Breaking the Cycle and Shipping the Product
CASE STUDY
2023 • B2E Enterprise • Mobile Expenses
How I helped bridge a bold design vision with the reality of shipping a product to real users
Early in my career, I learned a simple truth: perfection stalls progress. You make the best decisions you can with the information you have, you deliver, and then you iterate. Years later, that lesson became essential when I stepped onto a stalled product team facing a tough question:
How do you protect an ambitious vision and still ship something real?
The Challenge
A visionary product in need of a launch plan
Touchless Expenses had been in development for years. It was meant to be a flagship mobile experience within our ERP suite—consumer-grade, automated, and powered by real-time transaction data through a partnership with JP Morgan.
The vision had been carefully shaped through multiple design cycles and deep executive involvement. Designers before me had produced thoughtful, imaginative work aimed at delivering something exceptional.
But as we approached pilot launch, a hard truth surfaced clearly: the vision was strong, but the path to shipping it was not.
We needed a product that engineering could build confidently, design could maintain, and users could rely on—without abandoning the promise of the experience.
A Familiar Tension
Design system vs product vision
Our organization was fully committed to Redwood, the enterprise design system, with a strict expectation of 100% compliance and a formal waiver process for exceptions.
When I reviewed the app, I saw several patterns and interactions that extended beyond what Redwood supported. These choices were made with good intent—to elevate the mobile experience—but they introduced risk, variance, and implementation challenges.
Closing the gap between ambition and shippability became my focus.
What I Did
Building on what came before
I didn’t treat the differences as mistakes. They were the outcome of necessary exploration. My role was to translate the strongest parts of that exploration into something we could confidently build, support, and evolve.
I took a systematic approach:
Audited the full end-to-end flow for design-system deviations, constraints, and risky patterns
Proposed compliant alternatives that preserved the design’s intent and user goals
Clarified ambiguous interactions so engineering could move decisively
Documented system gaps as enhancement requests with clearer applicability and prioritization
The goal wasn’t to scale down the vision; it was to make it real.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Closing the gap with people, not just pixels
Shipping required alignment across many roles.
With developers: Paired closely with tech leads to clarify intent, evaluate feasibility, and support their learning of Redwood
With product managers: Combined my understanding of interaction design with their insight into legacy needs and user behavior to guide tradeoffs
With designers: Validated alternatives, avoided reinventing patterns, and ensured changes preserved the product’s ambition
With the design system team: Rewrote or closed ERs, clarified priorities, and ensured anything we escalated had broader platform value
Restoring Alignment
Reconnecting product and platform teams
A significant misalignment appeared around a key shared component. Both the product team and the Redwood team believed they owned the next iteration—each heading in a different direction without realizing the other was doing the same work.
I traced the history, surfaced the disconnect, and brought both teams into the same conversation.
Once everyone had the same context, we rebuilt the component collaboratively with shared ownership and clearer expectations.
The fix wasn’t just the component. It restored trust and accelerated progress across both teams.
The Outcome
A launch grounded in reality, driven by vision
We released the first version of Touchless Expenses to an initial group of 20 users.
Adoption grew tenfold the following year and was able to roll-out to nearly 2,000 users.
Most importantly, we validated the core hypothesis:
The touchless model worked in practice
Users preferred it over manual workflows
Engineering gained a stable, buildable foundation
The design system team gained practical insight into product needs
We unlocked real feedback and a real roadmap
The app wasn’t yet the full future-state vision, but it was real, usable, and grounded in the constraints of our ecosystem. Shipping broke the cycle and turned possibility into momentum.
What I Learned
Vision matters. Execution matters equally.
The work that came before me wasn’t something to fix; it was something to complete. By grounding the vision in what could be shipped, we accelerated everything that came after it.
Shipping is how teams learn. Vision is how teams aim. Collaboration and iteration is how teams move forward.