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.

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.