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Enterprise platform design & process innovation
Scope
Global contract management platform
Role
Lead UI/UX Designer
Duration
18 months
Team
UX Manager, Project Manager, Business Analysts, Engineers, Scrum Masters
I joined PwC to design screens. I ended up redesigning how teams work together, creating a workflow that reduced delivery time by 10% and was shared company-wide.
10%
faster delivery
25%
improved consistency
12
territories researched
This case study describes my process and contributions while respecting confidentiality. Specific system names and internal details have been generalized.
The Challenge
PwC's engagement management ecosystem turns client opportunities into billable engagements across every global territory. It handles risk assessment, financial analysis, compliance validation, and recurring contract management.
When I arrived, the system was fractured. Two separate platforms — one for opportunity validation, one for engagement management — were supposed to work together but didn't communicate well. The business wanted them merged into a single unified platform.
The Problems
01
Siloed Teams
Design worked in isolation. Engineers received designs late in the process with little context. Business stakeholders dominated conversations while technical constraints went unheard.
02
Broken Handoffs
The design-to-development handoff was a wall, not a bridge. Design was expected to provide static wireframes. Developers discovered issues mid-build. Rework was constant.
03
No Global Perspective
The platform served consultants across dozens of countries, but design decisions were made from a single office with little understanding of how different territories actually used the system.
04
Scope Creep Without Strategy
Features were added based on whoever spoke loudest in meetings, not based on user research or strategic prioritization.
Global Research
We were given a loose project scope and told to immediately jump into rapid design development. My UX manager and I pushed back. We argued that designing a global platform without understanding how different territories actually use it was a recipe for failure.
The Approach
We split our efforts strategically. My UX manager took point on the global research while I kept upper management at bay with design deliverables, buying us the time we needed. However, I was her right hand throughout. I attended every workshop with middle office teams from 12 territories, reviewed all Zoom recordings and Copilot transcripts, and analyzed them through Condens to generate insights.
01
Some Regions Had It Figured Out
Certain territories didn't want us touching the system. It worked beautifully for them. This told us: don't break what's working. Design for flexibility, not uniformity.
02
Others Built Workarounds
Some regions had created homegrown solutions to fill gaps the platform didn't address. We studied these workarounds to understand what the system was missing.
03
Local Laws Created Friction
Several territories struggled with recurring engagements because the system didn't account for local financial regulations. What worked in one region created compliance nightmares elsewhere.
04
Shared Teams, Mixed Data
Some territories share operations teams across borders. Their engagements sometimes got mixed up because the system wasn't designed for cross-territory collaboration.
Not every territory can get custom features. But understanding regional differences helped us prioritize solutions that served the broadest set of users.
Process Innovation
A few months into my time at PwC, I noticed something wasn't working. Figma was new to PwC. Most projects had just transitioned from Adobe XD. Developers got all their information from Azure DevOps and were used to receiving static mockups as attached images. They weren't accustomed to a collaborative process.
Business dominated every conversation. They told each team what to do and expected it done. Designers and developers worked in silos, and neither had any voice in decision-making.
The Old Process
Business defines requirements in a meeting, documents in ADO.
Design creates static mockups in Adobe XD.
Mockups get approved in meetings, developers often absent or silent.
Approved designs delivered as PNG screenshots attached to ADO tickets.
No documentation, no interaction specs, no context.
Developers build in isolation, discover issues mid-development.
Back-and-forth revisions, QA finds more issues, endless cycles.
What Was Broken
Designers created static mockups in Adobe XD, delivered them as PNG screenshots with no documentation, and developers built in isolation. Feedback came too late, QA discovered issues after development, and revision cycles were endless.
My Solution: A 7-Stage Process
01
Briefing
Business, design, and dev leaders align on complete requirements before sprints begin. Everything documented in Azure DevOps. Scope changes move to new sprints, forcing clarity upfront.
02
Sandbox
Designers explore concepts in Figma, iterating through low-fidelity ideas before committing to high-fidelity solutions.
03
Feedback
Weekly cadences where design presents to business AND developers together. Meetings are recorded for absent team members. Wireframes are linked to ADO user stories, with a 2-3 day async feedback window where all stakeholders comment directly in Figma. Major decisions are documented in ADO.
04
Ready for Dev
Final wireframes with complete annotations and interactive prototypes. Sectioned in Figma and linked in ADO, these become the source of truth for Development and QA. Once finalized, they are never changed and remain as a source of documentation. Any non-urgent updates that arise are moved to the next sprint cycle.
