Background: A Product in Lockdown

Market Pricing had already proven it could be the tip of the spear for our enterprise segment, the product that got companies like McDonald's, Bumble, and Ericsson in the door. It was also the product in our app that even the team building it couldn't explain. Instead of taking the time to fix it, it had become the messy basement everyone avoided. The team kept adding features and febreezed whenever someone complained of a smell.

Then it caught up with us. McDonald's threatened to churn. Bumble paid an outside consultant instead of using the product. Engineers were stuck in permanent triage. The team's fix was a backlog of "polish" tickets, six months and a hundred tickets later, nothing had changed. The company put Market Pricing on lockdown: stop selling it until it's usable.

My approach

I'd just become the design team's manager and wasn't asked to join the effort, but I reached out to the Product Director and proposed we rethink staffing before we rush to solutions. Pressuring the existing designer to produce faster wasn't going to get us out of this. Instead I split the work into two tracks: a scoped short-term fix to rebuild trust with customers, and a longer-term structural rebuild to fix the root cause. I paired our strongest systems thinker with the designer already on the product, partly to bring a fresh angle in and partly to push his own thinking somewhere new. I got into Figma myself, both to understand the complexity well enough to coach and to earn credibility with a team that had every reason to be skeptical of a two-month-old manager showing up uninvited.