RESEARCH
Initial research included qualitative sessions with internal users, revealing current workflows and critical challenges. We also mapped the client setup and maintenance ecosystem to identify systemic inefficiencies.
KEY LEARNING
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Information is fragmented and spread across too many tools and apps. It takes so much time to just complete a single task.
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Auditing a customers current setup is extremely antiquated and there is not one source of truth. Multiple sources have to be checked.
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Big need for making changes in bulk. One-off requests are not the problem.
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95% of setups are for returning customers. New customers is extremely rare.
DISCOVERY
After our initial research, we invested time with our stakeholders and internal team members to visualize the complexity that lies in this space. Visualizing the space helped us better understand and align with our product and business teams.
DELIVERABLES
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Created and shared a map of the different teams and applications that are used to on-board a new (or returning) customer.
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Created a diagram to showcase all of the objects in the system and their relationship.
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We shared the synthesized data that was gathered from all of our sessions with our product and tech teams to help foster empathy across the team.
IDEATION & STRATEGY
High level flows to illustrate the vision and flow
With an imminent start date, significant unknowns, and a long timeline ahead, we needed a scalable approach. An object-oriented framework became our foundation for decision-making. We began ideation by creating high-level visualizations of core user tasks.
PRIMARY OBJECTIVE
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Demonstrate how this framework would manifest across the major user tasks
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Represent how we would structure the content based on the objects and their relationships
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Visualize a repeating pattern that could be used for future scenarios
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Show how we could handle major user type scenarios
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Give our tech teams a sense of the scope.
PRIORTIZATION: HOW DO WE GET THERE?
Being a multi-year project in a SAFE agile environment, we worked with our product team to create a roadmap that could guide us. The business was going through some changes on their commercialization strategy so it was important to define the direction and planned phases
FAIL EARLY FAST: SEIZING ACCESS TO OUR USERS
As an internal tool with easy access to its users, we were fortunate to have constant touch points with them to get their feedback early during the ideation phase so that we could pivot quickly.
TECH CHALLENGES
CONSTANT PERMISSION MODEL CHANGES
As the company evolved its commercialization strategy, the data permissions architecture changed repeatedly—directly impacting our internal tool design. We iterated through 6 design versions alongside these shifting technical decisions.
Design proved its value by rapidly visualizing options at low fidelity, helping product and tech teams align despite significant complexity and uncertainty.
DATA COMING FROM SEPARATE SOURCES
Multiple backend data sources created technical constraints that prevented certain UI features.
In the organizations view, we couldn't display a default list of frequently accessed clients as intended. Instead, we implemented unified search across all sources.
While this added a search step, it kept the interface simple and prevented users from needing to understand which data source contained their information.
STRATEGY WINS
LEANING ON THE OBJECT ORIENTED FRAMEWORK
Two teams approached design with distinct requirements:
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Support teams needed to clone user assets for troubleshooting
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Commercial teams needed to bulk transfer assets during employee transitions
Our object-oriented framework revealed the underlying pattern: both were user-asset relationship problems. Since users are global objects with one-to-many asset relationships, we positioned user management at the global level—creating a single, scalable solution that served both use cases.
SCALING DESIGN WORK
Leading design across multiple verticals required scalable processes. My team members and I extended our design system by creating vertical-specific Figma libraries containing tailored pages, views, and components.
I also created low-fidelity and FigJam libraries for rapid flow visualization for the entire Design team to leverage and visualize faster.
ADDTIONAL FEATURE PROJECTS
NIQ: DEFINING DATA
Web based app
IAA TOW APP
iOS & Andriod mobile app
IAA ERP MODERNIZATION
Web based app