The brief.
OpenLM is a service to monitor and optimize usage of software licenses. For years it had been behaving as a monolithic SaaS platform. My goal was to refactor the whole solution so it becomes more flexible and accessible for less-experienced users.
What got in the way.
Transitioning company structure
The business was actively breaking the monolith into separate services. Design had to lead — not chase — that reorganisation, while keeping every existing customer fully operational.
Broken documentation
Years of feature accretion left the docs partial and contradictory. We could not rely on them as a source of truth, so the redesign had to re-document the platform as it actually worked.
No established connection with users
There was no recurring research practice. Before redesigning anything I had to build a pipeline to talk to license managers and IT managers regularly.
How I scoped it.
The company-wide goal was "breaking the monolith". The old design was clearly not suitable for the new business structure, so I insisted on a full design cycle — this work would shape the company for the next 2–3 years.
It required tight communication with every department: management for the 2-year business goals, customer support and customer success for usage signals, and engineering to map the real technical boundaries.
With those prerequisites in place, I built the design system on top of Angular Material components. The new structure was driven by business goals, and a new navigation flow became the backbone of the redesign.
Talked to people.
- Make the platform easy-to-scale — deploy and configure huge environments as fast as smaller ones.
- Offer a personalised solution — customers buy the services they need, not the entire SaaS.
- Update the look & feel.
- Formulate hypotheses, gather feedback and requests.
- Evaluate results and validate the hypotheses.
- Audit competitors for common patterns, strengths and weaknesses.
The numbers we couldn't ignore.
- Only 4 of 29 respondents could correctly describe the old system structure.
- Old homepage scored 3.2 / 10 across 27 replies (30 surveys sent).
- Old navigation scored 4.7 / 10 across 23 replies (30 surveys sent).
What engineering said yes to.
- Navigation must support multiple services and custom visual elements for new features.
- Homepage must support an interactive layout of widgets.
- Onboarding must be implemented across the whole platform.
Then & now.
Homepage
From a static landing into a configurable widget surface — every role lands on the metrics that matter to them.
Navigation
A new IA that scales with services instead of buckling under them — the menu now teaches the platform's structure.
Onboarding
A platform-wide onboarding layer replaces the tribal knowledge new users used to depend on.
More details.
- Conducted full user research, strategy and end-to-end design for the platform transformation.
- Established a recurring research practice — license managers and IT managers now feed every release.
- Shipped a modular service model, a widget-based homepage and a platform-wide onboarding layer.
Redesigning a monolith isn't a UI exercise — it's an organisational one. The brief was visual; the real work was getting management, engineering and customers to agree on the same map.