The project set out to replace a fragmented procurement environment shaped by legacy tools, inconsistent processes, and widespread reliance on spreadsheets. Over the years, teams had adapted to the absence of a unified system by developing their own methods — personal Excel templates, local approval chains, and isolated data repositories. The result was operational noise: overlapping activities, duplicated data, and incompatible workflows that slowed down every stage of procurement and assortment management.
The new product aimed to unify these processes under a single, configurable system that could scale across regions and teams while respecting existing business logic. Unlike typical procurement tools, it had to support an unusually complex classification model — from individual product variants to globally standardized assortments, including International Assortment and International Mandated items. The challenge lay not only in visualizing this hierarchy, but also in making it actionable for both global governance and local operations.
The initiative operated across an international procurement organization that encompassed more than a thousand professionals working in multiple regions with varying processes, priorities, and maturity levels.
The project’s design scope spanned over forty feature modules — ranging from tender creation and supplier negotiation to assortment validation, approval flows, and global assortment reporting. It handled shared datasets exceeding one million records, connecting thousands of suppliers and products under a single operational structure.
Work was distributed across four time zones, with multiple teams running simultaneous design, development, and validation streams. This required maintaining design cohesion in an environment where no two markets worked the same way and every week introduced new dependencies, feedback, and regulatory constraints.
The scope wasn’t defined by volume alone, but by depth. Each workflow required a different design lens — balancing the detail necessary for data-heavy users with the simplicity needed for strategic decision-makers. The system had to serve tactical buyers managing hundreds of SKUs and senior category leads monitoring entire product lines — all within the same interface.
The primary challenge wasn’t technical but structural. Procurement and assortment processes differed across every team, shaped by local realities and inherited workflows. There were multiple definitions of the same terms, distinct approval chains, and no consistent flow of data between departments.
Each function — sourcing, category management, supply coordination — operated under its own logic, often unaware of parallel efforts happening elsewhere. Consolidating this into one cohesive system required not only design clarity but also organizational diplomacy.
The company itself had a deeply procedural culture. Governance, compliance, and risk mitigation dictated decision-making pace, meaning any design innovation had to work within — not against — existing operational frameworks. Progress required persistence, patience, and precision: balancing what could be modernized with what had to remain familiar.
At the same time, multiple workstreams were running concurrently: user research, UX design, technical architecture, and feature implementation. The design process had no linear path. It required continuous recalibration and prioritization — maintaining quality while managing shifting scopes, dependencies, and expectations.
Establishing alignment across such a diverse set of stakeholders was a project in itself. I led design communication between product management, data governance, and subject matter experts (SMEX) representing procurement operations.
The early phase involved translating ambiguous business input into actionable design hypotheses. Since user interviews were conducted by a service designer, I focused on synthesizing insights — identifying patterns that could inform the system’s foundation without overfitting to local habits.
Weekly refinement sessions with SMEX became critical checkpoints, serving as reality filters for design concepts. Their input shaped not only the functional direction but also the semantics of the interface — how certain terms or data points were represented and what context they carried.
Parallel to that, I prepared high-level narratives for C-level presentations, focusing on connecting design output to measurable business impact. Instead of showcasing wireframes or flows, these sessions centered on how unified workflows could reduce time-to-decision, improve data integrity, and enable better reporting across markets.
This alignment process gradually built trust between design and leadership — shifting perception from “UI work” to strategic enablement. It also established the rhythm for future collaboration: iterative, transparent, and data-backed.