Uptempo is a B2B SaaS platform for enterprise financial marketing operations, used by global brands like Porsche, Estée Lauder, Amazon, and IKEA.
As Interim PM, I cleared the way: cancelled three projects heading in the wrong direction, redirected their budget to the initiatives that kept at-risk accounts from churning, and handed the incoming PM a focused roadmap.
Senior Product & UX Designer · PO responsibilitiesInterim PM · 3 months14 months · 2025–202611-person core team · cross-functional
1Problem
After the merger, high-value enterprise accounts were missing critical administrative capabilities and at risk of churn, while stalled decisions and a shrinking timeline ruled out a classic design process.
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2Approach
A pragmatic design approach that untangled inherited architectural limitations and stalled decisions: a strict MVP and AI-built, code-accurate prototypes to ship first and validate in-market.
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3Result
Five core admin capabilities in production within the retention window: user management, SSO, seat harvesting, notifications, and teams.
5core admin capabilities shipped to production
6 moof development time freed by cancelling three projects
80%faster discovery with an AI-native workflow
Project details Role · Team · Core challenge · Scope · Skills
Role
Senior Product & UX Designer (with cross-functional PO responsibilities and three months as Interim PM)
Cross-functional reach
3 Product Managers, 2 Product Designers, a 6-person development team, and stakeholders spanning leadership, Professional Services, and Customer Success
Core challenge
Give enterprise admins back the controls the merger took away, before key accounts left, with no time left for a classic design process.
Scope
The shared admin layer of the merged BrandMaker and Allocadia platforms: users, SSO, seats, notifications, and teams
Two mature platforms, two architectures, and enterprise accounts at risk of churn.
Following the merger of BrandMaker, Allocadia, and Hive9 under the Uptempo umbrella, I took ownership of the core platform layer. Our mandate was to unify BrandMaker and Allocadia.
01Legacy
BrandMaker Legacy
Operations & Planning
Allocadia Legacy
Budgeting & Financials
02Merger
Platform Consolidation
Codebase Unification under Uptempo
03Exposed
Governance Parity Gap
Granular Control Visibility
Admin Architecture Alignment
SSO & Permission Integration
04At stake
Enterprise Retention Urgency
Global & DACH Account Adoption
Both were mature, robust, and functional enterprise software solutions built around financial workflows that global marketing organizations had trusted for years. Their visual language reflected the era in which they were created.
Legacy platformsBrandMaker and Allocadia before the merger: mature, trusted, and visually of their era.
Fragmented Admin Systems
Neglected for years, administrative controls were scattered across individual modules and the central administration area, forcing client admins to navigate three separate interfaces just to perform routine maintenance.
Fragmented adminAdmin controls split between individual modules and the central administration area.
Cross-functional discovery with Customer Success and Professional Services revealed that our biggest threat wasn't dated visual styling—it was operational instability that quietly broke essential client workflows:
Governance & Visibility Gaps — Enterprise clients lost granular data visibility and unified permission models across merged environments.
Systemic Usability Friction — Conflicting historical behavior patterns between the two platforms drastically increased admin overhead.
With no permanent PM, I stepped in for three months and cut scope to what mattered.
While the platform domain waited on a new permanent PM, I stepped in as Interim Product Manager for three months, the highest-stakes phase of the transition. The job had two parts: create focus, then build speed.
I then aligned with Product Management and Product Design on an iterative MVP strategy focused strictly on immediate time-to-value.
AI-driven discovery
Sparring with AI, validating against the source of truth.
To create speed, I built a repeatable discovery framework that bypassed cross-departmental scheduling bottlenecks and turned fragmented inputs into delivery-ready specs. It became the discovery backbone for the platform.
Gather
Explore
Build
Input
Discovery data
CS, PS & PM feedback
AI
Synthesize
Patterns and edge cases from the raw feedback
Gate 1 · Me
Source of truth
I validate and lock the synthesis
Claude Projects · NotebookLM
AI
Design Thinking
Empathize → Frame → Ideate
Gate 2 · Me
Focus & features
I turn ideas into functional features
AI
Layered builds
One structured prompt per feature
Claude · Figma Make
Leadership in the "Messy Middle"
Beyond defining process, my primary responsibility was keeping stakeholders, product leads, and developers aligned when hard migration decisions triggered resistance:
PMD
Product Design
Stop exploring, start specifying.
As problems compounded week over week, I called time on undirected Figma exploration and set a written-first model: system logic and requirements before anyone touched the canvas.
Cl
Clients
Hear the concern before the migration.
I met directly with enterprise accounts to address their migration concerns. In high-stakes B2B workflows, utility, predictability, and governance come before aesthetic polish.
Eng
Engineering
Engineers in the room before the stories.
I brought developers into early discovery to stress-test legacy backend feasibility before a single story was written, making engineering a co-design partner.
PMEx
Leadership & PMs
Keep the team together under pressure.
I balanced executive expectations against PM requirements and technical constraints, keeping the team’s trust and cooperation intact under tight deadlines.
Section 3 · AI Prototyping
Out of Runway: How AI Bought Us Back Time
When validation time ran out, AI-built, code-accurate prototypes let us keep designing.
When stakeholder indecision and cross-team dependencies depleted our timeline, traditional research and validation became impossible. I pivoted to a pragmatic "Ship First, Validate In-Market" strategy—grounding decisions in platform and industry patterns and in domain knowledge, deploying functional MVPs straight to production, and stripping layouts to what engineering could implement within legacy constraints.
