Pivoting to Save a Doomed UX
CASE STUDY
2025 • B2E Enterprise • Mobile Expenses
How I redirected a failing UX toward clarity, alignment, and delivery
When a product experience starts to collapse, more design isn’t the answer—better decisions are. I stepped into a project where complexity had overtaken purpose, reset the direction, and led the team away from a doomed path toward a simplified, goal-driven experience that engineering could actually ship.
The Real Problem
The design wasn’t failing because of pixel-level decisions. It was failing because the team never aligned on what the experience needed to accomplish. Without a crisp problem definition, every feature, edge case, and stakeholder opinion kept getting bolted onto the UI.
The result was:
• tangled user flows
• decision fatigue
• unclear primary tasks
• design paralysis during critiques
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 eventually reached 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 is how teams move forward.