05
Development
Dev team builds from wireframes, prototypes, and documentation, with clear understanding of intended behavior and interactions.
06
QA
Quality assurance references Ready for Dev wireframes as source of truth for validation.
07
Amendments
If QA identifies critical issues requiring immediate fixes within the same sprint, a new user story is created. Designer copies Ready for Dev wireframes to Amendments section, makes changes, documents thoroughly, shares updated link.
Process Swimlane Diagram
Getting Buy-In
I pitched this to product leadership first, presenting the quality improvement and risk reduction case. Then I conducted workshops with development and business teams, teaching them how to use Figma and explaining how the new process would work.
The key argument: slightly longer upfront time investment would dramatically reduce time-to-successful-completion by eliminating late-stage revisions.
I piloted the process on an internal platform redesign project. We tracked sprint velocity through Azure DevOps and measured the results over six sprints.
The Pilot Results
10% reduction in delivery time
25% improvement in design consistency
Fewer QA rounds
Earlier issue detection
What I Designed
01
Unified Engagement Platform
Context
Merging two separate internal platforms into a single system for managing the full engagement lifecycle, from opportunity validation through recurring contract management.
What I Designed
Engagement Lists
Filterable, sortable view of all engagements: ongoing, completed, and marked for recurrence. Users can select multiple engagements and batch-process them through recurrence workflows.
Engagement Forms
Extensive forms for editing engagement details, line information, and line management. These forms work both during active engagements and when preparing for recurrence.
Validation System
When forms are submitted, they run through compliance checks before being submitted to risk analysis and embedded finance. I designed the notification system for warnings (informational) vs. hard stops (must fix before continuing).
Recurrence Flow
The process of turning a completed engagement back into a new opportunity for renewal.
Line Management
Each engagement has multiple product lines with their own managers, codes, and data. I designed the experience for linking, merging, adding, and removing lines to make updated for recurrences.
02
AI-Native Onboarding
Context
Consultants needed to access multiple systems, each with its own onboarding flow. Entry points were scattered and confusing. This AI-native onboarding would consolidate all those entry points into a single location.
What I Designed
A single AI-driven interface that consolidated all system entry points. The key design challenge: deciding when users should interact conversationally (typing/speaking) versus when structured selection (dropdowns, forms) serves them better.
The Design Principle
Conversational:
When the user's intent is unclear or they need guidance discovering options
Structured:
When the user knows what they want and speed matters more than exploration
This became the blueprint for company-wide AI application standards.
03
Validation Framework
Context
This was a new backend application for field and form-level validations across the entire engagement management ecosystem, which included all customer engagement and contract management applications.
What I Designed
I designed rule creation, verification, and management flows and associated interfaces for two user types:
Rule Creators:
They define validation logic (if X, then require Y) across local territories and federated groups.
Rule Validators:
They test and verify rules work correctly before deployment.
Impact
10% Faster Delivery
The new workflow caught issues during design, not during QA. Less rework meant faster sprints.
25% Better Consistency
Clear documentation and linked handoffs meant developers built what designers intended.
Companywide Adoption
After the pilot success, I presented results to a UX director who championed the approach to PwC's internal design center of excellence. Members adopted elements of the framework for their own teams. I worked with a scrum master to refine the documentation standards, and the process was applied to the main platform redesign and influenced teams across the company.
Beyond the metrics, the impact wasn't just efficiency. The cultural shift mattered more:
Developers had a voice at business-dominated tables.
Design decisions were informed by technical constraints from day one.
Documentation eliminated ambiguity and potential blame.
Teams started collaborating instead of just coordinating.
Reflection
01
Process Design Is Product Design
The most impactful work I did at PwC wasn't designing a screen. It was designing how teams work together. By identifying inefficiencies in handoffs and creating structured collaboration rituals, I improved outcomes for every project that followed. The workflow I created outlasted any individual feature I designed.
02
Early Alignment Prevents Late Chaos
The Briefing and Feedback stages of my process exist specifically because of this insight. Bringing developers into design conversations from the beginning, rather than treating them as implementation resources who receive PNG attachments, prevented weeks of rework later. A 30-minute design review with engineering present caught issues that would have cost us days in QA and wasted sprint cycles.
03
Global Research Requires Strategic Synthesis
Working across 12 territories with different regulations, workflows, and needs taught me how to synthesize diverse requirements into scalable solutions. The goal isn't to make everyone happy. It's to make decisions that serve the broadest set of users while acknowledging tradeoffs.
This project taught me that senior design work isn't just about craft — it's about systems. The systems users interact with, and the systems teams use to build them.