Code-Accurate AI Prototyping
To recover lost time, I leveraged Claude, my front-end development background, and the Figma MCP integration to translate our design system directly into code. This proved that when guided by domain expertise, generative AI functions as a controlled, code-accurate prototyping force rather than generating unguided visual concepts.
This produced a modular, LEGO-like code replica of our Figma library—enabling us to assemble testable, development-ready prototypes that drastically cut turnaround times across medium-scale initiatives.
Section 4 · Shipped
What Shipped: Five Capabilities Back in Clients’ Hands
Five architectural solutions that restored the capabilities clients were missing.
With our code-accurate library in place, we shifted from prototyping to platform production. The interface screens below reflect five strategic architectural solutions that restored critical client capabilities while unifying the platform layer.
Capability 1 of 5
User Management
The Problem
Platform consolidation stripped enterprise clients—particularly in the DACH region (BrandMaker)—of essential administrative controls, role assignments, and permission visibility.
The Solution
Designed a forward-compatible user management framework that met immediate DACH compliance demands while establishing a scalable foundation for the Uptempo platform.
What it delivered
Centralized user lifecycles
Role-based access control (RBAC) mapping
Permission structures
Regional privacy compliance
Capability 2 of 5
Single Sign-On (SSO) Groups
The Problem
Restoring complex SSO team hierarchies was blocked by tight deadlines and unresolved stakeholder direction.
Solution & Trade-off
To bypass core backend infrastructure bottlenecks, we partnered with PMs to leverage Workato integrations for rapid deployment.
What it delivered
Automated IdP user provisioning
Central access control mapping
Granular SSO group permissions
Cross-platform team hierarchy management
Capability 3 of 5
Seat Harvesting & GDPR Feature Flags
The Problem
Tier-1 clients had no native visibility into whether licensed seats were actually being used, relying on manual GoodData/Excel exports that were being sunset. Admins needed actionable usage metrics (session frequency, time-in-tool, cost-center allocation) to reclaim inactive seats under strict license caps.
Solution & GDPR Trade-off
Built active governance dashboards showing session frequency and cost-center allocation. To resolve GDPR compliance blocks when tracking individual behavioral data in Europe, we architected a feature-flag toggle—enabling tracking for US clients immediately while suppressing behavioral tracking in the EU pending legal review.
What it delivered
Real-time seat utilization metrics
Active license harvesting
Cost-center tracking
Regional privacy toggles
Capability 4 of 5
Notification Center
The Problem
In-app notifications were critical across Campaign and Financial modules—restoring lost functionality for BrandMaker clients while fulfilling a long-standing request for Allocadia accounts. However, stakeholder demands for complex, role-based controls far exceeded available sprint capacity.
Solution & Trade-off
Led the decision to cut non-essential customization and ship an MVP aligned with standard market patterns, delivering core functionality on time and within sprint budget.
What it delivered
System-wide event triggers
Role-based event subscriptions
Real-time campaign/financial status updates
Capability 5 of 5
Teams Across Both Platforms
The Problem
Restoring cross-platform team management was stalled for over a year behind a heavy engineering backlog.
Solution & Trade-off
Co-designed an incremental rollout with the Financial Management design counterpart, focusing strictly on minimal achievable core functionality and bridging backend infrastructure gaps with Workato integrations to meet the client's requirements for team management in the financial module.
What it delivered
Cross-platform team structures
SSO group integration
Synchronized financial module permissions
Section 5 · Impact
Business Impact & Outcomes
Retention, capacity, speed, and trust: where the focus paid off.
ImpactHow
✓
Enterprise Account Retention
Core admin capabilities live within the retention window
De-escalated critical enterprise relationships by putting operational MVPs straight into production.
How
Re-architected administrative governance and SSO hierarchies while pivoting to a “Ship First, Validate In-Market” strategy when runway ran out.
✓
Engineering Capacity & Focus
Six months of development time redirected
Unlocked sprint capacity: story points went straight to core platform fixes, with no wasted UI design iterations.
How
Stepped in as Interim PM, pausing three non-essential initiatives and enforcing a written-first “Specs & Logic First” workflow ahead of Figma exploration.
✓
AI-Accelerated Velocity
80% faster discovery
Compressed research and ideation from weeks to days, with a 50%+ velocity gain on medium-complexity initiatives.
How
Engineered an AI-native workflow (Claude, Gemini, Figma MCP) bridging research, PRDs, and code-accurate prototyping.
✓
Cross-Functional Alignment
Shared ownership instead of firefighting
Replaced reactive firefighting with shared ownership and a unified platform source of truth.
How
Built direct feedback loops and co-design sessions across Product, Engineering, Customer Success, and enterprise client admins.
Reflection
What I’d carry into the next merger
Three lessons from shipping under pressure.
01
Indecision is the highest tax.
Unresolved direction quietly consumes the timeline budget that should belong to research and validation. When runway runs out, design leadership isn’t stubbornly defending process. It’s adapting execution to buy confidence transparently while openly managing calculated risks.
02
Leverage happens before the canvas.
Craft matters, but true leverage happens earlier: framing problems so decisions can actually be made, giving stakeholders concrete models to debate rather than abstract ideas, and holding cross-functional teams together when deadlines tighten.
03
Retention is built on reliability.
Clients remain loyal when vital platform capabilities perform predictably, right when their operations depend on them.
