01 · Enterprise SaaS · Engineering
Platform Redesign
A monolith broken into modular services, with a new navigation backbone and the platform's first onboarding layer. Shipped after 4.5 weeks of research with 30+ license and IT managers.
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.
This is five years of doing that work inside one company. The audit is the same read done from outside, on yours — fixed price, ten working days.