03 — Enterprise Platform · 2022–2023
Aequify
Operational workflow platform replacing spreadsheets and email chains with structured, audit-ready decision systems for enterprise teams.
Year
2022–2023
Role
Lead Product Designer
Scope
0→1 product design · Enterprise UX · Platform architecture
Overview
Enterprise operational teams managing complex, multi-stakeholder workflows were doing it through a combination of spreadsheets, email chains, and shared documents. Workflows involving 5+ stakeholders took weeks. Critical information was buried in email threads with no audit trail. Deadlines were missed without visibility into why.
Aequify replaced this with a structured workflow system. I led product design from 0→1 — working directly with 3 enterprise customers throughout the design process, running weekly sessions to pressure-test every design decision against real operational complexity.
The hardest constraint: enterprise teams have legitimate edge cases. A system too rigid would be abandoned. A system too flexible would replicate the chaos of spreadsheets. Finding the right degree of structure was the core design challenge.
Tags
Process
- 3 enterprise customer partners
- Weekly co-design sessions
- 12-week discovery sprint
- 4 major prototype iterations
- SOC2 compliance by design
Core Challenge
How do you digitize enterprise workflows without creating another rigid system that users will abandon for the spreadsheet they came from?
Key Decisions
Template system vs. freeform
The pitch was 'flexible as a spreadsheet.' But unconstrained flexibility is why teams end up in spreadsheets to begin with. We designed a template system: structured workflow scaffolds that teams could parameterize but not infinitely customize. Flexibility at the right level — not at every level.
Progressive disclosure for complexity
Enterprise workflows involve conditional logic, branching paths, and role-based visibility. Surfacing this all at once overwhelmed users. We mapped decision points by frequency and designed a layered UI: the everyday path was simple, the edge cases were accessible but not prominent.
Desktop-first, deliberately
Conventional wisdom says design mobile-first. Enterprise operational workflows — where users are managing 50-step processes — don't work on mobile. We validated this through customer research and designed explicitly for large-screen, high-information-density contexts. Mobile came later.
Audit trail as a product feature
Compliance teams needed audit trails for SOC2 and internal governance. We could have bolted this on as a log. Instead, we designed it as a first-class UI — a timeline view that made the history of every decision legible to non-technical stakeholders. This became a major sales differentiator.
Information Architecture
Outcome
−45%
Workflow completion time
vs. spreadsheet baseline
3×
Enterprise contracts
multi-year agreements
SOC2
Compliance
Type II certified
72
NPS
at 6-month mark
Reflection
Building a 0→1 enterprise product is humbling. Enterprise users have real operational complexity that design patterns from consumer products don’t cover. The work that made the biggest difference wasn’t any single feature — it was the discipline to keep saying no to flexibility until we understood which flexibility actually mattered.